Ruby Justice Thelot

is a Designer, Artist & Cyberethnographer based in New York City. He is an adjunct professor of Design and Media studies at NYU. His work focuses on digital phenomenology, virtual ontology and the implications of being-on-line. He writes about virtual realms, digital communities, and artificial intelligence.

His work and research have been presented and published in journals, magazines and conferences all over the world. He is the author of the books "A Cyberachaeology of Checkpoints" and "a few essays of taste" (Metalabel’s 2025 Zine of the Year). Additionally, he is the Founder of the Award-Winning Creative Research and Design studio13101401 inc.

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The Treachery of Images

Ruby Justice Thelot’s “The Treachery of Images” traces the image from prehistoric representation to generative AI, arguing that images have progressively detached themselves from human intention. Drawing on Aristotle, Kant, Magritte and Vilém Flusser, Thelot describes images as mimetic devices that initially helped humans orient themselves in the world but later became autonomous technical objects whose apparent objectivity disguises their constructed nature.

Thelot characterises the AI image as “synficial”: simultaneously synthetic, because it recomposes the same visual matter as existing images, and artificial, because it is designed to produce credible deception. As machine-generated images begin to dominate both online culture and the datasets used to train subsequent models, image production becomes recursive: networks generate images from images generated by networks.

The article names this prospective “pictorial flippening” as the culmination of the image’s latent desire for autonomy—a hyperreal visual regime in which images cease to represent a human-centred world and instead circulate primarily between machines. We are deeply honored to republish this article.

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邊界 Team
ian margoalexandre montserratelena carbajal