Damien Roach (RCA) - 2023-24 Students
damien.roach@network.rca.ac.uk

Acid Realism: Aesthetic Disclosure in the Age of Generative Media and Planetary Computation

This practice-led PhD develops ‘Acid Realism’, a critical artistic method that seeks todestabilise generative AI in such a way as to disclose what its opaque and seamless media actively conceals. It argues that GenAI’s hyper-real output is a naturalism, a surface that makes both its own construction and the planetary system behind it appear as given and inevitable, operating as the apotheosis of what Mark Fisher termed capitalist realism. Drawing on Lukács and Brecht on realism and estrangement, Flusser’s technical imagination, and on Heidegger’s conception of disclosure (aletheia), the research proposes that in the breaking of the synthetic image mid-generation, the resulting fractures disclose the constructed nature of the media itself.

It is pursued through an installation in which live global lightning strikes disrupt a bespoke realtime GenAI system, bringing computation’s material relationship and thermodynamic link to the biosphere into tangible relational form. Crucially, the project reaches past a critique of AI’s material and energetic costs toward its central claim: that what finally exceeds computation is feeling – the situated, living capacity to be affected that the proto-sensorial machine can imitate but never possess. Developed through Donna Haraway’s situated knowledges, parsed through Jennifer Gabrys, and grounded in analyses of planetary computation’s material base, it offers a transferable method for rendering hidden systems both legible and felt. It ultimately locates, in feeling, as a capacity held by the living and decentred from the human, a ground that computation cannot reach.

This dense cross-domain framework draws on the worlds of electron microscopy, experimental music, art history, political theory, and the philosophy of technology. Nodes assembled into its hyperkinetic orbit include the alien algorithmic sonics of Autechre, Joanna Zylinska’s nonhuman photography, the mechanics of human speech mid-stutter, cybernetic feedback loops in Nam Jun Paik’s ‘TV Buddha’, the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act’s repetitive beats clause, Legacy Russell’s ‘Glitch Feminism’, a remobilisation of Clement Greenberg’s reading of kitsch, and the 2015 Saint-Ghislain Google data centre lightning strike incident.

Primary supervisor: Dr Josephine Berry

Secondary supervisor: Professor James Coupe