Art, Futurity, and Non-Human Agency

The Promethean myth is not a triumphalist myth. The gift of fire is inseparable from punishment, exposure, and wound. This detail speaks to the condition of those who imagine futures beyond the given order: the capacity to project what is possible often means inhabiting a present that has not yet reached what can be imagined. Today, in a moment of technological acceleration and ecological crisis, art is again called to confront this gap between the conceivable and the actual.

Art, more than ever, is called upon to perform the work of narration, interpretation, meaning, anticipation, mourning, care, resistance, imagination, and dream.

Prometheus gave fire to human beings. But what happens when fire becomes autonomous?

Generative artificial intelligence produces or enables constructs that expand the idea of creativity and destabilise the category of authorship. Robotics stages autonomous devices that operate physically and interact with the real. Synthetic biology intervenes on living organisms that grow, adapt, and evolve as artistic objects. These disciplines can operate in transdisciplinary ways within complex devices whose activities and purposes are directed toward or can be interpreted in aesthetic terms. We are no longer the only creators. We share the space of creation with entities that are neither tools nor persons, neither fully alive nor fully inert: algorithmic systems that learn from the entire archive of human expression and generate outcomes that no individual human mind could produce alone; engineered microorganisms whose activities, visual patterns, bioluminescent signals, environmental interactions, and chemical outputs configure new artistic dimensions; hybrid beings whose ontological status resists the categories through which we have traditionally defined art and its authors.

The environmental context is equally fundamental. Since the 1960s and 70s, artists have worked with soil, water, wind, decomposition, and growth not as materials to be shaped but as agents to be listened to. What distinguishes these art forms from mere landscape representation is precisely their insistence on the non-human as participant rather than background. The artist enters into relation with it, and their intention is only one force among many. Rain, frost, waters, microorganisms, mycorrhizal networks, bird migration — as co-authors.

In the context of ecological crisis, this tradition acquires a new and urgent inflection. Making art with living systems means acknowledging their vulnerability and agency, insisting that the non-human world is not a resource to be extracted but a presence to be reckoned with. The burning forest, the retreating glacier, the bleaching coral reef are not metaphors. They are actors in a drama whose outcome will determine the conditions under which any future art will be produced. “Ecological art,” in its deepest expression, does not merely represent this crisis. It asks what it means to create consciously and in solidarity with the lives — human and non-human — that bear its worst consequences.

Moreover, artificial intelligence, living organisms, robotic systems, and ecosystems are no longer separate domains — they bleed into one another, forming hybrid assemblages that resist stable categorisation. This entanglement forces open urgent questions about responsibility, collaboration, and authorship: questions that art, too, cannot avoid, and that only art can ask in certain ways.

All of this raises questions that are not merely technical or philosophical, but profoundly aesthetic and ethical. What does it mean for the future of artistic practice to share the field of creation with non-human agents whose capacities in certain domains exceed our own?

“Art” is an exquisitely human concept — even if there are cultures that do not know what it is and manage without it — but the future of art will not be exclusively human. However, if what is considered “art” can also be created by non-human entities, what will be the role of the human in art? It is precisely in confrontation with the non-human that the question of what is peculiar to the human in art becomes urgent and interesting. Mourning, embodiment, mortality, care, the experience of time — these are not computable, and they are the substance that has always constituted the most enduring art. But now, whether chosen or not, they are also in dialogue with forms of creation that operate outside them. What collaboration between the human and the non-human will be possible? What kind of conversation — collaborative, critical, resistant, or otherwise — will human artists choose to have with the non-human entities that now share their world?

Noema

AInfinite Art @ Noemalab

noemalab.eu — ISSN 2283-3145