“Fingery Eyes”- Human-ability in the More-than-human World

This paper explores how ‘feeding’ prompts to generative AI systems might constitute a form of domestication of the non-human in the way we verbally interact with and ‘train’ our ‘intelligent’ others to generate various content (such as the translation of text into image). My paper addresses this new dynamic interplay between human and the more-than-humans through the lens of my own creative practice. I will examine the different stages of my interaction with the generative AI in the process of collage making. What interests me is the encounter with nonhuman intelligence, and the degree to which it helps my PhD project (concerned with creative writing’s capacity to imaginatively adopt animals’ perspective). I will argue that creative associations with nonhuman intelligence offer a potent vehicle in imaginatively enabling an audience to inhabit ‘other’ perspectives. I will explore the significance of a potential analogy with the training of a pet dog. I am interested in how, in striving to domesticate the generative AI for creative purposes, the line between the owner and the creator, the organic and the technological, the human and the nonhuman gives way. This process relates to Donna Haraway’s ideas about ‘infoldings of the flesh’ – and I argue it is particularly enacted in the creative industries. I will present several of my collages, including ‘Fingery Eyes’, titled after Haraway’s term for technology’s mediating influence in the act of looking. She talks of‘visually fingering’ a digital image. Her point links this mediated act of looking with ‘touching all the important ecological and political histories and struggles’ – leading her to ask ‘Who should eat whom’ in the more-than-human world. By looking, we touch technology, culture, and politics of interspecies before we judge what we see. In the act of looking through an ‘other’ perspective through my collages, I will argue my creative actions approach what Joseph Anderton suggests is a ‘gulf between the human and the world of nonhuman animals’ so often figured in terms of language and subjectivity. I collage where writing fails. My paper explores how and why I am ‘domesticating’ a non-human pet to aid this process.

Zohreh Baghban is an Iranian postgraduate student writer and artist, undertaking a funded PhD at De Montfort University. Her project concerns creative writing’s capacity to imaginatively adopt animals’ perspective to generate a bio-ethical understanding of UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (2, 12, and 13) in Climate Change, sustainable consumption, and food security to impact non-scholarly audiences. Zohreh's work uses theoretical and empirical research to reinstate animal welfare as a key component