Prompt as symbolic form: An addendum to perspective, narrative and database?

With the use of AI – accessed via prompts – gaining traction in almost all aspects of everyday life, I in turn revisit a long history of symbolic forms and trace the place of the prompt therein. As I will demonstrate through a brief historical survey, the history of symbolic forms maps easily onto the history of media as documented by McLuhan. Overall, in this probe, I explore resonances between narratives and databases found inherently in the ‘prompt’. In an age where databases, the narratives and the perspectives contained within are all accessible only via prompts to our contemporary AI, I suggest the prompt has heated an already hot lineage of media environments and in doing so has become a prominent symbolic form following the AI turn of the twenty-first century.