AI Gothic

A new essay, plus some updates from the past few months.

I.

I’ve been thinking and writing about AI through the frameworks of abjection and the Gothic for almost four years. I’ve spent those four year close-reading Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror and weighing it against Eve Sedgwick’s thoughts on disgust from Shame in the Cybernetic Fold. I’ve been studying the video as a form, poor images as monsters, and the Gothic as a technology. It has all grown to infect every essay I’ve written since, and when the editors of {Empty Set} reached out, they tempted me with the chance to put it all together for their debut issue.

I am excited to finally be able to share this. I have a lot of faith in {Empty Set} as a project that supports writing “that not only thinks about technology, but with it” and “finds the concepts and thoughts that we’ll need in order to tell a new story about our technologized lives.” This is the best articulation I’ve found of what it is I actually do in my own work. The magazine launched in New York on October 28 with a party at Dear Friend Books, where I read the following excerpt:

Low quality AI-generated content struggles with borders and outlines and it should come as no surprise that popular critiques link AI slop’s brain-rotting potential to other kinds of abject substances: “the amalgamated gross style all of these videos have is like nauseating, i don’t know how to describe it, but it looks like the film is festering in real time,” one user shared on X. Another asked: “Can someone do a scientific breakdown on what it is about AI images that make them look so like,,,slimy? Glazed? I don’t know how to explain it but why do they all look GREASY.”

Citing Remu Bora, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes that “to perceive texture is always, immediately, and de facto to be immersed in a field of active narrative hypothesizing, testing, and re-understanding how physical properties act and are acted upon over time.”⁶ By leading with texture — be it by accident or by design — the AI video undulates with questions about its material narrative: What direction is it moving in? Is it floating on air, water or zero gravity? Is it melting or are the lines rendered poorly? Is the shape-shifting diegetic? Would all this ambiguity be edited out if given the chance?

Texture, especially the gelatinous, squishy, trembling, slippery kind of the AI-generated figure, gives these videos their affective and aesthetic power. “A particular intimacy seems to subsist between textures and emotions,” Sedgwick writes, quoting Bora again to explain that texture “tends to be liminally registered ‘on the border of properties of touch and vision’.”⁷Because it can be seen as well as touched, texture works from both far away and up close. It enacts the Gothic drama of emergence, pushing through the quiver of an outline or a porous malformation to break through the surfaces of commodification.

The 2007 introduction of the iPhone set off a trend in consumer electronics in favor of the smooth and shiny surfaces of polished aluminum and hard plastic. As long as one avoids the Uncanny Valley, a robot that executes frictionless motion is more attractive than one that moves to the breaks and clicks of its mechanics. And the same is now being said of us too. In the realms of beauty, skincare, and for-Instagram photography, “glass skin” is the reigning ideal: a texture that “signif[ies] the willed erasure of history,” a glossy mirror to 21st century consumer culture.⁸

On Instagram, Jess MacCormack shares AI-generated video portraits of doll-like figures with oversized eyes and faces made pearlescent by tears and makeup. The nasolabial folds are blurred by powdery light, browbones glisten with grease-paint, and the cheeks run with the high-gloss of thick tears. As the video cuts through various figures made-up in the same style, red lips part to reveal the mouth’s hyper-realistic, wet insides. Artists like @kentskooking use Midjourney and ComfyUI to render images and videos that feature organs, skins, nails and gums, people and animals swishing through and around each other. In one notable portrait, a man holds his shirt open to reveal his organs shifting around in what looks like a sous-vide bag filling his abdominal cavity. In another, texture fills the frame as Lisa Frank-colored fur shifts into hands while swatches of amorphous pink skin shine as if covered in oil or drool.
In the AI-generated video, gloss becomes slick, and smooth gives into squish as the technologies’ inability to offer coherent figuration is exploited into an over-coherence that approaches the grotesque side of cuteness.⁹ Movement turns AI-generated shine into a signifier for sweat, saliva, or disambiguated wetness. Shifts in light illuminate the quivering outlines— those gaps and lapses— that make way for the Gothic. The shiny, squishy-smooth surface of swollen over-coherence tempts with its wetness and excess. The pleasures of the Gothic lie in their titillating emergence from these exploitable holes.

A “perfected” AI-generated video — with subtly smooth motion and tasteful shine — might alienate these pleasures, or worse, create monsters that “stabilize bias into bodily form and pass monstrosity off as the obverse of the natural and the human.”¹⁰ Without its shaky outlines or slippery surfaces, the Gothic is just cruel; a stunted reading of the same rotted discourse about otherness. It’s worth rejecting the commercial sheen of the AI-generated video through Gothic readings that insist that “there is no one generic form that resembles ‘life’ and another debased form that deviates from the natural order of things.”

Read the rest of it online, here. And consider buying the magazine, a beautiful object that also includes writing by terry nguyen, Celine Nguyen, Kelly Pendergrast and many more.

II.

The birth story: In 2023, I wrote “AI Abjection” for Dirt, followed by a sequel essay, “AI Bleed.” The following year, I wrote “Rot All Over” for Dirt’s Trash Zine (2024), and brought these ideas to my research on AI in visual culture in conversation with Martin Gelen, who invited me talk about it further on a panel at Fotografiska. Towards the end of 2024, I put these newer thoughts in writing as “AI Excess,” for BON Magazine (edited by Gelen).¹ By the end of the year, {Empty Set} commissioned AI Gothic.

When I filed my copy of AI Gothic, it felt like the best thing I’ve written in a long time — the sentence-level choices of craft and style echoed the theories I aimed to advance. This was in March 2025. Since then, I’ve read more Gothic novels, more literary theory; I’ve been edited and challenged to sharpen my argument; and I presented the work as a guest lecturer in Molly Soda’s Imperfect Pictures class at the School of Poetic Computation as an essay-turned-presentation called, ai gothic // 𝖆𝖎 𝖌𝖔𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖈.² Here is an excerpt from my presentation:

One thing to know about Gothic horror is the way it moves: It starts with a surface — a veil, a veneer, or a skin. Then, like a poorly-popped pimple, it tunnels, growing deeper and darker in its irritation. It burrows, swelling into a cyst that grows more archaic, psychoanalysable, and harder to historicize as it takes its monstrous form. Rare is the narrative that describes why the Gothic monster stalks, why it hungers or why it spooks. It doesn’t chase or pursue because its work is done by the time it breaks through. All we can do is watch it creeping and inching, always emerging like a heavy and slothful ooze.

[…]

This motion is doubled over by the economies and technologies that play host to the Gothic drama of emergence: 19th century industrialization and imperialism, 20th century telecommunications and multinational capitalism, and now, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) accelerationism and technocapitalism.

If the vampire was born from industrial smoke, and the blob crawled out of the mid-century Space Race, the last three years have watched streams of AI-generated slop give life to new figures in the shapes of mythical creatures, aliens, humanoids and beasts. Accounts like Instagram’s @catsoupai and TikTok’s @shadecore have reached millions with their phone-sized Gothic horrors: Siren bodies sit half-encased in ice, lizard faces with fixed eyes twitch their tails as humans in hazmat suits shuffle all around, creatures pulled out of the dark blue sea are flopped onto fishing boats, their limbs rubbery with half-life, shimmering with the telltale quiver of a figure generated by a slush of data and software.

And AI Gothic continues to be born. I sometimes wonder if my attraction to these topics — contamination, unstable figurations, human permeability and self-anihilzatory impulses — is a distraction from the things I should be dealing with more directly, either in writing or in life (although I doubt there is a difference).

Still, I’ve reinfected myself with the urge to revise this text and I catch myself rewriting it in my mind while I cook, shower, or clean. Along with feeling, “this is my best work yet!” there is also the feeling that “this could be a book.” Two phrases that describe exciting or pleasant affective experiences linked to writing that should never be taken as sober assertions of fact. I don’t know if AI Gothic is my best work or if it can be a book. I just know that, for a moment, it felt like that could be true and that the ideas therein have proven to be relentlessly metastatic.

III.

After 11 months of living at home, in Puerto Rico, I returned to New York to work on a Digital Humanities MA at the CUNY Grad Center and I am finally at the point where I can say that I’m settled. Since July, I have been traveling back and forth between NY and PR, applying for and getting rejected by multiple jobs and apartments, crashing at friends’, hemorrhaging money, and never feeling like I have enough time to write anything that could make up for that gnawing feeling that my life isn’t moving forward like I’d want it to.

But I still wrote and published plenty: For DINAMO, an essay about 𝓯𝓸𝓷𝓽 𝓱𝓪𝓬𝓴𝓼, a defense of illegibility and brief Unicode primer. For Lux Magazine, a review of Joanna Walsh’s Amateurs and Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification. For ArtReview, an argument against having an online presence and an op-ed on Susan Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism” and what AI has to do with it. More has been assigned, commissioned or filed, but it is too early to promote, so stay tuned for the rest.

Lotte Jacobi’s “Hands on Typewriter” (1929)

IV.

Things I’m reading about and hope to write about soon: Surrealism’s take on play and labor; French Symbolist poetry’s connection to ballet; the early 2010s media landscape that was dominated by RookieMag, Amy Astley’s Teen Vogue, all the Susie Bubble’s vanishing husband, Karla Deras before The Line by K, The Devil Wears Prada and how they all shaped my generation’s views on Glossies glamour. (Thank you Akosua T. Adasi for your copy of Empire of the Elite.) I am enjoying art and paintings featuring inky blacks and glinting details. I don’t write reviews but I am trying to be better at documenting what I see on Instagram.

V.

I am still shopping for a literary agent, although I wonder if what I really need is a publicist. There are several projects I think about often, but my enthusiasm for them waxes and wanes, which means they’re each turning into something else or I’m starting to lose my touch. Please, advise.

VI.

Lastly, I have not abandoned my zine, Borikiut. It’s about 70% done. The project has taken some exciting turns and met a fair share of challenges. I’m waiting to stabilize financially so that I can justify the upfront costs of printing, supplies, etc. But there is a zine and it will be published, I hope, by the end of the year. It’s going to be the cutest 💝

1. Since BON only publishes in Swedish, the untranslated version is on my Substack.

2. This is me not-so-subtly suggesting you invite me to your class, workshop or event space to perform this lecture.