The Generic Gimmick
5 Blueprints to Survive the Age of AI Content
Introduction: The Crisis of Content
We are drowning in the "Generic Gimmick."
We live in a moment of infinite, procedurally generated noise. AI tools can now generate technically perfect images in seconds. They are flawless. They are also dead. They give you the pixels, but they miss the feeling.
To survive this flood, you must stop acting like a technician and start acting like an Architect. You do not just prompt the machine; you direct the soul of the work.
Below are five blueprints from the "Architects of Presence." These are not historical curiosities. They are the only way to build work that breathes in a digital suffocated by "content."
1. The Architecture of Collaboration: You Are Not the Creator, You Are the Curator
Stop trying to pour your soul onto the canvas. It is a romantic lie. You are not a god; you are a filter.
The composer John Cage famously used "chance operations" to construct his music. He tossed coins or mapped imperfections on paper to determine his notes. Brian Eno created Music for Airports by running tape loops of different lengths, allowing their mismatched cycles to generate a soundscape he never wrote. His goal was simple: "I want to be surprised as well."
The Bridge to Tech:
This is the blueprint for the AI age. You are no longer the creator of the "asset." You are the designer of the "seed." Like Cage tossing coins, you must treat your generative tools as collaborators, not servants. Do not try to control every pixel. Build a system that surprises you. Look for the "heart in the glitch."
"I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry." — John Cage
2. The Architecture of Form: Build a Playground, Not a Corridor
The "Generic Gimmick" forces the audience down a linear path. It spoon-feeds a message.
Umberto Eco fought against this. He championed the "Open Work"—art that is not a destination but a point of departure. He used James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as a model: a field of possibilities that the reader must actively navigate. Andrei Tarkovsky rejected "montage cinema" for the same reason. He felt rapid editing imposed a "single, unchallengeable attitude." He preferred long takes that gave the viewer space to inhabit the frame.
The Bridge to Tech:
Modern game design is the ultimate "Open Work." Bad narrative design forces the player down a corridor of cutscenes. Good design builds an architecture of possibility. Do not force a message. Build a structure (a vessel) that the user fills with their own meaning. The user is not a consumer. They are the final developer.
"The author offers the interpreter... a work to be completed." — Umberto Eco
3. The Architecture of The Unseen: High Fidelity is a Trap
We are obsessed with resolution. 4K. 8K. Ray-tracing. But presence is not about pixel count. It is about what you leave out.
In In Praise of Shadows, Junichiro Tanizaki argued that beauty is found not in light, but in the "variation of shadows." The gloom allows the imagination to build what is partially concealed. Alfred Hitchcock knew this; he built suspense by hiding the monster.
The Bridge to Tech:
In VR and XR, you cannot render the whole world. You shouldn't try. Use the "Architecture of The Unseen." Let the shadows hide the low-poly edges. Let the silence do the heavy lifting. The user’s imagination is the most powerful graphics card in existence. Let them render the fear.
"The beauty of a Japanese room depends on a variation of shadows... it has nothing else." — Junichiro Tanizaki
4. The Architecture of The Moment: Stop Scrolling, Start Sinking
Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky proposed that time is not a line, but a "state." He believed the present slips away like sand, but the past—memory—has weight. It is a stable landscape we can inhabit.
Matsuo Bashō, the Haiku master, operated on two axes: the horizontal (the fleeting "here-and-now") and the vertical (the deep well of "timelessness"). A great work stops the horizontal flow and drops the audience into the vertical deep.
The Bridge to Tech:
Social media is "Horizontal Time"—a breathless, anxious race to the next swipe. It destroys presence. Great VR creates "Vertical Time"—the feeling of sinking deep into a single moment. Stop designing "content loops" that addict the user. Design moments that arrest them. Stop sculpting the plot. Start sculpting the time.
"The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight only in its recollection." — Andrei Tarkovsky
5. The Architecture of Flavor: The Structure Is The Feeling
You cannot "tell" a player how to feel. You must build a mechanism that generates the feeling.
Susanne Langer argued that art does not express actual feelings (like a cry of pain); it creates ideas of feeling. It builds a symbolic form. Shakespeare’s King Lear isn't a man crying; it is a complex architecture of tragic suffering. The structure itself communicates the emotion.
The Bridge to Tech:
If you want the player to feel "isolation," do not write dialogue about being lonely. Build a level with vast, empty geometry and distant, echoing audio. Use the mechanics of the game to engineer the state of mind. The geometry is the message.
"What art expresses is not actual feeling, but ideas of feeling." — Susanne K. Langer
Conclusion: Install the Architecture
Do not just read these blueprints. Build with them.
Use Cage to prompt your next image. Use Tarkovsky to edit your next scene. Use Tanizaki to optimize your next render.
The tools have changed. The architecture remains the same. You are the Architect. Go build something that lasts.