10 to the naked eye or to slow down motion and break it into tiny segments of time, surpassing the limits of human perception. These capabilities enable photography to uncover layers of reality that are not accessible to the naked eye. In fact, photography can even create new realities. For example, Benjamin visualized tribal totem poles, emerging from “tenfold enlargements of chestnut and maple shoots.”2 He wrote that photography reveals to us the optical unconscious, just as psychoanalysis unearths the existence of the “instinctual unconscious.”3 About a century ago, the Surrealist artists discovered Freud's concept of the unconscious. In the 1920s, they turned to the mechanisms of the unconscious formulated by Freud, including the dream-work, as a means of disrupting the familiar world and creating a disturbingly direct picture of the depths of the psyche. Today, in the third decade of the 21st century, the rapid development of generative AI is providing art with an “unconscious” of a new order altogether. It invites us to see the world as reflected through a non-human eye; one that does not ”see” in the physiological sense of the word. Rather, generative AI comprehends 2 ibid., p. 512. 3 ibid. reality via mathematical models and complex algorithms, whose creators admit to not fully understanding their functioning. Thus, while AI technology remains a mystery to most of us, artists are beginning to employ it to revise our understanding of existential experience and represent reality through the “eyes” of a non-human entity. The installation Generative Crafts by Shirley Wegner and Tal Nissim is part of a broader trend of artists exploring the possibilities and obstacles engendered by the new technology. Wegner and Nissim employed Midjourney, a generative AI model, to reimagine the architectural space of the Open University campus in Ra'anana. The artists used this generative mapping, which combines the actual and the imaginary, to expose the architectural unconscious of the space. The emergent spatial configuration is not functional, nor does it seem, at least at first glance, to yield practical insights. However, once rational defenses are down, a second, deeper glance reveals that the artists' disrupted space exhibits hidden aspects of the campus and its environment. These experiential characteristics seem to have always been there but, without the AI prism,
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