does the ai grenade make someones mouth appear half way through their face, like where their nose is supposed to be? and does it increase their ears three-fold? the comically retarded ai grenade? what is "median, average" about it? are all the dead german soldiers supposed to be captured by a median average of "raised threefold humpty dumpty ears?" do the ears resemble the terror, that is being gathered, subsumed, like, boiled up into the squarehead of a soldier's facial posterior? and the woman with the short weave, a representation of a long-lost lover in the 1940s, a worried home-cook mom? "war actor" to be fair is an actually cool piece, except, it looks like some edgy teen with an illegal skyscraper-climbing hobby printed e.t. the alien on the back of his straight-jacket hoodie and is heading towards the fog in an ambiguous search of some kind. even the image of a battlefield and aftermath, it looks like a really weird fugly alien fly with a protruding neck-head is needlessly heading towards black and white hill-side as horse-men run towards it like a shitty rendition of attack on titan.

it captures literally none of friedrich's terror. the horse corpses there are real, every single one is uniquely distinguishable. it captures three characteristics that yurenev doesn't: 1) the seeming terrifying illusion of infinity, broken by the equally awful realization that, even when it isn't infinite, it's one too many to count or care about 2) desolation not as an explosion or a feeling but an actual landscape that is navigable, searchable, specific in its "thisness" 3) overly specific ruins generalized and ruined by a random arbitrary hanging, a random burial with a decorated cross on it, or a mutilated horse or someone's awfully long legs protruding in the middle of the landscape. if any ai generation model attempts this, it will "exactify" or "generalizify" this depiction, it will over-determine the legs precisely when they need to be under-determined, it will fail in realism by trying too hard to be real.

the specificity of a photo is it's indexability. it's not terrifying because you know an actual person suffered those injuries, but because the generalization of that suffering can extend outwards to capture that exact feeling only because the specificity already "imprints" the aura of that violence outwards due to its essence. now, if in the future an ai can perfectly index a specific photographic feeling, does that mean it's fully original, and therefore a valid ghost-feeling? no, because even if it transfers that feeling, it doesn't hold it. but it does mean it has achieved the halo of that exact feeling. aura is uniquely taggable, it depends on the medium as an inherent experience, artificialization surpasses it. the halo doesn't, but getting to the point where the halo is identical to the index of a photo requires so much more than similarity, than accidents (the inherent accidents (accidentability) of all so-far synthesized intelligence).

this political tangent that is about to come up is necessary, but only two skippable paragraphs. it's necessary because without understanding how this type of art is supposed to interact with us, there's no point in talking about war at all. bogna could have stuck to researching how ai depicts kitchen environments and utensils, but there's a reason she didn't. war is profitable, even for artists trying to sentimentalize it. it's okay to make profit out of it, but it's about how you want to position what you're doing.

lets say bogna really authentically decided to talk about this to an actual small niche public of real readers of theory and not anyone who has stumbled on her name accidentally. lets say this wasnt political at all, and yurenev was not selling prints of the ai-generated imagery book for up to 5000 dollars a copy on stripe, directly deliverable to your house, which includes a copy of his great granduncle who was lost during ww2. lets say that this is okay, that thats a valid price. that maybe purchasing the work is an act of support for war refugeeism or something like that.

screw it, the cost is the cost, but why is there a copy with some special type of plate that inflates the cost five times? obviously the artist is being genuine, its a mix of prestige economy (inflating so that rich people think its important to buy), natural artist inflation (only few people will buy it anyways) and cost of materials probably being way higher per book than normal publisher print. also hes selling and promoting in nyc so theres local market inflation too.

of course, photography has a mechanical constraint, even what is faked and evidentialized looks overly naturalized. at least ai-generated imagery returns us to the world of painting, and bogna is right to point this out. "photography and ai might seem diametrically opposed. where one is considered the gold standard of evidence, the other is accused of “hallucinations” and falsifying reality. yet photography, too, was once dismissed as unnatural, blasphemous, and mechanical." but, the method of discrimination that cultivates originality, even if our brain actually does discriminate, override, force decisions and reason linearly to an extent, still is not linear. more importantly, it isnt divided across a false binary competitive assumption, attempting to synthesize a result. an original and realistic depiction of something is booming with fruition. fruition is a kind of halo. it isn't an aura, an aura is the mystified post-effect of a real "labour-event" so to say.

its supposed to mimic a bunch of disfigured faces moulding/transforming under war-worn clothes like hats and helmets and uniforms, but there isnt a language of terror there because we dont know what giant ears would even mean medically for someone, but we know what a half destroyed face is and how annoying and fucked up that person will be to talk to and be around after that, and war photographs are scary because of that reason. the "median" of terror doesnt describe real events, it doesnt seem to be able to capture the terror of apocalyptic emptiness, the seeming infinity of scattered corpses, what it can do is bastardize silhouettes, but thats a type of positive perversion that is nowhere near the type of terror photographs capture, and as a medium its not even supposed to.

the "realism" of photographs isnt mitigated simply because bogna says that some guy was conscripted by the government to make propaganda images of uplifted soldiers, just like how when you look at a painting depicting war, you're not looking for war porn the same way you'd look for it in a photograph, cause you'd be looking for a different thing. in yurenev, i wouldn't look for an authentic portrayal of a soldiers fear in any single moment, but i would look for an abstract feeling of bureaucratic uneasiness that a soldiers figure could have, cause thats what the machine is built to stick together and process, it isnt built on identifying or building hypercomplex emotion or particular details of wounds. and even if it was it couldnt do the rest of what makes a photograph worthwhile. and all of them share an aspect of non-artistry, the photo captures whats already there, the painting illuminates or highlights what doesnt even exist, and the ai photograph, in attempting to capture the median, turns it into a stupid cartoon that is trying to capture something real but creating an entirely new dimension of reality.

a painting has no such constraints, yet, if we could exist in a world where painting is the true evidentiality of reality, then, bogna's dream becomes closer to a reality we once actually did live in. look at how she speaks about this issue:

they'd probably get ptsd from war if their light bulb broke in a way that resembles a gun firing, it's self obsessive. this doesn't validate or invalidate ai-as-terror-able. what it actually means is that, it's possible to discover a memory of trauma in them, the same way it's possible to discover the same taste in a different meal. tell you what, we'll torture a bunch of random people whilst showing them ai photos, then call them ai-veterans. and in the future, where everything is ai, we'll place them on the last ai-free place in the world, but have a bunch of people create real drawings of figures mutating. their world will be so perfectly still (analog: traumaless) that they'll associate any disfiguration at all as artifical fuckery, and therefore as violent to the nature of their being. war is not violent because it's realistic, only because it's happening. the realism is an accidental property, like how when god decided to give specific colors to specific objects, he only mechanized the functional "why" of the color, but likely not its teleological counter-point (obfuscating example, but an important one).

i'm not saying this to say that they are artificial. they're worse than artificial - they're an entirely different art form that has nothing to do with representing the terror of war. and that's a great thing, but it isn't the terror of war. the terror of war cannot be captured in the idea of a captain's face, only in the memory that the captain's face is somehow the face of your mother and bosses commands to you, and the real human nagging that comes with that. and the recognition in the eyes of a real human in a photograph that that type of terror is immanent, not too far away from you at any point, that those human experienced are shared, no, dispersed!

look, i know she's not saying it's supposed to capture the particular horror of photographic evidence, but that it can be a mode that reveals something new about it. but what i'm saying is that its faux presentation reveals, in fact, less, about memory, trauma and impossibility than the photos do. it actually crushes whatever they do reveal about them, somewhat! it does other interesting fetishizations, but not these.