Seeing without Seeing – Towards a Generative Archival Practice
Author: Kevin B. Lee
Published on Carrier Bag, 4 April 2025.
DOI: https://carrier-bag.net/seeing-without-seeing-towards-a-generative-archival-practice/
Abstract: This essay proposes generative archival practice as a critical framework for engaging with the spectral afterlives of erased images within generative AI systems. Reflecting on encounters with ISIS propaganda videos and the affective toll of analyzing them, I trace how distancing strategies used by human researchers—seeking to “see without seeing”—anticipate the algorithmic operations of machine learning systems that now filter, sanitize, and re-synthesize violent media. Through a combination of auto-ethnographic reflection and visual analysis, I examine how these processes shape both human and machine relations to violent imagery. Drawing on Judith Butler’s Frames of War and Harun Farocki’s notion of the operative image, the essay argues that such image operations require a new methodology for archival practices in the age of synthetic media. Generative archival practice thus invites critical engagement with what remains when archival images can no longer be directly accessed in latent space environments, revealing how technological systems both efface and preserve the memory of historical violence.
Keywords: generative AI, archive, media violence, algorithms, digital ethics.