# The Other Intelligence

- Title: The Other Intelligence
- Content type: Publication
- Language: ru
- Canonical URL: https://aurecevettier.com/ru/bibliography/research-papers/the-other-intelligence-david-bihanic
- Published: 2026-10-11T11:35:05+00:00
- Updated: 2026-10-11T11:35:05+00:00

## Summary

За или против искусственного интеллекта (ИИ)? Прогресс или опасность… Инновация или регресс… Возможность или угроза? Должны ли мы рассматривать его как эквивалент всеведущего, универсального помощника или как предвестника "великой замены"? Такая поляризация дебатов, как правило, обходит стороной серьёзное изучение возможностей — не только непосредственных перспектив — задействованных такими технологиями. Помимо экономических и социальных вопросов — и совершенно обоснованных опасений, сопровождающих их быстрое развитие — задача также состоит в понимании того, с какой формой интеллекта (от латинского *inter-, legere*) мы имеем дело, его ограничений, а также его открытых возможностей и подлинного вклада. Вот где "окольный путь" через искусство и дизайн может оказаться действительно просветляющим.

## Details

- Kind: research_paper
- Year: 2026
- Publisher: diid disegno industriale industrial design
- Authors: David Bihanic
- Original language: Английский
- Issue: 90
- Pages: 14
- ISBN: 9791254779484
- How to cite: Bihanic, D. (2026). The Other Intelligence. Diid, (89), 90–103. https://doi.org/10.30682/diid8926f

## Main content

90 David Bihanic
Copyright © 2026
diid disegno industriale
industrial design
CC BY-NC-SA
The Other Intelligence
Keywords
Artificial
Intelligence
Machine
Art
Design
David Bihanic
Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
david.bihanic@univ-paris1.fr
ORCID 0009-0000-1805-8911
Designrama
Abstract
For or against Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Progress or danger… Innovation or regression… Opportunity or threat?
Should we see it as the equivalent of an omniscient, versatile
assistant, or as the harbinger of a “great replacement”? Such
a polarization of the debate tends to sidestep a serious examination of the powers — not merely the immediate possibilities — engaged by such technologies. Beyond the economic
and social issues — and the entirely legitimate concerns that
accompany their rapid development — the challenge is also
to understand what form of intelligence (from the Latin inter-,
legere) we are dealing with here, its limits as well as its openings and its genuine contributions. This is where a “detour”
through art and design can prove truly illuminating.
The Other Intelligence
diid No. 89 — 2026
91 Doi: 10.30682/diid8926f
Art and the Machine: The Controversial Turn to AI
How can we interpret, with a little hindsight, the controversy that
arose on 5 September 2022 during the awards ceremony for the
annual Colorado State Fair Art Competition in the United States,
where the prize for best “digital artwork” was awarded to a certain
Jason M. Allen, a video game designer and amateur artist, for his
image printed on canvas entitled Space Opera Theater Fig. 1? Let’s
briefly recap the affair.
Several weeks earlier, Allen had begun evaluating new AI image
generation tools — a comparative analysis that he says proved to be
highly conclusive — and he chose to use the latest release, Midjourney Version 31, to produce an original work that could 'compete' with
those of more established experienced artists, such as painters, illustrators, photographers and other digital image makers who, for the
most part, still used relatively conventional technical/technological
means. It was with this goal in mind that in early summer 2022, he
decided to enter the famous Colorado State Fair competition under
the label “Emerging Artist”. Allen proceeded with the utmost secrecy,
informing no one, least of all the officials, of his intentions or the
tool he was using to create his work. The work was completed and
entered in the competition, where the members of the jury, unaware
of the method Allen used2, unanimously decided to award him first
prize along with the US$300 cash award. His secret was revealed
almost immediately on social media, as “leaks” on Discord and Twitter snowballed and controversy erupted. Although visibly troubled by
these revelations, the jury had no intention of reversing its decision,
a stance that provoked exasperation among some, while others
praised the audacity and avant-garde spirit the artist had shown.
Allen revealed that no fewer than 900 proofs had been generated
(only one of which was selected as the final version), with around 80
hours spent formulating instructions, requests and cleverly combined
prompts to produce a result the artist himself describes as unique.
1
The beta version of Midjourney (V.3), released in
July 2022, then came to
compete with DALL-E 2,
Stable Diffusion, Google
Imagen, and CogView 2,
among the best-known
tools.
Fig. 1
Jason M. Allen (2022),
Space Opera Theater.
Retrieved from: jasonmallen.com/space-operatheater
2
According to artist Cal
Duran, a member of the
jury, they were all fully
aware that significant
digital work had been
done to create this image,
but none of them could
have guessed that its very
"source" was AI.
92 David Bihanic
He stated that he had no intention of publicly revealing this written
command, which in his view encapsulates the originality of the
image, not to mention the time he spent on graphic and colour
correction, as well as adjusting inaccuracies and removing certain
“incongruities” embedded in the image. Seen as a scandal by some,
and a quasi-inaugural moment by others, the controversy has continued to grow ever since.
But why does this episode, which the press and the media
were quick to label as “deception” and “fraud” in the highest artistic circles, still resonate with us four years later? What makes this
controversy so special, setting it apart from the usual plagiarism or
counterfeiting stories that make headlines? Firstly, because the crux
of the problem, or the 'origin' of the controversy, was not the image
itself — which might suggest a 'lack' of authenticity, a classic case
therefore — nor more fundamentally, a denial of its aesthetic interest,
but rather the approach introduced by its author. Indeed, no expert
critic came forward when the time came, to offer a critical re-reading
of the image to expose its weaknesses and possible shortcomings.
After all, a computational machine, however revolutionary (or competitive) it may be, is not automatically a good artist! Without seeking
to substantiate or support a formal demand for the withdrawal of
the prize awarded to Allen, this could nevertheless have helped to
'fuel' the discussion3. There is clearly nothing truly sumptuous about
this Space Opera Theater, however, notwithstanding a few curiosities and distinctive 'traces' to which we will return later. Not a great
work, therefore, from our point of view, but a deliberately provocative
gesture. What ultimately troubled a large number of observers and
actors in the art world was that the so-called artist Allen was not
the creator of the image but, they argued, simply a clever operator
who had taken advantage of the latest advances in AI... And the law
proved them right! Since Allen did not, strictly speaking, hold full
“authorship”4, he could not claim to be an artist — at least in this
instance — and his generative image could not be considered a
work of art. What, then, was its true status5? Creation ex materia or
mere compilation? If certain qualities are attributed to it, to whom do
we owe them? Who is the primary instigator? Who inspires or 'commands' whom in this case: Man (meaning, of course, Humankind)
or Machine? The very idea that AI could 'give birth' to a work on its
own seems unthinkable to many, precisely because it would mean
treating it as our 'equal', or already our equivalent from this point of
view, granting it not only the capacities that are originally ours, but
the very faculty of both consciousness and judgement that defines
our intelligence: the perceptual and intellectual path that leads from
the capacity to the faculty of defining, schematically, the path leading
to understanding6 human7.
Man vs. Machine: When Intelligences Collide
This competition, this antagonism between Man and Machine — if
not already a form of comparison between the two — is nothing new,
far from it. Since the earliest days of computing, humans imagined that they would one day be able to develop their “mechanical
3
Of course, the direct
consequence of such an
initiative — undoubtedly
too heavy a burden to bear
— would have been to
delegitimise the jury.
4
For a work of art to exist,
as stipulated in the
legislation, it must have
"human authorship".
5
It should be noted that
a lawsuit was filed on
26 September 2024 in
the Federal Court for
the District of Colorado
(Allen v. Perlmutter No.
1:24-cv-2665), following
a complaint filed by Allen
against the United States
Copyright Office (USCO),
which continues to refuse
to register his image.
6
From the Latin intendere,
“to strive towards, to turn
one’s attention towards”.
7
From understanding
regarded as a psychic
and intellectual faculty
through which reason
gains an understanding
of various problems in the
world, large and small.
The Other Intelligence
diid No. 89 — 2026
93 Doi: 10.30682/diid8926f
double”, in the same vein as the “biological double” promised by
advances in modern medicine (cf. Frankenstein’s monster): a “creature” of a decidedly new kind, made by their own hands and at their
command, yet destined one day to supplant them in everything, or
almost everything8. One of the inventors of the Computer — the
Universal Machine — and a pioneer of AI, Allan Turing revived the
mechanistic view of the body and mind espoused by René Descartes (1649), Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1749), Thomas Hobbes
(1650) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1902), and 'set the stage' in a
way, forming the backdrop to the controversy we have highlighted.
The dream for some at that moment became the nightmare for others: if the eye is one sensor among many, and the brain the central
'computing' machine9, then the goal could be to build a machine
with functions that are as naturally human as they are computer-programmable: from thought to calculation would only be a short step,
moving through sequences of information to be processed, combining logic, language, and syntax. The famous Turing test, dating
from 1950 (Turing, 1950), and since generalised via the Loebner
Prize, among other things, was based on a blind verbal confrontation
between a computer (or primitive AI) and its user or questioner. Its
effect was to almost immediately foreclose any inclination or disposition to consider the machine on its own terms and, as a result, to
develop it in this direction: a quest (or conquest) for the human-machine analogy. This quest, at the source of the anthropological bond
that is now being forged with AI10, has in some respects 'blinded' us
to an understanding of its true drivers and potential. How many “Turing tests” have there been since the 1950s?... Joseph Weizenbaum’s
“ELIZA” chatbot, circa 1965 (Weizenbaum, 1966), and Kenneth Colby’s “PARRY” chatbot in 1972 (Colby, 1975) continued to explore the
possibility of genuine dialogue between humans and machines. John
Searle’s “Chinese Room” (Searle, 1980) was designed to prove that
a computer system can simulate (if not mimic) human intelligence
without actually possessing it. The “Winograd Schema Challenge”
(WSC) developed by Hector Levesque (2011), assesses a machine’s
common sense reasoning ability. And the still popular “Reverse Turing Test”/Captcha since 2000 (von Ahn et al., 2003), makes humans
the subject of the study, requiring them to prove that they are not
machines, thus closing the loop, so to speak... And all this without
counting the many games in which humans challenge machines,
the most 'serious' or meritorious of which is chess: Bobby Fischer vs
“Mac Hack VI” [1977] (Greenblatt et al., 1967; David, 1976) straight
out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) stables;
Garry Kasparov vs. “Deep Blue” [1996, 1997] (Campbell et al., 2002),
THE supercomputer produced by IBM; Vladimir Kramnik vs. “Deep
Fritz” [2002, 2006] (Wüllenweber et al., 2006) from the German
company ChessBase, all definitively confirming the superiority of the
'playing' machine over man. That being said, and without venturing
into abstruse scientific considerations, it is worth remembering that
several other co-inventors/discoverers of Artificial Intelligence held
views and conceptions that were very different from Turing’s, intuiting other behaviours and perspectives, without ever giving up on
making this new field a laboratory11 on human intelligence. Foremost
among them was the duo Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, to
11
With both epistemological
and technological aims.
8
The image of Man
battling Machine has
been a constant theme in
science fiction, from the
novel Rossum’s Universal
Robots (1920) by Czech
writer Karel Čapek to Alex
Garland’s film Ex Machina
(2015), via Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis (1927) and
Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep? (1968),
Frank Herbert’s Dune
(1965), James Cameron’s
Terminator saga (1 to 6,
1984-2019), Ridley Scott’s
Blade Runner (1982), Alex
Proyas’ I, Robot (2004),
among dozens of other
equally influential works.
9
A pure and human
machine described by
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
(1749).
10
Women and men who
think they will find true,
unconditional, eternal
love in AI... Director Spike
Jonze, in his 2013 science
fiction film Her, is spot on.
94 David Bihanic
whom we owe the introduction of artificial neurons, which, as early
as the 1940s (McCulloch & Pitts, 1943), advanced the key idea of a
“convergence” between the brain, logic, calculation and machines,
projecting the establishment of a common conceptual framework:
the artificial (formal) neuron, understood as a logical operator or
binary threshold, that in a network would open up to a formalizable,
calculable form of intelligence bearing no real 'rivalry' with that
specific to humans12. While Turing thought in terms of procedure,
via a sequential, symbolic model leading to an abstract replica of the
human brain (an imitation of a mainly behavioural nature13), McCulloch & Pitts, inspired by brain circuits, thought in terms of structure,
following a distributed, parallel model that heralded a form of autonomy or potential independence for the intelligent/thinking machine
(a reproduction capable of becoming non-isomorphic through
exercise and learning). The divergence of views held by McCulloch
& Pitts overlaps in various respects with that of other pioneers of
AI, such as John von Neumann14 (1951–1953; 1958), cyberneticists
Norbert Wiener (1948; 1950) and Ross Ashby (1952), John McCarthy
(McCarthy et al., 1955), and Marvin Minsky (1954; 1961), among
other prominent speakers at the Dartmouth Conference in 1956.
The Art of Machine Intelligence
As we pointed out at the beginning of this article, art (which intersects with design), while not completely escaping controversy15,
nevertheless leaves a fairly wide field or terrain open for exploration
and creation with technology. From there, can we reactivate some
non-Turingian founding perspectives on AI, and thus rethink our relation to it? Let us take a look at a leading figure in contemporary art,
the French artist of Hungarian origin Véra Molnar, who died in 2024
at the age of 99. From the late 1950s onwards16, the artist, associated with the geometric abstraction movement, undertook a bold
approach aimed at revealing the (eminently) poietic power of computation. She and her husband, François Molnar, were early participants in making the internal workings of the computer transparent.
She then tried her hand at programming algorithms and automata17,
tracing random drawings on paper using a plotter, or on-screen, as
if generatinginfinite variations and combinations based on rules
deliberately left open. The hope was for surprises and novelties.
This letting go — a withdrawal of subjectivity and abandonment of
the artist’s total control18 — proved to be fruitful. Her 'investigation'
occupied her until the end of her life. Just a year before her death,
Molnar took part, alongside Aurèce Vettier, in a creative project with
AI titled AD.VM.AV.IA. Fig. 2.
Like so many other artists, she said she was fascinated by
the work of Albrecht Dürer, by his writings on geometry, of course,
but also his majestic works. As she had done in the past with less
powerful tools, Molnar decided, in agreement with Vettier, to provide
the Artificial Intelligence with a database of sketches and engravings by the German master19 in order to generate new occurrences,
wagering that the 'copying' Machine would nevertheless find a way
to impose its own style20.
12
Human intelligence
and thought cannot be
reduced, by their very
nature, to such a model.
13
And his "epigones", to a
certain extent, such as
Herbert A. Simon & Allen
Newell, John R. Anderson,
Frank Rosenblatt, Rodney
Brooks (etc.) — in addition
to those cited in relation
to the tests.
14
The work of McCulloch
& Pitts greatly influenced
that of Von Neumann on
self-reproducing automata.
19
All of them have fallen into
the public domain.
20
Etymology: estile, “way
of doing (acting)” (circa
1290).
17
In Fortran, Basic.
18
A trend or desire shared
by many modern artists,
François Morellet springs
to mind in particular.
16
Artists such as John
Whitney, Manfred Mohr,
Georg Ness, Frieder Nake,
and A. Michael Noll (the
three “Ns”).
15
This is particularly evident
in Jason Michael Allen’s
Space Opera Theater.
The Other Intelligence
diid No. 89 — 2026
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The AI, which was also fed formal instructions — from geometric
guidelines to incentives — produced an initial batch of 64 imitation
engravings, which the pair then reworked (regenerated) to ultimately
retain only 16. As we mentioned earlier, the aim of this experiment was
not to pit Dürer against the Machine. Molnar considered his genius to
be unsurpassable. As always, her intention or goal (which could not
have been more noble or decisive) was to get to the heart of what constitutes the essence of Artificial Intelligence. What does the Machine
do, so mysteriously to our eyes? What would it gain from speculating,
elaborating, conceiving? One thing is certain: what it accomplishes
goes beyond the strict operation or execution of its programme. In
this case, the Machine literally creates. It freely produces arranged
sets, harmonised in form, volume and material, which neither Molnar,
Vettier, nor even Dürer would have deliberately created on their own.
Yet, beyond their reflexive nature, these sets touch us. They speak to
us and, in doing so, they make sense. Is this a miracle or merely a statistical coincidence, a matter of probability? The combinatorial game
based on multiple selections and samples is, in fact, far more complex than it appears, while the computational core or organ is more
'differential' (divergent) than strictly mimetic. What makes these AIs
a truly valuable resource is not their replicative, repetitive capacities,
the 'same' or 'memes' they are already capable of delivering, however
multiple (and composite) they may be, but rather the liberties they
take, their deviation or departure from the reality and truth of the things
they are supposed to represent. Deepfakes, which abound on social
platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and X, are often denigrated on
the grounds that these images distort a proper reading of reality, when
in fact it is precisely these fakes, brimming with what are wrongly
described as “aberrations”, that constitute their main interest. Artists
such as Grégory Chatonsky, Albertine Meunier (Flood the zone with
shit, 2025) and Éric Tabuchi (The Third Atlas, 2023 Fig. 3) have understood this perfectly.
Fig. 2
Véra Molnar, Aurèce Vettier (2023). AD.VM.AV.IA—
11. Photograph by Romain
Darnaud. Retrieved from:
aurecevettier.com/collaboration-vera-molnar.
96 David Bihanic
Of course, we must consistently and severely denounce the dishonest, deliberately misleading uses of hyper-faking, but we must also
learn to perceive and cherish the power of illusion here. What about
the art of magic? Does it not teach us that there are artful behaviours,
ways and techniques of playing with the false, which then become a
source of renewed experiences in our relationship with the objectivity of reality21? Let us return to our AI artists.
British artist Harold Cohen is one of the few pioneers of art in the
age of Artificial Intelligence, with his project-programme22 AARON
(Cohen, 1968; 1987). Begun in 1968 at the University of California,
San Diego, AARON Fig. 4 consisted of programming a series of “painting machines” in the style of its creator, Cohen himself.
Fig. 3
Éric Tabuchi (2023). The
Third Atlas. Poursuite éditions. Photograph taken
from the book. Retrieved
from: poursuite-editions.
org/produit/the-thirdatlas
Fig. 4
Screenshots of a website
showing views of the
exhibition “Harold Cohen:
AARON,” presented at
the Whitney Museum of
American Art in New York
from February 3 to May
3, 2024. Retrieved from:
expressiveai.net/harold-cohen-aaron-the-whitney-museum
21
The magician’s deft, skilful gestures could just as
easily be used to perform
deceitful manipulations,
with the magic then turning into theft, or outright
fraud.
22
A "work in progress" reminiscent of the work titled
“Xanadu” begun in the
mid-1960s by American
sociologist Ted Nelson,
who is still pursuing his
research to this day (Nelson, 1965; 1974).
The Other Intelligence
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The aim was not to generate new sequences of images, but rather
to create random variations and modulations within a process, an
artistic approach that he developed in parallel. In short, his real aim
was to work with technology, so that it would accompany him in
his work, helping him progress and develop artistically23. Feeding
AI with rules, procedures and constraints derived from his own
perception (or apperception) of the world, Cohen created machine
agents whose sole virtue, or richness in his eyes, was to perform
(and provoke) “side steps”, to provoke differences — “différances”,
as Jacques Derrida (1973) wrote — which in a way escaped, or
circumvented, a certain determinism of the programmes. It was
this fecundity or fertility — some would call it imagination24 — with
which machines could potentially be endowed that 'excited' Cohen:
an intelligence, creative in this case, of the artificial (from the Latin
intelligere25) operating through a variability of choices: a choice without limits, even if at first glance it might seem “restrained”, held back
or constrained in its language (or command)26. Many other AI artists,
following in Cohen’s footsteps, questioned its variable power — not
to be confused with its variety, which is as profuse as it is disparate.
Each of them trained their machines to perform random (undetermined) operations, reassembling attributes or components of the
image, notably in completely new “unimagined” remixes. In the case
of Space Opera Theater, as we mentioned at the beginning of this
text, the setting and composition, mixing Renaissance and “Steampunk”, are less important than the material or texture of the image.
No one seemed to attach any importance to the fact that it is nothing
more than an illusion, in which every detail, every fragment 'betrays'
and evades, in countless ways , the very impression or sensation of
representation. Once again, this theatre is not particularly remarkable from a strictly artistic point of view, but it does reveal the distinctive feature of an AI-processing run, with 'aberrations' appearing as
multi-variable 'touches' of digital painting. Among the artists who have
been far more successful in deploying an artificialised visual-graphic
idiom, we could mention the Americans Casey Reas, Joshua Davis,
David Young, Sam Balfus (alias Balfua), as well as Refik Anadol, Memo
Akten27, Ferdi and Eylul Alici (of Ouchhh studio)28 or, in quite different registers (VJing, Creative Coding, etc.), the Spanish artist Marcos
Fernández Díaz, known as Catmac, the English studios Amiangelika
and Field.io (IMI. A World Closer, 2025), the Montreal studio Iregular. In
France, in addition to those mentioned earlier, other talented creators
(coders)29 include Anne Horel, Gwenola Wagon and Samuel Bianchini...
One of Bianchini’s recent pieces (2025) in version 3, entitled Prendre vie(s) Fig. 5, perfectly illustrates this attempt to redefine
the material or texture of the image that we were just discussing.
Relying on the “Flow Lenia” AI developed by Inria Bordeaux (Plantec
et al., 2025), what comes to life here through artificial means are
the thousands of pixels, dots, grains or cells of the image, all taken
individually in a “tug-of-war” between disposition/arrangement (representation, respecting the X, Y coordinates, Y of the shapes, figures
and patterns of the image) and organisation (the animated, mobile
{neural} units continuously evaluating the conditions of the “imaged”
environment in which they are immersed, attempting manoeuvres
and “strategies” of coexistence and co-evolution).
23
To sharpen the eye and
the mind.
24
As the faculty of inventing
and producing images
(etym. 1269-78).
25
From the Latin inter-
("between, among") and
legere ("to choose, to
discern, to disentangle"):
"to choose between (with
the mind), to gather from
among (a set)".
26
In assessing the entropic
nature (or degree of
uncertainty) of computer
programmes; this tension
between order and disorder gives rise to the fundamental concept of “emergence”; a disposition
within the reach of AI for
a convergence between
Man and Machine.
27
Having creatively invested
in “Deep Dream” from
Google’s laboratories.
28
All four are of Turkish
origin and emigrated to
the US.
29
Justine Emard,
Filipe Vilas-Boas, Julian
Charrière (now based in
Berlin).
98 David Bihanic
There are equally captivating artistic approaches that bring together
and blur the lines between the natural and the artificial30, with a view
to observing their mutual influences, encounters and exchanges
(their 'convergences'). We are thinking, for example, of the project
The Way of Flowers (2024-2025) by the German collective Crosslucid
(co-founded by Sylwana Zybura and Tomas C. Toth), conceived as a
practical test of the theories of Russian-born philosopher Michael
Marder (2013) on the extended cognition of plants or plant thinking. Another project, titled Once Upon A Garden (2022-2024) by
Senegalese-Lebanese artist Linda Dounia, combines an archive of
plant species that are now extinct and have been regenerated here
by Artificial Intelligence (based on fragmentary data and clues),
with a database of speculative creations31 featuring unexpected
processes and growth dynamics32. The projects Neural Zoo (2018-
2022), Decohering delineation (2022-2023) by Argentine artist Sofia
Crespo, and Speculative Species Evolution (2025) by Russian artist
and researcher Helena Nikonole, draw numerous parallels with
Linda Dounia’s work, questioning notions of agency, hybridity of life
and more. Finally, a fourth and final example, Mosaic Virus (2019) by
Anna Ridler from England, is a work of fiction set in the Anthropocene era, which consists of instantiating the growing development
— in images — of tulips with data, vectors and exogenous factors
such as financial market prices. On screen, before our eyes and in
real time, the plants mutate and metamorphose, finding completely
improbable 'connections' and reconciliations. This type of approach
(and experimental methodology) is also making inroads into the
physical realm of tangible, object-based space: see the projects by
the leading British designer Ross Lovegrove, the German designers
Daniel Widrig and Philipp Schmitt Fig. 6, and the French design duo
Bold (William Boujon and Julien Benayoun).
Each artistic project, each work carried out with AI, is more
of an analysis, a 'dissection' of its modus cogitandi rather than,
strictly speaking, its modus operandi. The Hallucinations explored
since 2017 by American artist and geographer Trevor Paglen are
indeed breakthroughs or revelations of its reasons and reasoning,
its choices and qualifications, its training and acquisitions. As are
the robotic installations and sculptures of another American, David
Fig. 5
Samuel Bianchni [with
the collaboration of Colin
Bouvry and Léon Denise]
(2025). Prendre vie(s).
Photograph by Samuel
Bianchini. Retrieved from:
dispotheque.org/fr/prendrevie-s
30
From the Latin confundere, “pouring together”.
31
“Playing with entropy”,
she says.
32
"Ex-growths".
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Bowen, for example in the work The Two (2025): two robotic arms
equipped with a camera, each connected to a separate computer
system (two computers and AI that are identical in every way). The
artificial twins scrutinise each other, attempting to recognise one
another in a non-mimetic (non-similar/non-symmetrical) way. As we
watch them, we understand what they think they see and then infer.
The creations of the Berlin duo Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst
combine AI, music and Crypto, urging us to take a different look at
what is too quickly labelled the 'extractivism' of AI. Finally, in The
World We Made (2023), Australian photographer Jon McCormack
carefully examines not the cultural biases of prompts, bad word-object (semiotic) pairings and other 'statistical regressions' of certain
visual concepts, but rather their derivations, their machinic impregnations or appropriations with still largely unsuspected potential —
hallucinations, aberrations and confusions which, all things considered, they are not. Not at all.
It is through such an effort — to which art and design commits us — that we will succeed in recognising the real effectiveness
and extreme depth of artificial intelligence, thereby better preparing
for the future.
To Conclude: Human with Machine — Converging Intelligences
Ultimately, the relationship between humans and machines cannot
be reduced to a clash, or to antagonism between two forms of intelligence, both perceived as competitors. Rather, it constitutes a space
for co-evolution, mutual exchange and reconfiguration.
Whilst certain high-profile events in the history of artificial
intelligence — from the Turing test to the chess matches between
human champions and computer programmes — have often been
interpreted as duels, this interpretation obscures a more complex
relationship. In the work of (and since) Alan Turing, the machine is
assessed on the basis of its ability to reproduce linguistic behaviours
Fig. 6
Philipp Schmitt [with the
collaboration of Steffen
Weiß, Mikkel Mikkelsen].
(2019). The chair project
(Four Classics). Photograph taken in collaboration with Gregor
Scheuerlein and Jonas
Voigt. Retrieved from:
philippschmitt.com/work/
chair
100 David Bihanic
indistinguishable from those of a human interlocutor. The 'imitation
game' seeks not so much to determine whether the machine possesses intelligence of its own, so much as to examine the conditions
under which intelligence can be recognised through its external
manifestations.
Conversely, as we have pointed out, the work of Warren
McCulloch and Walter Pitts opened up another avenue, based not
on imitation but on a hypothesis of structural convergence between
the brain, logic and computation. The machine is no longer merely
a device that seeks to simulate the human, but becomes a possible expression of the same principle of informational organisation
shared with biological systems.
Such a divergence is fundamentally significant. The Turingian model situates the question of intelligence within the realm
of appearance, interaction and behavioural evaluation: a machine
is intelligent if it can be recognised as such. McCulloch and Pitts’s
neuro-logical model, by contrast, shifts the focus to the ontological
continuity between organisms and machines, where intelligence
emerges from material configurations capable of processing, transforming and organising information.
Consequently, the human–machine relationship is not
merely a matter of opposition between two rival agents, but a story of
co-emergence: the machine can be conceived at times as a mirror of
human intelligence, at other times as a new instance of its manifestation. Between imitation and convergence, simulation and continuity,
a plurality of models of intelligence takes shape — human, biological,
artificial or machine-based. Art and design are undoubtedly invaluable resources, not only for glimpsing and understanding these
co-emergences, but also for putting them into practice and bringing
them to tangible fruition. What holds true for art, design and creativity in the broadest sense also applies to what binds us together
(and to our very being or existence) in society: the new world that is
emerging, in which AI is gaining a more prominent place with each
passing day, cannot serve as fertile ground for harmonious coexistence if that coexistence is based on a neo-capitalism of intelligence. There are, and always will be, forms of intelligence: the plural
remains essential.
David Bihanic
Designer, Associate Professor (habilitated to supervise
research) at Université
Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
(France), David Bihanic
investigates the advances,
constraints, and aesthetic,
epistemological, and
praxeological dimensions
of art, design and architecture in their collaborations
— sometimes interdisciplinary — with engineering
sciences.
The Other Intelligence
diid No. 89 — 2026
101 Doi: 10.30682/diid8926f
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The Other Intelligence
diid No. 89 — 2026
103 Doi: 10.30682/diid8926f

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