Asker Staunæs

This article argues that the most consequential democratic question raised by artificial intelligence is not institutional efficiency. It is how representative systems can regain mechanisms for articulating, testing, and answering political claims. The synthetic chamber proposes a counter-institution to the privatisation of mediation occurring through polling systems, recommendation environments, campaign analytics, and conversational interfaces. We develop the concept of the synthetic chamber as a standing parliamentary organ of opinion-formation and reason-structuring designed to respond to the erosion of political party mediation. Its role is auxiliary in power but constitutional in effect, because what is institutionalised is a mechanism for processing and answering deliberative reasons within representative democracy. The proposal is grounded in debates on party decline, deliberative democracy, and representation, and treats mediation not as the replacement of human judgement, but as the use of multi-agent AI to structure, preserve, and relay the outputs of organised citizen deliberation. The synthetic chamber’s architecture is extrapolated from the research-creation setting of the Synthetic Summit, which made plurality, conflict, and traceability operable as AI deliberation. Rather than presenting a cure for democracy, the synthetic chamber offers a specific constitutional response to the contemporary crisis of mediation: a way of projecting organised reasons into representative politics in a form that preserves disagreement, compels answerability, and keeps algorithmic processing open to contestation.

The article critically analyzes how contemporary image practices involving generative artificial intelligence are entangled with processes of democratization. We demonstrate and discuss how generative artificial intelligence images raise questions of democratization and citizenship in terms of access, skills, validation, truths, and diversity. First, the article establishes a theoretical framework, which includes theory on democratization and aesthetics and lays the foundations for the analytical concepts of ‘formative’ and ‘generative’ visual citizenship. Next, we argue for the use of explorative and collaborative methods to investigate contemporary image practice, before analyzing the central part of our investigation, which takes the form of four collaborative workshops conducted in 2023 with external partners in different domains (the art scene, art therapy, education, and the news media). After analyzing insights from these workshops, the article significantly nuances how visual citizenship is at work in different manners depending on the different concrete image practices using generative artificial intelligence. Finally, we conclude that an aesthetic perspective offers valuable insights into foundational aspects of belonging to contemporary visual communities.