| Beschreibung |
The notion of “hallucination” has come to shape the current debate around artificial intelligence perhaps more than almost any other term. Originally, it refers to a disturbance of perception, a phenomenon situated at the boundary between reality and madness. In the context of the AI debate, by contrast, the term is used to describe a phenomenon of statistical prediction models that is often too hastily characterized as a “malfunction.” In fact, it points less to a defect than to the fundamental logic of generative AI, which models probabilities rather than evaluating statements according to their truth value. The term, however, also points to another layer of meaning. In the history of psychology, philosophy, and particularly the psychedelic counterculture, hallucinations and hallucinogens do not stand exclusively for deception or pathology, but also for altered modes of perception, new spaces of experience, and the possibility of creative insight. They are associated with the idea that perception does not merely represent reality, but simultaneously produces and transforms it. Against this background, hallucination—particularly in relation to generative image-making—seemingly also points toward the origins of creativity: toward the unpredictable, the emergent, and a creative potential that cannot be fully derived from rules or data. Here, an old idea resurfaces: the connection between genius and madness. What counts as an unequivocal error in law, science, or journalism may, in an artistic context, appear precisely as a source of originality and innovation. Does creativity emerge where prediction fails? The seminar follows this multilayered conceptual history by examining the different meanings of hallucination across science, philosophy, psychology, and art, asking what they reveal about human perception, creativity, and the workings of artificial intelligence. These perspectives are not understood as competing or mutually contradictory positions, but as different epistemic layers spanning an expanded conceptual field—layers that overlap, intersect, and can be projected onto one another. At the center of the seminar is the question of how artificial intelligence actually works, how it can be used critically and competently, and what consequences its use has for creativity, authorship, academic study, and future professional practice. It is precisely here that art, design, and art and design research can assume a mediating role between technological development and social reflection. The increasing disempowerment of the subject cannot be countered either through the authority of individual specialists or through purely technical solutions, but only through interdisciplinary education and collective knowledge production. Highly specialized tasks are among the strengths of artificial intelligence. It is therefore crucial to develop the ability to connect different perspectives and critically reflect on technical systems. This makes it possible to better understand and contextualize the societal consequences of these technologies. But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern. In Blake, hallucination opens perception; in AI, hallucination closes off reference to the world. |
| Literatur |
Grundlagen: KI, Wahrnehmung, Vision * Marr, David (1982): Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information. W. H. Freeman. * Li, Fei-Fei (2023): The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI. Flatiron Books. * Goodfellow, Ian; Bengio, Yoshua; Courville, Aaron (2016): Deep Learning. MIT Press. Halluzination, Wahrnehmung, Erkenntnis * Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1945): Phénoménologie de la perception. * Huxley, Aldous (1954): The Doors of Perception. * Nietzsche, Friedrich (1872): Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik. * Freud, Sigmund (1900): Die Traumdeutung. * Deleuze, Gilles (1969): Logique du sens. Technik, Wissen, Gesellschaft * Simondon, Gilbert (1958): Du mode d’existence des objets techniques. * Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix (1980): Mille plateaux. * Adorno, Theodor W.; Horkheimer, Max (1944/47): „Kulturindustrie. Aufklärung als Massenbetrug“, in: Dialektik der Aufklärung. * Benjamin, Walter (1936): „Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit“. Gegenkultur, Kunst, veränderte Wahrnehmung * Artaud, Antonin (1938): Le Théâtre et son double. * Breton, André (1924): Manifeste du surréalisme. * Leary, Timothy; Metzner, Ralph; Alpert, Richard (1964): The Psychedelic Experience. * McKenna, Terence (1992): Food of the Gods. |
