PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Hughes, Rolf
TI  - Administering (AI) Attention: Ekphrasis and the Poetics of Prompting
DP  - 2025 Jul 15
TA  - ArteActa
PG  - 1--18
VI  - 8
IP  - 1
AID - 10.62804/aa.2025.002
IS  - 25711695
AB  - "Administering (AI) Attention: Ekphrasis and the Poetics of Prompting" explores how the act of prompting generative AI constitutes a new form of artistic authorship and aesthetic practice, grounded in historical frameworks of conceptual art, creative constraint, and ekphrasis. Drawing an analogy with Kafka's messengers - figures navigating indeterminate pathways - the paper positions AI as a similarly enigmatic collaborator, interpreting human prompts through opaque, algorithmic processes. Prompts are theorised as a form of micro-ekphrasis: textual acts that mediate between human intention and machine-generated image or sound. Through interdisciplinary analysis involving rhetoric, media theory, and art history, the paper argues that prompting is both a technique of control and an invitation to serendipity, echoing aleatory practices in literature and music. The dynamics of prompting require artists to develop new literacies of attention management, navigating between distraction and focus in both human cognition and machine processing. Case studies, including iterative experiments with Midjourney, demonstrate how AI prompting functions as a contemporary poetics, reframing authorship, creativity, and collaboration. By linking AI prompting to traditional pedagogical practices and avant-garde methods, this study reveals how generative systems extend and transform long-standing artistic strategies, offering a critical framework for understanding AI's evolving role in the creative process.