Aided, abetted, multiplied, burlesqued: Authorship, artificial intelligence and the poetics of the assemblage
Published
28-1-2026
Type of Work
Article - Journal
Abstract
This article examines the creative, aesthetic and ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence-assisted art-making through the lens of PandorasVamp, a visual project that extends the author’s performance persona Lola The Vamp into the machinic field of synthography. Drawing on poststructuralist theory, feminist critique and the historical avant-garde, the article argues that generative artificial intelligence does not erase authorship but reconfigures it as assemblage – a mode of creation entangled with prompt-craft, performance and cultural memory. The project’s visual outputs, generated using Wonder.ai and trained on a personal archive of stage and backstage imagery, occupy a historical moment in 2023 when glitch aesthetics and surreal distortions marked the infancy of public-access generative tools. Through curated example, theoretical synthesis and poetic reflection, PandorasVamp is offered not as a solution to the ethical conundrums of artificial intelligence art, but as a case study in reflexive entanglement – a co-authored sublime of aesthetic pleasure, cultural anxiety and vampiric recursion
Notes
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Citation
Montgomery, L. (2026) Aided, abetted, multiplied, burlesqued: Authorship, artificial intelligence and the poetics of the assemblage. European Journal of Cultural Studies, AI Special Issue, Sage, first published 28 January 2026.
Link to Published Work
Sensitive handling note
5. Readers should be aware that this output contains content with explicit language, hate speech, nudity or sexuality, drug use which may be confronting and potentially distressing to some people.