Fringe | Promptism: The Art of Talking with Machines

Man and machine ally to create new images

The fiction in science fiction is slowly becoming reality. Writers, artists, and other creative minds had the wind knocked out of them this year. Artificially intelligent applications like ChatGPT, Midjourney, dall-E and Stable Diffusion continually generate more impressive texts and images, turning the creative sector and art education upside down.

The LUCA School of Arts and BAC ART LAB KU Leuven surf this wave of change in the PROMPTISM exhibition. Media and Information Design (MIND) students, supervised by Guillaume Slizewicz and Dr Sandy Claes, spent a week caught up in a human-machine conversation. The students constantly fed AI applications new prompts or instructions based on the images they produced in response.

But PROMPTISM doesn’t stop at the results of its dialogue or the machine’s final response. A unique vertical print robot also brings all the dialogues, prompts, experiments, and challenges the students encountered along the way to life.

These students tread the same pioneering path of Dieric Bouts, the image maker supreme.