Maren Ada Küpper

Since I discovered Stable Diffusion(1) , a text-to-image model that generates AI-based images, there is a fascination in using it as an oracle or lens to what the internet presents as the “truest depiction” of a certain artifact. Typing in not a detailed description of an image I wish to generate, but instead using only one word prompts, I am using the software as an oracle to reveal some kind of “truth” to me. The prompt “love” shows a white woman. “Power” a blacked-out picture.

The first images that were generated according to my prompt “Antarctica” often featured both: icebergs and boats. This struck me as bizarre as I was not expecting the depiction of human presence - I was expecting vast landscapes, whiteness, maybe the sea, possibly penguins. The cover of Katha Pollitt’s 1982 poetry collection “To An Antarctic Traveller” shows the painting “The iceberg” by Frederick Edwin Church, which - again - depicts an iceberg and a sailboat. Looking at the book cover I wondered what addition the ship makes to the depiction of Antarctica. Would it not be more impressive to see untouched nature? Massive icebergs shifting unseen through wild seas? Is not the fantasy of untouched wilderness, human-less purity what is generally evoked by the term “Antarctica”?

What the boats and ships add of course, is scale. They give an idea of dimension. Without them, I might know that the iceberg is massive, but I cannot see it. The images, that were generated for me by Stable Diffusion touch on classical depictions of the Sublime; that is of nature or events that evoke a kind of holy terror within the spectator which then dissolves into an experience of beauty and one’s own un-importantness in the face of the overpowering. The generated images are the same for either the prompt “Antarctica” or the prompt “Arctic” - literally the same: the same iceberg, the same boat, the same sea. Researching the iceberg-painting on the cover of Pollitt’s poetry collection, I am also unable to find any indication that the iceberg depicted is in fact an Antarctic iceberg. Instead, Wikipedia gives me plenty of information about a second, more well-known painting by Church, which is called “The icebergs” and shows verifiable Arctic icebergs. Even when using the prompt “South pole” most pictures I get out of Stable Diffusion are pictures of the coast, not the Antarctic inland. This holds also true for a simple google search of “Antarctica”. Additionally, none of the Stable-Diffusion pictures feature inhabitation, stations or even traces of human presence on the ice. What the images look like to me, is the staging of arrival. They seem to replicate the first discoveries recorded in the Western world, staging Antarctica as a place that is still to be discovered and discovered by ship, the traditional tool of colonial conquest.

(1) Stable diffusion is an AI-based text-to-image model. In the free version (state of October 16th 2023) users can enter a prompt, that is a written description of what they want the image to contain.

September 2023