Unreliable Past
Lev Manovich
Summary
Lev Manovich describes his return to making single images after fifteen years of “cultural analytics,” a shift that comes from the emotional shock of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and from feeling that he loses the country a second time, decades after leaving it. He regards generative AI not as a passive tool but as a formidable, unpredictable collaborator whose statistical training compresses data into frequent patterns, inevitably favouring clichés and stereotypes when asked to imagine unfamiliar subjects. To resist this, he uses ambiguous prompts and reference images; in the series “After the Long War,” he instead embraces the clichés—Russian churches and Kremlin architecture—that models like Midjourney automatically insert into images of Moscow. By placing these symbols in ruined, post-war visions of Russia in 2028 or 2032, he turns the medium’s tendency towards stereotype into a dystopian meditation on destruction, historical unreliability, and cultural loss. He also observes how AI can simulate handwriting and grammar in non-existent languages, evoking the fragility of memory and the many unrealised ideas that vanish from human history. For Manovich, working with AI becomes both an adversarial struggle and a way to process grief.
This AI summary was generated by kimi-k2.7-code (13th August 2026).