The recent advent of widely accessible generative AI image models has been met with reactions anticipating a seismic paradigm shift in how art is produced and consumed, opening new quandaries about labor and value for artists. What this paper proposes is a shift in understanding toward the psychological dimension of generative AI as fruitful ground for aesthetic innovation. Drawing from Sigmund Freud’s 1925 essay “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad,” I read generative AI as an extension of and mirror to unconscious processes, generating symptoms in the forms of distortion, glitch, and recursion found across the internet at large. Generated from compressed and distorted training data, AI images resemble dreamwork performed by the internet itself. Analyzing images made by myself and other artists using the same medium, I outline the contours of digital desire and how they coalesce into a collective uncanny. What emerges is a visual language of the algorithmic Real—where glitch and distortion mark the points at which the Symbolic order of code breaks down. In dark times, these images serve as both symptom and diagnosis of a culture whose unconscious has become technological.

This article presents a theoretical and methodological approach towards a greater understanding of the digital everyday lives of children through their own perspectives. The analysis sheds light on aspects of digitalised childhood by applying critical psychology and cultural-historical theory to interview excerpts with children.

The article suggests the theoretical concept of screen ambivalence as a possible way to understand children’s conflictual experiences in specific digital engagements. It is proposed that engaging in curious dialogue with children as knowledgeable agents in their own digital lives provides valuable insight for researchers, professionals and parents alike. Concurrently, it is argued that the commercial functionality of screen technologies must be critically investigated as a developmental condition for children today.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift from face-to-face to online qualitative research, reshaping social interaction and meaning-making. Digital tools are often seen as neutral, yet from a new materialist perspective, they actively participate in producing knowledge and power dynamics.

This presentation proposes a materiality-sensitive methodology grounded in Karen Barad's agential realism and Alfred Lorenzer's depth-hermeneutic method. Drawing on Barad’s concept of intra-action, the online interview setting is an entangled phenomenon where humans and non-humans—participants, technologies, spatial-temporal conditions, etc.—co-constitute meanings, boundaries, and identities. Thereby, Barad's notion of ethical response-ability guides attention to what comes to matter or is excluded, emphasizing justice as entangled with material-discursive practices. Lorenzer's method complements this by uncovering latent, affective layers beyond language, focusing on embodied, material interactions and memory-traces that shape power relations.

As a work in progress from the "Competence Management of Older Workers in Digitized Learning Environments" project, affiliated with the German Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB), this contribution reflects on the political implications of qualitative research. It challenges ageist stereotypes about old(er) workers in the context of digital workplace learning by viewing them as emergent, negotiated effects of intra-actions, and reclaims theory as a form of political engagement—emphasizing qualitative research as a site of resistance and transformation in "dark times".

The presentation invites feedback on advancing materiality-sensitive methodologies to critically explore the role of entangled digitality in co-producing knowledge, power relations, and potentially exclusionary (ageist) stereotypes within digitally mediated (work and research) contexts.