Now that AI has happened, we are in the era of post-AI. But was does that mean? Without really having any art school training, I started thinking about the question relative to ‘postmodern art’, so thought I’d start with the structure of a text on postmodernism, change ‘modernism’ to AI, and then edit it until it made sense.
What is post-AI?
Post-AI was a reaction against AI. AI and generative art were generally based on idealistic observations around generativity in nature, a futurist vision of agentic life in society, and a belief in unbounded accelerationism. It assumed that certain ultimate universal principles or truths formulated by and centering on ketamine billionaires, could result in empowering creativity in the public at large. AI artists experimented with automation without considering community, adopting a hylomorphic approach in their attempts to impose pure visions on the world, ungrounded in culture or material.
While AI art was based on technofuturist/fascist accelerationism, post-AI was born of community, craft and humanism. It challenged the notion that culture could be reduced to statistics. Post-AI art drew on pre-industrial relationships with technologies of work and craft, and advocated that the long history of algorithmic arts and crafts practice was more relevant than black box statistical models. While AI artists championed combinational creativity and homogeneity using tools of corporate control and extraction; post-AI embraced true abundance and ‘red plenty’ through liveness, pattern-making and radical sharing.
Anti-hierarchical by nature, post-AI refused to recognise the authority of any single style or definition of what art should be. It collapsed the distinction between high culture and mass or popular culture, between art and everyday life. Because post-AI broke established narratives around technology and gender, it introduced a new era of expression through patterns-as-algorithms, challenging gender-policed boundaries between the abstract and material. Often funny or tongue-in-cheek; it can be confrontational and controversial, challenging notions of quality in favour of energy; but most crucially, it reflects a self-awareness of the art project as a humane, inter-generational collaboration. Often mixing different artistic and popular styles and media, post-AI art consciously and self-consciously picks up and continues heritage traditions around as highly developed, ethnomathematic technologies in their own right.
(hastily adapted from https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/postmodernism)
I realise this is quite dense, but it was fun to write. I will probably edit/clarify it later.
It ended up with a very alpaca/pattern club-style perspective, but in the anti-hierarchical spirit of post-AI, I recommend you follow the same pattern – take the structure of Tate’s (or someone else’s) definition of postmodernism, and fill it in with your idea of what post-AI is. Feel free to share it back!