Colloquium on "Objects of Interest and Necessity" – HIAS

Nicolas Malevé (Sciences Po, Paris) & Christian Ulirk Andersen (Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies)

Hamburg Institute of Advanced Studies, Nov 25, 2025

AGENDA

1) Introducing AI imaging (the interface Draw Things)

2) Hardware (the GPU and how to access it through a network)

3) Currencies ("Kudos" in Stable Horde)

4) Organisations of AI imaging (Hugging Face, in particular)

5) The question of 'autonomy' and why 'infrastructures' are not trivial.

Model: 8-10 minute short presentations, followed up by one or two questions.

"Draw Things": Introducing AI imaging

Draw Things" is a free, AI-assisted image generation app for Mac, iPhone, and iPad that uses Stable Diffusion to turn text prompts and images into art. It is known for being able to run offline on devices for privacy

It includes a extensive control over many Stable Diffusion settings ("basic" and "advanced") and variety of features for professional-level image generation and editing - as opposed to the simple presets of e.g. DALL-E (OpenAI)

EXAMPLE prompts:

"A highly detailed illustration of the 2008 version of Hulk, standing in a dynamic pose, muscles exaggerated and glowing green skin, wearing torn purple pants and hugging a teddy bear in his arms. The background is a dramatic cityscape with smoke and debris, emphasizing chaos and strength. The art style is cinematic, with realistic lighting and shadows, smooth brush strokes inspired by Pixar's aesthetics for animated movies. Ultra-realistic textures, sharp details, and vibrant colors."

"The 2008 version of Hulk in a calm, contemplative standing pose in a garden landscape, wearing a long green sleeve-less dress. Warm orange and purple hues in the sky, soft lighting, and a serene atmosphere. Hulk’s expression is thoughtful, with detailed facial features and realistic textures. The art style is cinematic, with realistic lighting and shadows, smooth brush strokes inspired by Pixar's aesthetics for animated movies. Ultra-realistic textures, sharp details, and vibrant colors."

Base model: SDXL Base (v.1.0) // good for anything – large scale, automated

LoRA: animte/pixar-sdxl-lora // 'tweaking' the base model - small scale, community made

Trigger word: Pixarrrable

LoRA "The Incredible Hulk (2008)."[1]

Screengrab of the LoRA page on the civit.ai platform. Civitai.com is a platform for images and models (LoRAs) and features a mix of fan-fiction, role-playing game characters and stereotypical (incel-like) gender representations.

What we have seen is what we call the "pixel space" of AI imaging. There is much more to AI than just the 'algorithms' and statistical "diffusion" models that generate the images.

2) Hardware / AI horde - edge AI vs commons, common property / Nicolas

3) Currencies / Nicolas

Organisations

... Hugging Face & our diagramme

5) The project: the question of "autonomy" and why "infrastructures" are important / Together 5+5

... "theory"

... "practice" / Taller Estampa (other maps) / Vladan Joler - the complexity and contradictions of AI

Themes (suggestions):

Intro to our project - "autonomy" and "decentralisation" of AI (and other knowledge infrastructures)

How to imagine with objects

Maps and cartography

Pixel Space: Interfaces to AI imaging

Pixel Space: Visual cultures of AI imaging (where do images come from - where do the go?)

Latent Space: LAION, Models, LoRAs (how are images collected and what happens to them?)

The material plane: The infrastructures of GPUs - earning and spending currency.

The organisations involved: LAION, Hugging Face, etc. – the grey zones of autonomy