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Paper short abstract

How can AI-generated images render visible the agencies of corals that lie beyond human visual thresholds? This presentation takes an experimental, posthuman approach to visual cultures of the coral holobiont, exploring what the machinic gaze might reveal or obscure.

Paper long abstract

This presentation challenges dominant representations of coral reefs by turning attention to the coral holobiont—the complex symbiotic assemblage of coral, algae, bacteria, and countless other organisms whose collaborative labor remains largely invisible to the human eye.

Working with AI image generation tools, this project explores what the machinic gaze might reveal or obscure. What regimes of visibility emerge when generative systems synthesize coral imagery from historically burdened archives? And conversely: what forms of knowledge, agency, and multi-species kinship might be embodied in images that refuse familiar aesthetics of reef photography?

This presentation engages with alternative visual languages that foreground the collective agency of corals as multispecies- technological assemblages. Instead of accurate representation, this work aims to experiment with speculative visualization—an attempt to render visible the invisible collaborations within the holobiont and to ask how such images might attune us to distributed forms of cognition and cooperation within the reef. In doing so, this posthuman endeavor positions human-AI collaboration as a site for rehearsing other ways of seeing multispecies worlds.