From instructions to intelligent synthesis: conceptual art, distributed creativity, and the posthuman turn in AI

The paper traces the historical connection between conceptual art, exemplified by Yoko Ono and Sol LeWitt, and contemporary generative AI art practices. It explores how conceptual art’s focus on dematerialization, instruction-based practices, and participatory frameworks provided a foundation for understanding human-machine relationships in art. The analysis posits that while AI art delegates creative agency to external systems, the historical legacy suggests a need to reconfigure artistic ontology by integrating posthumanist perspectives. The text examines how concepts like "prompt engineering" emerge as crucial tools for navigating this new collaborative space, suggesting that true creativity lies not in the final artifact but in formulating the underlying conceptual frameworks.

The transition from conceptual art, which prioritized dematerialization and instruction, to generative AI presents a critical inflection point concerning authorship and agency. The historical tension between LeWitt's focus on the idea being the machine, and Ono's emphasis on mental co-creation, finds a contemporary echo in the delegation of execution to generative systems. The analysis suggests that when external systems like GenAI assume the role of the executor—replacing human hands with algorithms—the locus of creativity shifts. Prompt engineering is framed as an intermediate space where human ingenuity adapts interfaces, moving away from the passive reception observed in earlier participatory models toward a posthumanist recognition of distributed co-authorship. The core implication is that to reconcile this technological mediation, one must adopt a posthuman framework that views humans and machines as entangled entities, moving beyond anthropocentric notions of artistic control. What remains to be explored is whether prompt engineering successfully reconfigures the participatory legacy or merely masks the delegation of agency within the technological structure.