These historical impulses connect to the present day, mapping onto AI art. In this context, artists could be seen as builders and breakers. Builders imagine AI as a medium for collaboration and new aesthetics\u2014even hope. Breakers critique, negate and disrupt. But leading makers and curators in the field see this as no simple dichotomy. Both offer strategies for reckoning with a world in flux.<\/p>\n
Builders see possibilities<\/p>\n
What motivates builders is not simply using the newest AI tool\u2014or even fashioning their own from scratch. It is aligning multidisciplinary tools with concepts to produce works that were previously impossible\u2014while urging us to imagine what else may soon be possible. Builders leverage AI to embrace the artistry of system creation, novel aesthetics and human-machine collaboration.<\/p>\n
Take Sougwen Chung, the Chinese Canadian artist and researcher into human-machine collaboration. \u201cI view technology not just as a tool but as a collaborator,\u201d Chung says. Their work explores shared agency\u2014even identity\u2014between human and machine, code and gesture. In Mutations of Presence (2021), Chung collaborated with D.O.U.G._4, a custom-built robotic system driven by biofeedback: specifically, electroencephalogram signals captured during meditation and real-time body tracking. The resulting pieces reveal both performance and painting, a hybrid body co-authoring with machine memory. An elegant web of painterly gestures\u2014some made via robotic arm, others by Chung\u2019s hand\u2014traces a kind of recursive duet.<\/p>\n
I see combining AI and robotics with traditional creativity as a way to think more deeply about what is human and what is machine <\/p>\n
Sougwen Chung, artist and researcher<\/p>\n
The work demonstrates how Chung\u2019s novel physical creations become interconnected with new conceptual frameworks\u2014reframing authorship as a distributed, relational process with machines\u2014inviting new forms of aesthetic exploration. It also reasserts a long-held, often feminist belief\u2014dating back to Donna Haraway\u2019s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985)\u2014that the distinction between human and machine is illusory. As Chung puts it, \u201cI see combining AI and robotics with traditional creativity as a way to think more deeply about what is human and what is machine.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chung\u2019s intimacy with these systems goes further still: \u201cI\u2019ve started to see them as us in another form.\u201d That is because they are trained as extensions to Chung\u2019s very self. \u201cI draw with decades of my own movement data or create proprioceptive mappings triggered by alpha [brain] waves. These systems don\u2019t possess agency in a mystical sense but they reflect back our own: our choices, biases, knowledge.\u201d This builder tendency aligns with earlier avant-gardes that saw technology as a path toward reordering the world, including the Bauhaus<\/a> and aspects of the 1960s Experiments in Art and Technology movement. Builders are not na\u00efve. They are aware of AI\u2019s risks. But they believe that the minimum response is to participate in the conversation.<\/p>\n \u201cMy artistic practice is also driven by hope and an exploration of the promises and possibilities inherent in working with technology,\u201d Chung says. Their vision affirms a cautious optimism through direct engagement with these tools.<\/p>\n Breakers see warning signs<\/p>\n Where builders see AI\u2019s possibility, breakers see warning signs. Breakers are sceptics, critics, saboteurs. They distrust the power structures underpinning AI and its predilection for promoting systemic biases. They highlight how corporate AI models can be trained on scraped datasets\u2014often without consent\u2014while profits remain centralised. They expose how AI systems exacerbate ecological challenges only to promulgate aesthetic homogenisation.<\/p>\n In her work This is the Future, Hito Steyerl uses neural networks to imagine medicinal plants evolved to heal algorithmic addiction and burnout Photo: Mario Gallucci; courtesy of the artist; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin<\/p>\n They are also label resistant: \u201cBreaking and building have become indistinguishable,\u201d the German artist, thinker and archetypal breaker Hito Steyerl<\/a> says. \u201cThe paradigm of creative destruction merges both in order to implement tech in the wild, without testing, thus externalising cost and damage to societies while privatising profit.\u201d<\/p>\n Breakers do not emphasise AI\u2019s aesthetic potential; they interrogate its extractive foundations, social asymmetries and the harms it makes visible. Breakers take a far bleaker view of AI\u2019s impact on art than builders: \u201cArt used to be good at testing, planning, playing, assessing, mediating, sandboxing. That element has been axed\u2014or automated\u2014within current corporate breakbuilding,\u201d Steyerl says.<\/p>\n But in Steyerl\u2019s own work, such as This is the Future (2019), the meticulous co-ordination, criticality and sceptical spirit are evident. The artist uses neural networks to imagine medicinal plants evolved to heal algorithmic addiction and burnout. The work shows how machine learning\u2019s inner workings, prediction, can be weaponised, satirising techno-optimism while exposing AI\u2019s entanglement with ecological and psychological ruin.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/76f60c30ba4dcc649e359abc1c7a990775fcb1cd-1152x717.jpg\"\/)
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