Through the Shadowland – ZORA ZINE

Zora Zine's essay argues that digital cryptids, such as the AI-generated images Loab and Crungus, are avatars of the unreality people feel online, and that they resemble older legends because their existence rests on collective storytelling. The article says Loab was first noticed when a user named @supercomposite found that certain text-to-image prompts repeatedly produced the same image. Drawing on Lovecraft, Timothy Morton, Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, it suggests that the hybrid, the weird and the layered online self all make the boundary between real and imagined harder to hold.