Pataphysical Aesthetic in the Posthuman Era: Collaboration of Human and Artificial Intelligence in Painting Practice

Abstract

AI image-making has become a trend in contemporary visual culture; however, no research has yet addressed its relationship to pataphysics, which studies the laws governing exceptions, as a crucial framework for hybrid art practices. This study addresses that gap by positioning the work as an inquiry into ontological contradictions, absurdity, and alternative realities that emerge when human and machine modes of image-making confront each other. Drawing on contemporary post humanist theory, the research situates this encounter between the gestural ontology of painting, characterized by embodiment, intentionality, and tactile expressiveness, and the algorithmic ontology of AI computation. The process sustains productive friction, using incompatibility as a value. Adopts Art Practice as Research (APaR) framework, treating the act of overlaying a gestural image on an AI image as both artistic production and epistemic inquiry. This process is read as an instance of absurd intentionality. The resulting works operate as pataphors that exceed their referents to generate autonomous realities in which neither the human nor the machine is removed from the other. By embracing ontological instability as a generative condition, this research challenges human-centric notions of artistic mastery and technocentric claims of computational supremacy with contradiction as a critical and aesthetic force.