CONCEPT
Submedial Space
Groys's term for what lies beneath every cultural surface — the canvas under the paint, the assumptions under the argument, the training archive under the AI output — whose invisibility is constitutive of the visible.
Every cultural product has a visible surface and a hidden depth. The painting has a canvas beneath the paint. The text has assumptions beneath the argument. The building has a structure beneath the facade. The submedial space is not visible, but it determines the character of the visible surface. To understand the surface, one must excavate the depth. Groys developed this concept across multiple works to identify the dimension of cultural production that critical analysis must recover if it is to engage with more than appearances. In the context of AI, the submedial space is the training archive.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The visible surface of AI is the polished output: the well-structured text, the functional code, the persuasive argument. The hidden depth is the billions of tokens of human-generated text from which the machine extracted the patterns it reproduces. To understand the output, one must understand the archive — its composition, its biases, its exclusions,