Art after Humanism: Post-human Aesthetics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
- mariacharame
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
As technology increasingly radically shapes our everyday lives, art as a receiver of social and existential change shifts from the anthropocentric to the post-human. The question is no longer simply whether artificial intelligence can produce art, but how art is transformed when created with or through technology, in a field where the boundaries between creator and tool become fluid.
The term post-human does not indicate the end of man, but a philosophical and aesthetic departure from his dominance. As Rosi Braidotti notes in her book The Posthuman (2013), meta-humanity proposes a new humanism, a way of thinking that does not place man at the center of the world but perceives him as part of a network where machines, animals, plants and digital “entities” coexist. This shift is strongly reflected in contemporary digital art. The body is not necessarily represented as natural or human; on the contrary, it appears altered, augmented or technologically hybrid (Avatar). Identity becomes fluid, form multidimensional, and creation collective, with AI not functioning as a tool, but as a co-performer.
Artificial intelligence ceases to be a mere medium but becomes a producer. Through machine learning algorithms, AI “learns” from millions of images, texts and data, creating works that are often indistinguishable from those of the human hand. Artists such as Sofia Crespo use neural networks to generate digital biological hybrid beings that do not exist in nature but seem organic, as if from some future or parallel universe.
In this context, the artistic duo Entangled Others Studio explores the relationship between man-nature-machine, creating narratives where the natural and the artificial converge aesthetically and conceptually. Their images are not just strange, they are familiarly foreign, like a kind of imaginary ecology after humans. The aesthetics of the post-human are characterized by fluidity, representational ambiguity and complexity. The traditional body gives way to interconnected forms: cyborgs, algorithmic avatars, sounds generated by data, and environments that respond to the presence of the viewer. Artificial intelligence thus becomes the vehicle of another subjectivity, one that is not necessarily human.
In this context, the questions shift:
– Who is the creator and who is the “performer”?
– How autonomous is an AI work?
– Can a machine feel or produce empathy?
– Can we also accept works without human intent?
Art in the age of AI may not threaten human work but rather transfigure it. It invites us to reconsider the concept of art, of creation, to examine our coexistence with the artificial, and to imagine the aesthetic future not as exclusively human, but as deeply networked and radically different.
In a world where the creator can also be an algorithm, art becomes a space for reflection, not only about what we can make, but about who we are and what our aesthetics are.
Citation:
Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Polity Press.
Crespo, S. (2020). sofiacrespo.com
Entangled Others Studio. (2021). entangledothers.studio
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