Hallucination names a phenomenon increasingly on everyone’s brains: AI-driven content that is flagrantly inaccurate, yet asserted with utter certainty, resembling what a human might write, say, or see. Today inseparable from generative AI as well as social media worlds and their uncanny doppelganger effects, hallucination identifies — both technically and critically — a powerful media effect, a visual and verbal subterfuge. Yet it also invokes a world-building potential, at once dangerous and powerfully productive. Arguably, this dual edge has been present long before AI. Media theorists, artists, and art historians have been particularly attuned to the powers of hallucination. The phenomenon of anamorphosis has been generative for theorists in and beyond the visual arts, while scholars of early image technologies have debated the extent to which projected images and the phantasmagoria of everyday life could instigate viewers to lose their bearings in the world. Hallucination has been marshalled to critique the powerful mass effects of media in Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle and Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of hyperreality and simulation. Meanwhile, the influential contemporary visual artist and media theory Hito Steyerl has been rethinking spam, AI-slop, and the implications these contemporary phenomena have for the gallery space and the very notion of the artwork.

Our programming for this academic year features artists, scholars, and artist-scholars exploring both the pitfalls and generative dimensions of hallucination through the transdisciplines of visual cultures and performance studies. We invite scholars, students and the greater community to collaborate on this year-long inquiry into hallucinations throughout history and the globe — sharpening their critical edge in a present of distorted worlds.