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Portrait Photographer | Transdisciplinary Artist | Practice-based (auto)ethnographic Researcher
AI-assisted Digital Art
Artwork credit:
Michi Masumi (2024)
'Fragmented Silhouettes'
Artwork credit:
Michi Masumi (2024-25)
'Abstracted Identity - The Protest' (Quadtych )
My body of AI-assisted digital artworks explores Black British female identity through abstraction, fragmentation, texture, and emotional intensity. Developed from my own photography, mixed-media fine art experiments, and lived experience, the works use artificial intelligence as a human-led, responsive tool rather than an autonomous creative agent.
The images function as visual counter-narratives to dominant digital systems, addressing issues of visibility, algorithmic bias, care, and emotional truth. Through layered digital processes, these works articulate identity as relational, non-fixed, and continually in process—reflecting intersectionality, neurodivergent ways of sensing, and the complexities of Black British lived experience within technological space.
Process & Method
Affective Recomposition Method (ARM)
This series was developed using the Affective Recomposition Method (ARM), a human-led, AI-assisted visual ethnographic approach.
Affective recomposition is not used here as a prescriptive or standardised research method. Instead, it operates as a conceptual–methodological practice, informed by affect theory and visual ethnography, which attends to how emotion, sensation, memory, and identity are reworked through creative and digital processes.
Many of the artworks originate from earlier mixed-media fine art experiments that were unresolved or intentionally left incomplete.
Rather than discarding these works, I re-enter them as visual and emotional data—merging fragments, textures, and original Black portrait photography through emotion-led prompting and iterative digital intervention.
AI functions as a responsive collaborator, enabling recomposition rather than automation.
Abstraction operates as a method for articulating intersectionality, allowing multiple identities, affects, and states of being to coexist without resolution.
Dense texture reflects emotional intensity, sensory overload, and neurodivergent processing, translating internal experience into visual form. These works prioritise process over finish, and reflection over resolution.
Method & Positioning
Throughout this research period, I apply affective recomposition as a human-led, AI-assisted visual ethnographic approach grounded in Black methodological frameworks.
This process reframes unresolved visual material through emotion, abstraction, and lived experience, positioning creative practice as a site of cultural knowledge production rather than aesthetic output.
This practice is situated within:
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Practice-based research
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Visual ethnography
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Autoethnography
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Digital anthropology
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Black feminist visual methodologies
The work resists neutrality in both technology and representation, foregrounding subjectivity, care, and cultural specificity.
AI is engaged critically, with authorship retained through original photographic source material, manual digital painting, selective prompting, and post-production control.
AI Ethics, Transparency & CADE
All works presented here are AI-assisted, not AI-generated.
This practice operates within the CADE™ (Cultural AI Decolonial Ethics) framework, developed to address issues of authorship, consent, algorithmic bias, cultural misrepresentation, and ethical transparency in creative AI systems.
CADE ensures that AI functions as a collaborative tool rather than an extractive authority, maintaining human-led decision-making and accountability across datasets, processes, and outcomes.
Creative authorship is retained through:
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original photography and mixed-media source material
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emotionally driven and critically informed prompting
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manual digital painting and compositional intervention
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selective refusal and curation of AI outputs
AI is treated as a site of interrogation rather than neutrality, aligned with ethical, human-centred creative technology practices.
Framework Alignment
This page applies the following original research frameworks developed by Michi Masumi:
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MMAT—Masumi Methodology of Art and Technology
Governing the ethical, human-led integration of AI within creative practice. -
MAETT—Masumi Applied Ethnographic Tools and Theories
Supporting reflective, sensory, and culturally situated visual ethnography. -
MPM—Mobile Praxis Method
Enabling non-linear, iterative, and adaptive research practice over time. -
ADN—Anthro-Digital Narratives Framework
Structuring layered storytelling across identity, culture, and digital systems. -
CADE—Cultural AI Decolonial Ethics
Ensuring ethical authorship, transparency, and accountability in AI-assisted work.
Artwork credit:
Michi Masumi (2023-24)
'Visual ethnography research practice outputs'
Diagrams:
The Affective Recomposition Method (ARM)
operates as a non-linear, iterative process. Works may re-enter the cycle at any point.
References:
Barthes, R. (1980) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Vintage.
Benjamin, R. (2019) Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Campt, T. (2017) Listening to Images. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Candy, L. and Edmonds, E. (2018) Practice-Based Research in the Creative Arts. Cham: Springer.
hooks, b. (1992) Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press.
Noble, S.U. (2018) Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: NYU Press.
Pink, S. (2013) Doing Visual Ethnography. 3rd edn. London: Sage.
Artwork: Samples of my research exploration outputs
Michi Masumi (2025)
AI-assisted digital artwork using original photography, mixed-media source material, and human-led AI processes.
Explores identity, abstraction, emotional intensity, and cultural memory.