An essay by Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) arguing for 'Post-AI Art' that rejects human-centered aesthetics in favor of posthuman entanglement with AI and non-humans.

Entangled Others (Sofia Crespo and Feileacan McCormick), this jellyfish does not exist, 2020. Courtesy of the artistPost(human)-AI ArtPeter Bauman (Monk Antony) explores the concept of "Post-AI Art," positioning it as a significant departure from "AI Art." Bauman posits that Post-AI Art rejects human-centric views, embracing a posthumanist perspective that emphasizes interdependence, entanglement and co-inhabitation between humans and non-humans, including AI.Did you hear? The human is dead. Actually, it's a cold case. But there are leads.Nietzsche killed (god and) humans well over a century ago in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), when he described the fixed, rational human as a bridge to the Übermensch: “man is something that must be surpassed.”For Foucault in The Order of Things (1966), “man is a recent invention…and one perhaps nearing its end.” He argued that the human as we know it, speaking, laboring, knowing, being, emerged only in the eighteenth century as a byproduct of disciplinary regimes and epistemic structures. Just as it emerged, it could dissolve.Derrida spoke in “The Animal That Therefore I Am” (2002) about deconstructing strict lines between human and animal, resisting human nature to “other” non-humans and exposing our anthropocentric tendency to caricaturize animals.Donna Haraway expanded this posthumanist tradition to include machines in "A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985), collapsing fixed notions of organism and machine, embracing the cyborg as a feminist, empowered figure.Most recently, James Bridle asked us to rethink intelligence, decenter the human and question modern rationality in the context of deep learning breakthroughs in Ways of Being (2022).This through line of posthumanist thought must not be confused with transhumanism, which centers technological solutionism to upgrade humans and is favored by tech oligarchs. Think less enhancements (transhumanism) and more relationships (posthumanism).Stop, Stop, It’s Already Dead!Okay, the human i