Manifesto of Post-Agentive Art

Manifesto of Post-Agentive Art Post-agentive art examines systems that act as agents without granting them subjecthood, responsibility or the right to replace relationships. It lives among systems that answer, plan, organise, filter and guide the user through successive steps. It does not pretend that these systems will disappear. Yet it does not recognise them as persons. An agent may be a tool, a procedural actor, an extra, a dramaturgical figure or material for investigation, but it is not a community, a teacher, a curator or a witness in the relational sense. Post-agentivity examines delegation. It asks what happens to the artist, the institution, the educator and the public when an answer is generated by a system. It exposes the rift between interaction and relationship. A system can sustain a conversation, but it does not bear responsibility for the encounter. Its formula is: an agent may act within the work, but responsibility for the work remains with the human being, the institution and the framework of the process. – Manifesto of Post-Agentive Art