The Pyromaniac Images

Max and norma opened a real-estate agency…

Blending theory and fiction, the authors—an artist and a philosopher—explore the aesthetic and political implications of generative AI. The current disjunction between the reality of the environmental crisis and the technological mirage embodied by AI raises uncanny questions about the status of the image itself and the multiplicity of discourse contemporary images may produce.

Through a series of speculative tales, this manifesto-book examines the many facets of an addictive fascination with generated images. A duo of real-estate agents manipulates reality through a metafilter. The city’s archives proliferate into an anarchive. The theft of light by the Platform plunges the images of art history into darkness. The inhabitants of an imaginary future are afflicted with pyropictomania—a strange pleasure taken in images of energy consumption, which transforms the planet’s last resources into a new form of wealth: available brain time.

Both joyful and purposeful, this book experiments with texts and images to generate momentum around a series of questions: what can AI do for us, and what does it do to us? What kinds of futures—and what kinds of alternatives—can be imagined with AI? Drawing on visual intensity and fictive imagination, the book unfolds as a sequence of speculative tales, at times ominous, at times hopeful, opening up new ways of thinking about artificial intelligence.

“This delightful and terrifying book is a sharply critical and creative response to the incendiary explosion of AI in contemporary culture. Cassou-Noguès and Wagon are able to work with and against AI at the same time, revealing the absurdity of our technocapitalist situation through literary humour, visual irony, and bold philosophical tactics. The Pyromaniac Images robs AI of its Promethean hype; in short, it is a work of kleptophania! “

Marcel O’Gorman, University Research Chair and Director of the Critical Media Lab at University of Waterloo

“Les Images Pyromanes is a unique book that allows us to see. To see the images produced by generative AI. To see again a past that could have been. To foresee a future that no longer needs us.”

Frédéric Neyrat, Professor in the English department of UW-Madison

Pierre Cassou-Noguès is a philosopher and writer. He is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at University Paris 8. He has published several books in French that use fiction to investigate the theoretical issues raised by contemporary technologies within an ecology of presence. Gwenola Wagon is an artist. She is Professor at the Ecole des arts de la Sorbonne. Through installations, films, performances, and books, she develops alternative and paradoxical narratives that speculate on the contemporary digital world. Working alone or within various collectives, they explore new forms and media at the crossroads of philosophy, art, and fiction.