Paper short abstract:

This paper asserts the replacement of 'art' and 'artist' with 'creation (content)' and 'creator' to be of significant anthropological relevance. Among others, it considers differentiating between deterministic and algorithmic systems, Kant’s notions of 'Spiel (game-toy)' and 'Kunst (art-artifice).'

Paper long abstract:

Modern physics associates consciousness neither with creativity nor with computation, emphasizing instead awareness of one’s relation to the game played by the given agent, while differentiating between deterministic and algorithmic systems (Penrose). Conversely, algorithmic culture (Striphas), from which contemporary modes of social production e.g. the creator and the attention economy arise, makes no such distinction. In ‘the informational space,’ (Bagheri Pour Fallah) from the centralized landscape of AI to the decentralized proposition of blockchains, algorithms are given precedence, albeit in opposing capacities, through computational excellence, over their human counterparts, provisionally granting the latter the freedom to assume the role of the creator, in an implicitly utopian vision of society. The term ‘creator’ here follows neatly the notion of the ‘prosumer’ (Toffler), taking simultaneous cues from relational and participatory art, asserting itself as the sine qua non of both web2 and web3 architectures of the internet as one coalescing into greater society. This paper asserts the replacement of the terms art and artist with creation (content) and creator to be more than a matter of semantics, and of significant anthropological relevance. Kant’s Anthropology locates man’s horizon as one ‘that goes from the ambiguity of the Spiel (game-toy) to the indecision of the Kunst (art-artifice)’ (Foucault). Similarly, in the existential anthropology of Peter Wust, man is in essence ‘the artist’ in the extent that ‘he is conscious of himself.’ To locate man today is therefore a matter linked with his role in the (network) society, as artist—beyond the creator economy.