Refusing clichés: artificial imagination in the synthetic photography of Kevin Abosch

The synthetic photography of Irish-American conceptual artist, Kevin Abosch, speaks to a growing field of artistic and creative practices concerned with critically exploring the potential futures of human creativity and imagination in the wake of artificial intelligence (AI). Scholars within and beyond geography have often turned to such artistic engagements with AI for how they figure these technologies and systems as objects of refusal, framing them in terms of neoliberal mechanisms of appropriation or ominous harbingers of human obsolescence. In this short piece, we expand on what resistance to the onto-political logics of AI entails through a creative engagement with Abosch’s photographic series, Somewhere in Los Angeles (2023) and Civics (2023). We explore how Abosch’s recursively produced AI images generate possibilities for creative practice that go beyond the limits and clichés of human imagination. Abosch’s photography, we argue, thus speaks to an alternate sense of ‘refusal’ in art’s encounter with AI, one that resonates in interesting ways with cultural geography’s ongoing concerns with critiquing the representational and humanist paradigms that bind creative practice to the reproduction of the figurative givens and logics of the present.