AI Art: Dimensions of Co-creativity and the Ecology of Artistic Techno-Medial Operativity

The recent diffusion of generative AI in the artistic field has brought renewed attention to long-standing questions concerning creativity, authorship, and the role of technology in cultural production. This project investigates that intersection through a theoretical model grounded in the concept of co-creativity, advancing a relational and distributed account of creative processes that remains attentive to the material, technical, and socio-cultural conditions under which technologically hybridized practices take shape. The project builds on the premise that human beings are technical by nature: from this perspective, AI does not constitute a rupture with previous forms of technical mediation; it rather extends and intensifies a condition that has always shaped human experience. Rather than centring on “intelligence”, the research turns to agency as a key conceptual node, continuously renegotiated through our dynamic interactions with technical objects, systems, and environments. Artistic practice renders this renegotiation particularly visible, activating an operativity that is shared and distributed across human intention, technical mediation, algorithmic operations, and material constraints.

The research is guided by three main questions: how the notion of authorship has shifted over time; whether AI-assisted artistic practices can produce works we perceive as authentic; and how extensive the spaces of autonomy are within creative processes, both for human artists and for technical systems. These questions are addressed through concrete artistic practices in which collaboration between humans and machines is structurally embedded. The proposed case studies function as interpretative devices through which the concept of co-creativity can be tested, articulated, and refined.