In an era of algorithmic authority, The Hallucinating Archive proposes a critical reframing of the term “hallucination” as applied to generative AI. Rather than treating hallucinations as software bugs or epistemic failures, we examine them as expressions of deeper paradigmatic shifts — mirroring how the industrial and computational revolutions previously reshaped collective understandings of time, power, labour, and the self.

Drawing from our June 2025 symposium in Amsterdam, this talk foregrounds how synthetic media inherit their “truth-effects” not from direct referents, but from sedimented training data, latent images, and residual metadata embedded in archives, bureaucracies, and computational infrastructures. Through the lens of strategic adoption and disruptive refusal, we investigate how hallucinations are governed by and are a product of surveillance capitalist logics and varying degrees of technofeudalist opacities.

The hallucinated image, we argue, is not merely untrue, but structurally determined: a product of semiocapitalist abundance, post-truth ecosystems, and data commodification. These conditions demand new critical strategies including speculative and decolonial futurisms, guerrilla archiving, dataset poisoning, intentional recursive feedback looping, and mode collapse to interrogate and redirect machine storytelling. In this way, hallucinations are not outside the archive but constitute its newest operational mode.

We ask: What forms of trust, authorship, and collective memory emerge when generative systems become our primary narrators? What are the ethics of interpolated truth? And can we learn to navigate the synthetic uncanny not with suspicion, but with critical fluency?

Christopher Meerdo (b. 1981) is an artist, researcher, and educator who grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Šiauliai, Lithuania. Meerdo’s sculptural, image, and film work engages with data archives, computational processes, and digital forensics, often incorporating encrypted imagery, leaked documents, synthetic media, and machine-learning techniques. He has exhibited widely at institutions such as the Renaissance Society, the Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the National Gallery of Kosovo, and FOAM Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam. His time-based work has been screened at the Nightingale Cinema (Chicago), the Flat Earth Film Festival (Seyðisfjörður, Iceland), nodoCARACAS (Venezuela), the Chicago Underground Film Festival, Platform Centre (Winnipeg), and on DIS.art.

Meerdo has participated in residencies at SÍM (Reykjavík), Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht), and the Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris). He is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award, The Hopper Prize, and the Silver Eye Fellowship 15 International Photography Award. His scholarship on artificial intelligence has appeared in DIAPHANES Magazine, Para-Educational Papers (University of Hamburg), and Techniques Journal. He previously taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and currently serves as Assistant Professor of Photography and New Media at the University of North Texas. Meerdo is represented by DOCUMENT Gallery in Chicago.