2026, Vol., No.59

Journal of History of Modern Art 2024 KCI Impact Factor : 0.43

pISSN : 1598-7728 / eISSN : 2733-9793
https://journal.kci.go.kr/kahoma

This study examines the relationship between post-nature and AI-based ecological art in order to explore the possibility of a common world shared by humans and nonhumans in the new climatic regime. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s Actor–Network Theory (ANT), it reconceptualizes nature not as an external object but as an active agent in socio-material networks, and defines post-nature as the reconfigured condition of nature in the Anthropocene. As case studies, the paper analyzes Anna Ridler’s work, which connects seventeenth-century tulip speculation with contemporary data-driven image production, and the AI-based ecological artwork Sensorium Arc. Ridler’s work demonstrates how the financialization of nature participates in the formation of post-nature through strategies of capital accumulation. Sensorium Arc, inheriting the ecological narrative practice of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, transforms environmental data into sensory and poetic discourse using artificial intelligence while making visible and reconfiguring relationships between human and nonhuman actors. The study argues that the common world should be understood not as a unified totality but as a multilayered process emerging from heterogeneous networks of actors. Ultimately, AI-based ecological art reveals otherwise imperceptible transformations of the Anthropocene and suggests the possibility of contemporary artistic practices that seek to aesthetically reconstruct an ecological common world through the complex networks of humans, nature, and technology.

This paper examines the creative structure of Ian Cheng’s live simulation Emissaries Trilogy in the context of posthuman co-creation, amid the reshaping of relationships between human and nonhuman agents in the age of AI. While existing discourses on co-creation have addressed the unpredictability that arises from interactions among participants, they have shown limitations in conceptualizing nonhuman agents as creative subjects. Therefore, this study employs Rosi Braidotti’s concept of “becoming” and Donna Haraway’s notion of “worlding-with” or “sympoiesis” as theoretical frameworks for posthuman co-creation. Four masks, Director, Cartoonist, Hacker, and Emissary, were examined as an allegory of “becoming,” in which the creative subject is transformed as a relational actor in the system of simulation. It is shown that the umwelt of each nonhuman agent functions as an environment that enables nonhuman players to break free from the control of the human creator and determine their own actions according to their cognitive processes. In this way, in Cheng’s Emissaries Trilogy, nonhuman agents are not merely objects that execute given commands, but active participants in the creative process based on their own umwelt. Ultimately, Cheng’s real-time live simulations reveal a mode of posthuman agency in which creativity emerges from relational processes of “worlding-with” through interactions between human and nonhuman agents.

This paper proposes “access” as the internal driving principle of ecoart and analyzes cases of ecoart that take the earth as their medium. As a principle running through existing ecological discourse, access finds its analogous conditions—access, network, coupling, connection and relation—in the theories of J. Rifkin, G. Bateson, and H. Maturana and F. Varela, as well as D. Haraway, N. Luhmann, J. Burnham, and N. Bourriaud. From this perspective, Alan Sonfist empirically accesses social and historical realities through physical contact with the earth, while Unmake Lab stages ecological disturbance with the recursive input and output of data. By repeating feedback within their respective media and methodologies, these practices demonstrate that access is both the premise and the operative principle of multiple relations among various subjects. Accordingly, “Access-Aesthetics” attends not to a consequentialist application but to the process of junction and generation among the countless instances of information that produce difference; through this process, it establishes an epistemological and practical foundation for the symbiosis of nature-human-machine-art.