There is no AI art and cannot be
Notes on AI - art - embodiment
Some notes are already two years old, but still valid I think – the AGI is not here yet, and it will never be, I hope the notes make clear why. They’re part of the Artwork book that was continuously postponed by the publisher. I hope 2026 will finally be its year, probably with another publisher. And hopefully an at least a no worse year for all of us.
“There is no AI art and cannot be. I see all art as performance – artworks point to the processes, activities, experiences through which they were brought into existence. They are mediums of aesthetic transmission from one body to another. Through this perspective, there is no experience behind AI art, no body, so there is no art. No matter how virtuous or spectacular it might look, it’s just empty display, art simulation, the culmination of society of spectacle. The problem is that a lot of the artworld is busy with art simulating too, and that a lot of visitors expect just that – spectacle. AI art is just an acceleration of all this. From the perspective of art as performance, artworks are portals to their constitutive processes, towards the forms of thinking, sensibility, that made them possible. Approached in this way, they can be activated in our bodies too. Through this perspective it becomes immediately apparent what is art and what is simulation of art, human or AI made.” (09.12.25)
“The “AI art” that I saw is very bad. AI can do images, objects, movement virtuosity (robots dancing), theory, but in all this the quality, sensibility, intelligence, art are absent. The fact that some people are afraid of AI replacing them tells me just how much we are already AIs, robots, confirming Illich that more than technology catching with us is us changing ourselves to meet it, to become machine-like. It’s not only that we tamed animals and plants, but sedentism and agriculture made us domesticate our bodies, to see them as resources, as workforce – private property, exploitation, classes, slavery were some results of this process. Industrial revolution accentuated all this, and we didn’t only mechanize nature but our bodies too, to use them as tools that function on the clock, on the mechanical time, instead of nature’s rhythms and signs. Computers’ age brought big disembodiment and a self-programming, managerial subjectivity. A possible good side of AI is that it makes us see how far we got in this process, it shows us how much we became machines.
Art sometimes responds by going away or even against these tendencies, proposing counter aesthetics and philosophies. Romanticism insisted on nature and dreaming, in an overwhelming general atmosphere of industrialism and extractive rationalism. On the same note, now all the disembodied simulations make you want a more corporal social reality. All the image bombardment makes you want embodiment, body sensibility, presence.” (13.09.24)
“Any new technology triggers two types of productive reactions in art (and society). Certain artists are quickly adopting it, others are thinking seriously about what it means for their practice and art (and world) in general. For instance, many artists saw photography as the end of painting. Some embraced photography, others were rethinking their medium and came up with revolutionary new ways of painting: impressionism, cubism… The same with video - it was believed that performance arts can’t compete with the effects and possibilities of cinema. Some artists embraced the new medium, while others redefined the performance, insisting on the presence, immediacy and richness of the live embodied experience. Now it seems like VR, 3D printing and especially AI can challenge artists even more radically, especially in the creation of images and objects, and many are embracing the new mediums. I’m more curious how this new jolt from technology will redefine art, what should we fundamentally rethink this time, what new possibilities, new zones will emerge. I’m kind of pulled towards immateriality, affects, the sensible, embodied experiences, strange consciousness phenomena and sociality as possible more fundamental art zones that cannot be colonized by machines. This is a challenge because some of these are kind of tabu in current art. Yet, politically, ecologically and maybe also spiritually (to use another tabu word) we might have to explore uncomfortable zones. These are the zones that many scientists and mind philosophers say that AI and machines in general cannot reach. There is a “hard problem of consciousness” – an impassable “explanatory gap” that the instruments of science and technology didn’t make, and apparently cannot make in principle, not even a first step from matter, physics, biology to subjective experience. The best they can get to are AIs, “philosophical zombies” that cannot experience their own “thinking”. It seems like Wendell Berry’s prediction is upon us already: “The next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” I’m interested in a third position: not to become machines, nor to retreat in (dead) traditional ways of being, but in what kind of new creatures, forms of life, we can become, being pushed to rethink ourselves by the machines.” (18.02.24)
“Illich shows how more than technology advancing to catch up with us, it’s us becoming machinic in order to accommodate it. It kind of feels like AI advancement is paired with an even bigger human altering – we increasingly see ourselves as information processing beings, as flesh computers, as in the past were seeing ourselves as mechanisms, as sophisticated clocks, to meet the mechanical, industrial age. There is a digitalization of the self that makes us having cybernetic processes instead of going through experiences, like thinking in terms of acquiring “information” from a book instead of having the experience of reading it, and so on with other digital terms that we came to see as normal, but are reductive and disembodying alternatives to the words (and associated experiences) they replaced. The human - AI meeting requires an extraordinary process of disembodiment. We’re having image bodies or “medical bodies” (bodies as information, as techno-data coming from experts and devices, instead of felt experience) that think and behave more and more like AIs. I can see my recent work also as attempts to escape the contemporary AI-body prison – Unimages, Artwork. Unexperiences (formerly called Artificial Emotional Intelligence), Love,” (280325)
Each of these selections opens an important area of inquiry. How did the qualities and modalities of experience you mention become tabu/taboo? Why? And there's just so much here: Illich, who needs to be more widely read, and the Wendell Berry quote, spot-on. About the mechanization of the human, audiences laughed at Charlie Chaplin’s robotized antics as a factory worker in Modern Times. Tellingly, the funniest parts are when the robot-like Chaplin wanders into human society outside the factory walls. He clearly doesn’t fit in. This stands in contrast to the less visible shift you describe, of people “…thinking in terms of acquiring “information” from a book instead of having the experience of reading it.” Unlike robotic Chaplin, person can fit right in with that level of mechanization. Hence the need to find, as you write here, “…more fundamental art zones that cannot be colonized by machines.” Thank you.