Rethinking Generative Media as Data Visualizations: A Designer’s Perspective on AI

by Linda Kronman

 

Linda Kronman is a media artist, digital culture researcher, and graphic designer. Since 2010, she has created art as part of the Kairus collective, exploring the use and abuse of technologies. Through a research-led art practice, she has addressed topics such as data privacy and security, AI ethics, activism and hacking culture, disruptive art practices, critical making, electronic waste, and the materiality of the Internet.

 

She holds a PhD from the University of Bergen (Norway), where she worked on the ERC-funded Machine Vision project. As a PhD researcher, she studied how machine-vision biases are conceptualized in digital art. By combining methods from digital humanities with artistic approaches, Linda’s PhD research explores how art can help us think differently about AI.

 

In her work as a graphic designer, she is also investigating meaningful and sustainable ways to integrate AI into her design practice. She believes that the dominant, polarizing narratives—one camp claiming that “AI will revolutionize everything” and the other that “AI will destroy civilization”—offer little help to digital media designers. Instead, she suggests treating AI-generated visuals as infographics or data visualizations, and using AI image generation as a method for visualizing data.

 

This approach brings data—the foundation of AI—into focus, along with the human labor and creativity that remain central to working with AI.