On AI and the Abolition of Man: Art as Techne for Conceptual Inadaptation

19 Oct, 2025

Lecture at the Bergen Assembly for the Futurological Congress: The Future of the Contact Zone. October 18–19, 2025 at the Kode Bergen Art Museum, Bergen, NO. The Bergen edition is conceived by Julieta Aranda and David Rych, with Mari Bastashevski, Katya Garcia Anton, Ed Keller, Adam Kleinman, Pierre Huyghe, Larissa Mendoza Straffon, Hito Steyerl, Martinus Suijkerbuijk, and Amir Yatziv.

How can we learn to navigate the improbable in non-trivial ways without fetishizing contingency, nor over-idealizing speculation?

There’s an allegory I’d like us to keep in mind as a backdrop this afternoon that illustrates this relation to improbable realization.

In a 1982 paper evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba to coined the term “exaptation” to account for a specific process that is distinct from the more familiar ‘adaption,’ which they found used rather ambiguously throughout the field.

Exaptation describes a trait that evolved to serve a particular function, but is later coopted to serve another, like the feathers on a bird once adapted for warmth that now enable it to take flight.[1] I’d like to propose that the mediating function of AI and Art for that matter, that induce co-cognitions with it, be considered in a similar way: a technology once aligned to, and a by-product of the narcissism of Man, that can be coopted in a way that undermines the relevance of his frames of reference, towards an unsettling of the self-conception of his very edges. The question is at what threshold of sensitivity to possibility did this bird understand that the feathers it had evolved for warmth, could also enable it to fly? How did it come to witness the real possibility of its existing feathers for flight, without having had the memory or experience of flying?

[1] Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth S. Vrba, “Exaptation-A Missing Term in the Science of Form,” in Paleobiology Vol. 8, No. 1 (Winter, 1982), pp. 4-15.