1. ART MUST BE ARTIFICIAL: AI, PARAFICTION, AND THE VISUAL ARTS
1. Defining Parafiction: Fabricated Realities in Contemporary Art
- Parafiction is an art that deliberately blends fact and fiction, presenting fabricated stories as real. It’s a strategy employed by many contemporary artists who wish to challenge the viewer’s perception of truth and expose the fragility of facts.
- Unique abilities to blur the line between reality and fiction and numerous workflow strategies are immersed in the territory of parafiction. Documentary-based narratives are interwoven with constructed realities, inviting viewers to question what they see. In my works, fact and fabrication become interchangeable, which is not just a formal experiment but an invitation to reflect on the complexities of history, memory, and representation.
- Therefore I don’t offer viewers easy distinctions between truth and falsehood. The artistic process aligns with the philosophical idea that what we perceive as "truth" is often a product of manipulation, subjectivity, and ideological imposition. This reflects Foucault’s perspective on how power shapes knowledge and how historical narratives are constructed to serve particular interests.
- For me, parafiction is not mere deception but opening a critical space where audiences can question the foundations of human cognition and reality. By destabilizing the viewer’s understanding of what is real, I force them into a state of reflexivity. This is central to the political potential of parafiction—it reveals the instability of seemingly objective histories and truths, making room for alternative or suppressed narratives.
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On the other hand, parafiction’s plasticity also allows for thought experiments and speculation that generate new knowledge when interviewed in other fields in interdisciplinary clusters.
2. Artificial Intelligence in the Visual Arts: The New Fabricator of Reality
- Artificial Intelligence, with its growing role in the visual arts, brings us into an era where the boundaries between human creation and machine generation blur. AI allows for creating hyperreal images and narratives that mimic human imagination but are produced through algorithmic processes.
- AI, in the context of parafiction, can create visual narratives that are so convincingly real that they force us to confront the limits of our perception. AI-generated images—whether through machine learning, deepfakes, or generative networks—produce entire realities that challenge our understanding of authorship and truth.
- In this context, we can consider Jean Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra. Baudrillard suggested that images have lost their connection to reality in the postmodern age and exist only as simulations. AI technology, which can simulate reality to an unprecedented degree, might be seen as fulfilling Baudrillard’s vision of a world where the distinction between the real and the representation collapses entirely.
- For me, parafiction relies on the definition of borders, such as fact and fiction, to, with necessary awareness, deconstruct, speculate, and push this boundary in order to demonstrate certain intentions.
- For me, this collapse presents both an opportunity and a danger. On one hand, AI’s capacity to generate new realities opens up exciting possibilities for exploring constructed histories and imagined futures. On the other hand, it poses a philosophical dilemma: when machines create parafiction, who controls the narrative, and how do we engage critically with this new artifice? AI does not occupy a space of no-whereness. It demolishes the boundaries of fact and fiction, and by doing so, it proposes an all-new experience of the world.
3. Salomé Lamas and the Philosophical Depth of Parafiction in the AI Era
- In my practice parafiction is not just a formal device but a method of engaging with the unstable nature of the world while examining historical and political narratives. From one perspective, I critically examine how artificial intelligence is implicated in contemporary power structures. AI is not a neutral tool—it reflects the biases and ideologies of those who create it. When AI generates art or parafictional narratives, it brings with it the assumptions and biases encoded into its algorithms.
- Here, I encounter ethical questions: if AI can fabricate entire histories or social realities, how do we ensure these creations are used responsibly? The ability to create parafiction through AI opens up new spaces for representation but also risks further distorting truth in ways that might reinforce existing inequalities.
- My engagement with parafiction is fundamentally political—it is about exposing the mechanisms by which certain narratives are constructed, maintained, and legitimized. In a world increasingly shaped by AI, these mechanisms become more opaque, and the challenge for artists is to navigate this opacity while still preserving the capacity for critique.
- From a standpoint, we can also think about Martin Heidegger’s concept of techne—the idea that technology is not simply a tool but a mode of revealing. For Heidegger, technology brings forth new ways of understanding the world, but it can also obscure other forms of knowing. Working in the intersection of art and technology, I see AI as a new form of techne, one that reveals certain truths while concealing others. My task, as an artist, is to bring those hidden truths to light.
The Future of Parafiction in the Post-AI Age
- As AI continues to evolve, we will likely see more artists experimenting with parafictional strategies. AI-generated art could push the boundaries of what we consider to be real or artificial in ways that go beyond human perception. The potential for AI to create complex, multilayered narratives that blend fact and fiction will redefine the landscape of contemporary art.
- However, the role of the artist in this process will become increasingly important. Parafiction is not merely a technical exercise—it is a form of political and ethical engagement. In the future, artists will need to navigate the tension between the creative possibilities of AI and the risks of losing critical engagement with reality.

2. INTEGRATION OF AI IN CREATIVE PROCESSES
- Focusing on how AI-driven systems can enhance human artistic practices, we come to the concept of anticipatory aesthetics, where AI tools support creativity by predicting and responding to the artist's future-oriented intentions.
- AI-mediated creativity positions AI as a collaborative agent rather than a passive tool.
- Perspectival Affordance: AI offers "perspectival affordance," a concept describing how AI tools provide new expressive spaces and possibilities for artists, allowing them to explore and refine creative processes through dynamic interactions with intelligent systems.
- Mediated Imagination: AI systems enable a kind of augmented imagination, where human artists interact with AI-generated imagery, leading to new forms of creative expression that are neither fully human nor fully machine-driven.
- Collaborative Creativity: The study argues that AI's involvement in creativity challenges traditional ideas of authorship and control. Artists interact with AI outputs, contributing to a co-created process where the boundaries between human and machine-generated creativity blur.
- Embodied Cognition and Affective Computing: The paper emphasizes that creative interactions with AI are embodied and affect-driven. AI helps artists externalize and refine their creative visions by anticipating aesthetic outcomes based on real-time feedback.

3. TRIANGULAR COLLABORATION
- By working at the intersection of art and technology we can output production with new methodologies.
- This collaboration creates a practice-based research model where art, academia, and technology meet, offering new ways of thinking about how our reality is constructed, remembered, represented, and experienced today.
4. METHODOLOGY & RESEARCH STRATEGY
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Combination fieldwork, archive, and matter as a method of critical inquiry.
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Blending scientific inquiry with artistic exploration and technology fosters the co-production of knowledge that arises from interdisciplinary exchange.
