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Paper short abstract

Generative AI renders transgression as a reproducible visual style while detaching it from political risk and agency. The paper presents the outcomes of a graphic design workshop that tested queer materialist art practices as a way to reintroduce contingency and friction into AI-driven workflows.

Paper long abstract

Contemporary generative AI systems increasingly participate in the production of visual culture, reshaping how differences are represented and globally circulated. While these systems are often discussed in terms of bias, surveillance, or automation, less attention has been paid to the aesthetic regimes through which they translate historically transgressive forms of embodied aesthetic practice into statistically reproducible outputs. This paper examines how generative AI converts transgression into a visual effect that appears disruptive while remaining detached from political risk, material conditions, and situated agency. The concept of synthetic transgression is proposed to describe this process. Rather than challenging normative orders, AI-generated images stabilise them by converting embodied practices of excess and refusal into optimised styles. Through abstraction, embedding, and probabilistic recombination, difference becomes a pattern to be managed rather than a relation capable of intervening in social arrangements. In this sense, synthetic transgression functions as anticontingent depoliticisation, preserving the appearance of disruption while excluding the contingency through which transgression acquires political force. The paper then presents material from experimental workshops with graphic design students at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK). Prompting was treated as an interface of mediation and power, and hybrid workflows transformed AI-generated texts and images into collectively produced, self-published zines. Within this setting, a queer materialist orientation toward graphic design was proposed and explored through practice, reintroducing manual labour and collective authorship and relocating outputs within situated processes of material production.