CentAIrus: the return of the centaur and the history of futures past

This brief experimental text explores metaphors of recognition in a computational poetics of generative AI imagery. Artificial intelligence (AI) is framed as a transitional entity initializing a journey through a latent space of algorithmic self-reflection, mediating the emergent polarities of chaos and cosmos. The conflation of text and image engages with the conflict between linear temporality and speculative futurism that creative process attempts to bring into alignment in the epistemology of composition. The image informs the text, and the text informs the image in an iterative cycle of anticipation and reflection. Employing the myth of the Centaur and its resonance with AI image development, the text questions the legitimacy of boundary schema in latent space. The hybrid beast-human offers an origins story of possible futures of the manifest image poised at the interstice of analog human and digital machine intention, where (algorithmic) abstraction turns imagination to representation and representation determines what humans may become under the recursive watch of AI. Drawing from poet C. P. Cavafy and conceptual metaphor theory this postphenomenological intervention aims to expose alignments between pre-technological mythology and posthuman mythocracy in a narrative trace through the subjective madness of pareidolic familiarity in the age of technic imagination