Area
Meaning Negotiation
The engine of the PhD seed: AI, artist, viewer, evidence, and public signs become meaningful through negotiated practice rather than one-way expression.
This area replaces the flatter “AI as medium” frame. AI still has material affordances, but the stronger claim is that AI participates in a networked field where prompts, outputs, curations, refusals, hallucinations, viewers, and evidence traces all negotiate meaning.
The area keeps the practice lineage visible — Emergent Play, Topology Unknown, Latent Intersection, Exquisite Agents, public experiments — but treats those works as sites where signs and roles become temporarily stabilized. The important question is not simply what the medium can do. It is how meanings, agencies, and public interpretations are made, contested, revised, and held long enough to become researchable.
Nodes
Inside this territory
AI as material, not the whole claim
A reframed node: AI has medium-specific affordances, but the PhD claim is stronger than “AI is a medium.”
2026-06-10 / growing / needs-confirmation / public Prompting as negotiationPrompts as negotiated proposals, refusals, corrections, constraints, and asymmetries rather than one-way commands.
2026-06-17 / growing / public-ready / public Hallucination as material affordanceA cautious note about treating model misalignment as design material without normalizing false evidence.
2026-06-19 / seed / needs-confirmation / public Multimodal sketchbookA seed note for comparing sketches, generated images, written prompts, and design annotations as one material chain.
2026-06-20 / seed / needs-confirmation / public Prototype failure logA public-safe failure log that treats broken prototypes as evidence of constraints and not just discarded work.
2026-06-28 / seed / needs-confirmation / public Chart 02 seed revisionThe accepted seed revision that turns the Fable review report into implementation decisions for the PhD website.
2026-07-04 / seed / public-ready / public Latent Intersection and the artist/AI/viewer triadA placeholder node for Latent Intersection as a bridge from AI co-creation into viewer interpretation without over-theorizing Hong's wording.
2026-07-04 / seed / needs-confirmation / public Meaning as negotiated signThe theory node that gives Meaning Negotiation its name: meanings are produced through inference, negotiation, and asymmetries of power.
2026-07-04 / seed / theory-anchor / public Networked agency and complexismA placeholder node for Hong's stronger claim that AI is an agent in a networked paradigm of complexism, not merely a medium.
2026-07-04 / seed / needs-confirmation / public Storm: process social ontologyA slim theory node grounding the seed's process-social-ontology claim without turning the public site into a glossary swamp.
2026-07-04 / seed / theory-anchor / public Voluntary and involuntary signsThe public wording node replacing tentative tentional/intentional language with Storm's voluntary/involuntary sign frame.
2026-07-04 / seed / theory-anchor / public Creature drawing systemA prototype note for co-created creatures, shared turns, and visible differences between human and AI moves.
2026-07-15 / growing / needs-confirmation / public