Processing Memory

Processing Memory 
WOOOOOOOOF and Cultural Velocity

BY HENRIK J. KLIJN
 
WOOOOOOOOF doesn't announce itself quietly. The oversize format, sheer weight, glossy pages, saturated colors, poems that run hot and close to the bone. It's a book that knows exactly what it's doing. It sets its stakes early. Look at me. Look what I made. Look what a project can become in the hands of people who refuse to shrink to fit the moment. The more time you spend with it, the more another pattern becomes clear: velocity.
To be clear, "velocity" is not in reference to production per se, but how visual cultural markers pivot, mutate, and reappear in new contexts. The concepts in WOOOOOOOOF move faster than we can absorb them: words suggest motion, visuals refuse genre, acceleration is content.[1] Walter Benjamin worried mechanical reproduction would strip art of "aura," their singular presence in time and space.[2] This collection tests something else: what happens when aura is augmented by processed memory and recombination.
Turn to an early still life, and you see why the book insists on that confidence. A table crowded with guns, glass, wine, flowers, insects, playing cards, the whole scene in deep chiaroscuro[3]. Everything is precise. Petals feel weighty. Metals gleam. The page looks like staged photography, except it is not. It is AI, shaped by an artist who knows exactly what makes vanitas painting[4] sing. The still life is not just a technical flex. It's cultural memory made visible—the way certain images get carried forward across generations because they help us think about death, appetite, status, decay.[5] The firearms, glassware, cut flowers, and playing cards are figures of memory in the technical sense: icons that stabilize particular ways of seeing.[6] This table has been set for centuries. Aguilar knows exactly what he's inheriting.
Flip a few pages. Everything changes. A hard graphic silhouette stands against radiating lines and shredded newsprint. Sepias and reds dominate. The aesthetic pulls from Soviet constructivism but also from something even more unmistakable: the design language of anti-apartheid resistance. You can feel the echo of one of the most important photographs of the twentieth century, that of Hector Pieterson carried through Soweto by Mbuyisa Makhubo, Antoinette Sithole running alongside on 16 June 1976, the day when a country saw itself with brutal clarity. The photograph circulated on front pages worldwide within days and came to represent both the cruelty of apartheid and the moral shock it caused on a global scale.[7] TIME Magazine recognized the Sam Nzima photograph as one of 100 most influential images of all time. WOOOOOOOOF, in turn, is not recreating Nzima. It acknowledges its gravitational pull. And inserts the label USA. So far, so symbolic.
But this exact image is where the project snaps into focus. Trauma images enter the cultural bloodstream, becoming inherited memory rather than mere documentation. People who were not there, who were not yet born, carry them forward, until the line between collective memory and inheritance blurs. The image becomes more real than the event.[8] Aguilar is working with that kind of inheritance, not documentary evidence but transmitted structure, something carried and reworked in a different generation's visual language. The question is not whether to use the image. It's already using us. The question is how to work with it without flattening what it means.
WOOOOOOOOF is not asking whether AI can mimic things. The book treats that question as settled and, frankly, a little boring. The real question is whether AI can carry cultural memory with intention instead of flattening it into digital wallpaper. Whether a machine can be guided through visual traditions with respect. Whether the output can sustain weight instead of skimming the surface. The surprising part is how often the answer is yes.
 
The Collaboration and Its Consequences
 
Andrew Sykes brings sixty-four poems. Ernesto Raul Aguilar, 140 images. The press materials tell how this is a story about transformation. Sykes did not call himself a poet before this. Aguilar did not see himself as an illustrator. WOOOOOOOOF became a crucible that turned both into something larger. The narrative fits, because the work shows exactly what learning in public looks like. Some pairings click with the precision of a double lock. Others feel more literal, more tentative, like early drafts that slipped into the final show.
In "Commitment Street," Sykes writes of falling and Aguilar gives us figures suspended in light. Poem equals falling. Image equals falling. The collaboration here illustrative rather than conversational. But then you land on "Negrome Salume WOOOOOOOOF," a quasi-baroque still life. The words circle appetite and satisfaction. The visual does the same through objects that tradition has always used to talk about death and desire. Both move toward shared questions from different angles. Collaboration, not as extension or literal augmentation. As exchange.
How the Process Worked
 
Aguilar's account of his method matters here. "AI was part of my illustration process, but not in a 'generate and drop it in the book' kind of way," he says. "I used it more like a creative starting point and a way to test moods." That distinction is everything. Starting point, not endpoint. Foundation, not replacement. "From there everything went through a ton of Photoshop work for compositions, adjustments, and manual design so the visuals felt intentional and tied to Andrew's writing," he says. This thoughtful approach shows. It's there in the decision-making. Aguilar is an artist using a new tool the way artists have always used new tools: as leverage for vision, not substitute for it.
The collaboration itself required restraint. "My role was to visually interpret the world he created," Aguilar says. "It was a lot of back-and-forth between the emotional tone of his writing and the imagery I felt could sit alongside without trying to explain it too literally." Aguilar understood the assignment: "The goal was for the images to echo the feeling of the poems, to create atmosphere and texture rather than just direct illustration." Translation: he's not drawing pictures of what the poem says. He's building visual companions that live in the same emotional weather system. And that required trust. "Our collaboration is really built on trust," Aguilar says. "He gives me this internal landscape, and I respond visually in a way that keeps the mystery intact."
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Apartheid Material & the Weight of Memory
 
The most electric images in WOOOOOOOOF are the ones drawn from graphic protest traditions. Bold forms, pared-down palettes, and text woven into the composition. These are not broad gestures toward struggle. They're specific. Clenched fists, broken chains, stark silhouettes, blocky screen-printed color fields. This is a visual vocabulary built to survive cheap paper and police confiscation.[9] The graphics had to be reproducible, portable, deniable. They were made in basements and safe houses, designed to move fast before they could be seized.
They are rooted in a specific history of resistance design crafted in closets, basements, back rooms, and safe houses. These were images built to survive censorship, silence, and violence. Apartheid organized space into zones of life and zones of death. Black life, systematically exposed to violence, premature death written into a nation’s subconscious.[10] In that context, resistance posters were not simply images. They were counter-memories built into the death-world, fragile but insistent.
You feel the lineage immediately. One senses the pressure of visuals that shaped global understanding of apartheid, including the photograph of Pieterson's body being carried through Soweto. WOOOOOOOOF doesn't recreate it. Instead, it carries the memory the way a new generation carries inherited trauma: redirected, but unmistakable.
Aguilar approaches these visuals as someone working from the inside. The compositions are controlled, not showy. The red is measured. The figure placement is precise. Nothing feels borrowed for style. Nothing feels casual. AI becomes a tool for creating distance from history without disrespecting it. The images acknowledge that they are constructed, contemporary, and not pretending to occupy the same documentary space as the original struggle photography. They operate as reflections on inherited memory rather than reenactments. Photographs of suffering teach us what to remember and how to feel about it, even when the memory was never ours.[11] They're not just records—they're instructions. And political photographs especially create obligations. Photographer, subject, viewer: bound together in what gets called a civil contract.[12] Aguilar's AI-generated echoes still participate in that contract. They still have to answer what it means to inherit, transform, or restage an image that once testified to state violence. The technology doesn't erase the ethical questions. It makes them stranger.
When Aguilar says the book is "about becoming, about the courage to change, the joy of absurdity, and the wisdom hidden in blind spots," he's describing not just theme but method. The images themselves embody transformation. They take historical visual languages and run them through contemporary tools to say something urgent about right now.
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The Range Challenge: Mastery or Tourism?
 
Here's the problem with software: it makes everything feel equally available. Oil painting, constructivist poster, hyperreal photograph: all in the same interface, all a few clicks apart.[13] Style becomes a dropdown menu. The distance between traditions collapses. You can tour centuries of visual language in an afternoon without ever earning the grammar.
Aguilar moves across traditions with astonishing briskness. Baroque still life. Constructivist propaganda. Neoclassical allegory. Minimalist graphic design. Commercial tropes. It is impressive, but the velocity itself raises a real question. When does range become mastery, and when does it slip into tourism?
Put simply, Aguilar avoids touristic voyeurism by consistently approaching subjects with empathy and knowledge. The apartheid and protest graphics show understanding. The constructivist pieces feel historically grounded. The still lifes demonstrate command of compositional principles that have governed the form for centuries.
This matters because AI makes surface accuracy and gloss easy. What separates meaningful work from mimicry is intention. Aguilar's process reveals exactly that: "Everything went through a ton of Photoshop work for compositions, adjustments, and manual design so the visuals felt intentional." Some images in WOOOOOOOOF undeniably have intention. A few resemble exercises that never quite reach completion. And that's acceptable. The inconsistency is honest. It shows where the project is discovering itself and where it has not fully arrived. Warts and all.
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The Page/Live Performance Challenge
 
Performance poets write with the body. Timing. And breath. Most of Sykes's work thrives on the page. But meaning in performance poetry doesn't live only in the words. It lives in voice, gesture, timing, the call-and-response between body and room.[14] Reading Sykes on the page means missing half the medium. "Blood Orange Summer" hits hard because the imagery cuts fast and clean. The knife in the image amplifies the knife in the text. Occasionally, a piece begs for a room, an audience, a living voice to fulfill its shape. Incidentally, Sykes is making a name for himself at the Uptown Poetry Slam Sundays (the third Sunday of every month) at Chicago's Green Mill—the venue where Marc Kelly Smith launched the slam poetry movement in 1986.
"From East Timor to the End of Tomorrow" has a catalogue quality, stacking image and desire atop one another: the first kiss sprayed like perfume mist, the week spread across months like dumplings in foil. Accumulation as a form of ecstasy and grief. "I Never Met-a-morphosis I Didn't Like or Know" with its "Jump off a cliff with me, we can't see the ground below" embodies Beat recklessness. It's all about transformation through risk, through saying yes to the unknown.
Even "CERENÉ.LIFE" channels a certain exasperation with consumerist America, though where Ginsberg raged against Moloch's machinery, this piece is more quietly done with it all. Different eras, similar weariness.
Sykes describes the project as treating "poetry and art as twin forces of transformation, inviting readers to laugh, reflect, and perhaps meet their own brilliant future selves." That ambition shows up frequently. The project's willingness to risk occasional unevenness in service of genuine collaboration makes it more interesting than most poetry collections that play it safe.
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What AI Does Here
 
WOOOOOOOOF never tells you what tools were used. It doesn't need to. The images themselves reveal the process. You do not get to chiaroscuro accidentally. Nor anti-apartheid poster logic, without knowledge of the original graphics. Someone had to know what to ask for, where to refine, which ones to keep, and when to throw one away.
AI is not the artist here. It's an instrument. A brush that can move faster than a hand, but only when the hand knows what it is reaching for. Software shapes what we can imagine before we ever open it.[15] It suggests possibilities, naturalizes certain aesthetics, and makes some choices feel inevitable. The work reveals the eye behind the prompt precisely because someone had to fight against those suggestions, refuse the first outputs, know when the software was lying.
The book as a whole demonstrates selection, refinement, post-processing, and sagacity. The human presence, visible in composition and refusal to settle for the first output. Aguilar's description confirms this: he used AI "more like a creative starting point and a way to test moods." Test, refine, rebuild. It's the kind of labor that separates meaningful output from digital karaoke.
The question was never whether AI can generate pretty images. The question is whether artists can use AI to make better work than they could without it. And whether they have the taste, skill, and discipline to know the difference between an interesting starting point and a finished piece. Aguilar does.
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Luxury Looks This Good
 
WOOOOOOOOF is a large, heavy, expensive-looking thing. But the images demand space. The still lifes need scale. The resistance graphics need air. The poems need room beside the visuals. The lay-flat design works. The book's physical ambition feels right. The poor image circulates fast, degrades beautifully, gains political force through compression and velocity.[16] WOOOOOOOOF refuses that logic. High resolution. Large format. Heavy paper. It insists on slowing down what the technology wants to accelerate. But the contradiction is baked in: these images still originate in infinitely reproducible prompts, digital outputs that could be copied a million times. The book tries to put weight back into weightless things.
The production quality reinforces what Sykes and Aguilar are arguing throughout: this work deserves to be taken seriously. The format demands you slow down. You cannot just scroll around WOOOOOOOOF like you're at a salon. You have to sit with it. Turn pages. Let the pairings land. That physical friction matters.
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So What?

WOOOOOOOOF proves AI-assisted art can mean something when guided by humans who know what they are doing. Cultural memory—the long-term storage of fateful events in symbols, texts, images—does not stop at the edge of new tools.[17] Software just adds another layer through which those memories get staged, revised, contested. For people who meet apartheid primarily through inherited images rather than lived experience, this is how postmemory works now: transmitted through layers of mediation, copies of copies, feeling like something we remember even though we were never there.[18]
When knowledge, cultural understanding, and precise intention shape the process, AI becomes a medium, not a shortcut. Aguilar's still lifes pop because he studied the tradition. His apartheid works succeed because he approaches memory with care instead of spectacle. His minimalist graphics land because they follow clear conceptual lines. And Sykes, no slouch when it comes to wordplay, meets the images with language that vibrates instead of explaining.
This is not the story most people tell about AI and creativity. Some insist AI will replace artists. Others insist AI cannot be art. Both miss what's actually happening. Artists like Aguilar are demonstrating the third way: AI as collaborator, not creator. As texture generator, not finished product. AI as the thing that gets you 30 percent of the way there so you can spend your time on the 70 percent that matters.
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No Apologies
 
WOOOOOOOOF is not a referendum on AI. It is not a manifesto. It is a test case for what happens when two artists use new tools to walk into old territories with both humility and ambition. The book refuses smallness. It doesn't apologize. Instead, it howls. It's right there in the title. Eight O's. Not ironic. Not winking. Just loud enough to register in the body.
You sense the howl in the still life. You feel it in the Soweto shadows. It's there in the poems that lean into rhythm the way a performer does when the mic is theirs and the moment is honest.
Sykes and Aguilar built something that demands attention not because it uses AI but because it uses AI well. The technology serves the vision which in turn fuels the collaboration. And the collaboration produces work that carries cultural weight without collapsing under it. That alone makes it worth taking seriously.
WOOOOOOOOF insists on substance. It carries memory. It honors tradition. It takes risks. Some land perfectly. A few fall short. All of it matters. It proves that the tedious debate about whether AI can make art is already over. The real question is whether artists can use AI to say something true. Sykes and Aguilar answer yes. Loudly.

 

 

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South African-born Henrik J. Klijn has been writing since childhood when his mother handed him a stack of notebooks to fill with his stories. Years later, she admitted it had more to do with keeping him quiet "because everyone needs a break, now and then." Currently, Henrik is pursuing a Master's in Journalism and Sociocultural Anthropology at Harvard. He is a book on the |Xam people of South Africa and the role of storytelling in oral history and collective memory.
In his spare time, he attends music events, ranging from classical to jazz and electronica. Henrik is an avid cook and a voracious reader who tries never to complain about Chicago winters, a city he has called home since 2017.
 
References: 
[1]Hito Steyerl, "In Defense of the Poor Image," e-flux Journal #10 (November 2009), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/
[2]Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217-251.
[3] Artistic technique that uses strong contrasts between light and dark to create a sense of volume and drama.
[4] A genre of still-life painting, originating in the 17th-century Netherlands, that symbolizes the transient nature of life and the vanity of earthly achievement
[5]Jan Assmann, "Collective Memory and Cultural Identity," trans. John Czaplicka, New German Critique 65 (Spring-Summer 1995): 125-133. See also Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
[6]Jan Assmann distinguishes between communicative memory (lived, generational) and cultural memory (formalized, ritualized). Vanitas imagery belongs firmly to the latter—it's a canon that survives precisely because it's been institutionalized in painting, still taught in art academies.
[7] For documentation of its impact, see "The Soweto Uprising," South African History Online, https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/soweto-uprising; "Behind the Picture: The Soweto Uprising," TIME, http://100photos.time.com/photos/sam-nzima-soweto-uprising
[8]Marianne Hirsch calls this "postmemory"—the relationship of the generation after to the trauma of those who came before, mediated so heavily by images and stories that it takes on the weight of lived memory. See Hirsch, "The Generation of Postmemory," Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 103-128; and The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
[9]For documentation of South African resistance poster design, see the South African History Archive's collections at https://www.saha.org.za/; and Judy Seidman, Red on Black: The Story of the South African Poster Movement (Johannesburg: STE Publishers, 2007).
[10]Achille Mbembe, "Necropolitics," trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 11-40. Mbembe argues that sovereignty is fundamentally the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die—apartheid as a spatial regime of racialized death distribution.
[11]Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 85-86.
[12]Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008). Azoulay argues that photography of political violence creates a space of civic responsibility that exceeds the photographer's intention or the viewer's passive consumption.
[13]Lev Manovich, Software Takes Command (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Manovich argues that media software has become "the invisible engine" of contemporary culture, not just executing creative decisions but actively shaping what seems possible or natural to imagine.
[14]On performance poetry as a distinct tradition with its own circuits of meaning and value, see Susan B.A. Somers-Willett, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009).
[15]Manovich, Software Takes Command, 340-342. He calls software "the new language of media," but it's a language that speaks back, actively proposing and constraining what kinds of cultural objects feel right.
[16]Steyerl, "In Defense of the Poor Image." She argues that low-resolution images "express all the contradictions of the contemporary crowd: its opportunism, narcissism, desire for autonomy and creation, its inability to focus or make up its mind, its constant readiness for transgression and simultaneous submission."
[17]Jan Assmann, "Communicative and Cultural Memory," in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 109-118.
[18]Hirsch, "The Generation of Postmemory," 106-107.