Julien Porquet

The Image People: Labour, Vision, and Technology in the US Illustration Industry




 My doctoral research examines how heterogeneous ways of seeing shape artistic labour in the US illustration industry in the wake of the release of text-to-image generative AI models. Rather than treating images as stable objects that move through separate phases of production and reception, I argue that their volatile value stems from interactions through which people and machines look together and against each other. This thesis thus asks: How do different people (and machines) look together and against each other at the same images? And how do these ways of seeing shape the political economy of artistic labour?

Based on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork in New York City with freelance illustrators, art directors, designers, editors, agents, copyright lawyers, and machine learning scientists, I develop the concept of heteroscopia: the coexistence and calibration of multiple, often competing ways of seeing focused on the same visual objects. This concept foregrounds how actors reflexively model each other’s perception, infer how others will see, and attempt to align, exploit, or resist those ways of seeing to work, collaborate, or clash.

By tending to the scopic processes rather than the visual outcomes of artistic labour, the thesis argues that generative AI does not rupture existing economies of vision so much as extend and intensify longstanding techniques for capitalising on artists’ labour. Attending to how different people (and machines) look together and against each other reveals not only the politics of image-making, but also the conditions under which some ways of seeing come to matter more than others.





Post-Truth Citizenship: The Sociotechnical Witnessing of US State Violence


 My second project investigates the sociotechnical mediation of sight on a new terrain: the evidentiary practices of community residents who train to observe and document state-sanctioned violence and open-source investigators (OSI) working for human rights organisations, who discover, verify and analyse footage of state violence in the US. State-sanctioned violence is at once more visible than ever, recorded, quantified and documented through complex sociotechnical networks, and yet, it is also routinely denied or reframed as misinformation. Witnessing and testifying thus play a complex role in American experiences and practices of citizenship. 

This project focuses on citizen and expert communities to understand how they use media technologies to make truth-claims, from grassroots use of Discord groups, applications, and social media to the professional use of AI classifiers, remote sensing, or 3D modelling. This research will show how acts of seeing are communicated in evidentiary ways across these communities to constitute meaningful and effective political participation. It promises to contribute a novel account of emerging forms of collective, sociotechnical acts of witnessing and their implications for what we might call a post-truth citizenship.