Aristotle Bancale
REFRAMING POST-CREATIVE ART: AI AND THE TRANSMATERIAL FLOW MATRIX

Il. Martyna Kielesińska

Introduction

Art exists in the volatile balance of tradition and the emerging technologies of its era. In the age of machine learning, immersive interfaces, and autonomous agents shaping artistic and design practices, this tension has reached an unprecedented intensity. Creativity now unfolds across hybrid terrains of data, perception, and matter. The question is no longer how technology mediates art, but how art itself reconfigures technological experience. This shift demands a framework capable of mapping how art operates through these entanglements.

I propose the Transmaterial Flow Matrix (TFM), a model that maps creativity as a dynamic field rather than a sequence of stages. The TFM may be understood as a relational model that maps creative processes as movements across interacting dimensions of inspiration, manifestation, and signification. While new materialist philosophy has reshaped how agency and matter are understood, few frameworks translate these insights into a practical model for analysing contemporary art practices. The TFM addresses this gap by mapping creative processes across three interacting axes. Drawing from Performative New Materialism,¹ Radical Immanence,² and Transmaterialism, the TFM describes three continuous axes (Inspiration, Manifestation, and Signification) through which creative events circulate. These axes do not necessarily follow a temporal order but continually interact, forming a performative ecology of creation. As Michelangelo wrote in Sonnet 151, “The best of artists never has a concept that a single marble block does not already circumscribe within itself,” suggesting that manifestation may precede inspiration, the form already latent within matter.³

This discussion is situated within a global and regional context. Alongside international exemplars Refik Anadol, Ruairi Glynn, and Anicka Yi, the study also considers Polish artists Agnieszka Kurant, Roman Lipski, and Janek Simon whose practices exemplify transmaterial thinking through algorithmic systems. Their works articulate spectral variations of post‑creative art, situating the TFM within both international discourse and Polish contributions to Performative New Materialism. By ‘post‑creative art’ I refer to practices in which creativity is distributed across human, machinic, and environmental agencies rather than residing in a single author.

Methodology

This study employs a critical‑interpretive framework informed by media theory, design studies, and new materialist philosophy. Artworks are read not as fixed objects but as dynamic mediations where material, conceptual, and technological forces converge. Using a diffractive method,⁴ it traces how creative processes arise through entanglement – how artworks act, shape perception, and refract cultural and technological conditions. The TFM serves as both conceptual map and research apparatus, translating theory into a visual and curatorial tool for analysing these relations. Six case studies were selected for their explicit engagement with algorithmic, biological, and sensory systems, allowing the TFM to be tested across both global and regional contexts. The case studies function as a practical demonstration of the TFM in action, showing how the Matrix operates as a method for analysing diverse creative trajectories.

Theoretical foundations

The TFM arises from the convergence of Performative New Materialism, Radical Immanence, and an expanded notion of Transmaterialism that repositions art as an event of entangled becoming rather than a product of isolated expression. Each strand contributes to the rethinking of agency, matter, and meaning in the post‑creative field.

Performative New Materialism

Following Karen Barad’s agential realism,⁵ Jane Bennett’s vital materialism,⁶ and Barbara Bolt’s performative aesthetics,⁷ matter is no longer passive but an active participant in world‑making. Barad argues that entities do not pre‑exist their relations but emerge through intra‑action – a continual negotiation in which matter and meaning are co‑constituted. Artistic practice therefore becomes a site of ontological performance, where materials, gestures, and technologies mutually determine what can appear.

Bennett extends this view by describing all matter as vibrant, endowed with propensities, resistances, and capacities that shape creative outcomes beyond human intention. Her call to attend to the thing‑power of materials encourages an ethics of coexistence within creation, acknowledging that vitality is distributed across human and non‑human agents. Bolt situates this within the studio, describing the artwork as an encounter in which the artist is influenced by all the forces that are active. From this perspective, the studio, the body, the algorithm, and the material form a single performative field.

Radical Immanence

The immanent ontology grounding the TFM also resonates with Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman philosophy. For Braidotti,⁸ becoming is not transcendence but zoe‑centric continuity – a vital, affirmative flow through which human and non‑human life co‑compose the world. Her notion of affirmative ethics situates agency within this relational vitality, calling for responsibility towards the entangled field rather than mastery over it. In the TFM, this stance translates into an ethics of practice: every movement across the Matrix participates in the same generative plane of zoe, where creation is a negotiation of forces rather than an act of design. The TFM can thus be read as a diagram of Braidotti’s cartographies of becoming that maps how artistic processes enact life’s immanent self‑organisation across material, affective, and technological domains. Following Park’s new materialist reading of Barad, entities “do not merely interact but come into being” through intra‑actions.⁹ Read through the TFM, artworks become such entities: they emerge from dynamic intra‑relations of perception, material, and environment. This framework presents creativity as a process of world‑participation rather than mere expression where art is a continual co‑emergence of form and force.

From New Materialism to Transmaterialism

Transmaterialism extends the philosophical concerns of New Materialism into the lived field of artistic practice. It emphasises the continuity between material and informational processes through which energy, perception, and substance co‑compose form. The concept draws inspiration from the material poetics of Antoni Tàpies, whose use of dust, marble powder, varnish, and discarded matter redefined artistic value as an ethical and ontological inquiry. In his practice, the surface becomes a site of resistance, where matter performs thought and memory rather than merely representing them.¹⁰ This sensibility aligns with Barbara Bolt’s¹¹ account of material performativity and echoes Rosalind Krauss’s¹² observation that post‑medium art reconfigures substance into process. These precedents articulate Transmaterialism as a movement from representation to relation, from object to field; a stance in which artistic practice participates in the same continuum of vitality that New Materialism attributes to all matter. If New Materialism grants vitality to matter, Transmaterialism extends this recognition to digital and energetic substrates: code, light, sound, data, and affect. These elements act not as abstractions detached from substance but as material events of transmission and transformation.

Within this expanded field, AI systems exemplify post‑creative machines that participate in ideation rather than merely execute it. Their generative capacities redistribute authorship across human and machinic agencies, producing what Barad would call a phenomenon: an entangled event where boundaries between maker, medium, and output are performatively drawn. These machinic actors, like pigments or marble, possess their own affordances and unpredictabilities; they do not replace the artist but reconfigure what artistry entails.

TFM explained

Figure 1. The Transmaterial Flow Matrix: Three Axes of Becoming

The TFM models creativity as a three‑dimensional field. It consists of three orthogonal axes (Inspiration, Manifestation, and Signification) that intersect within a continuous space of becoming. Each axis represents a spectrum of forces, not a category. The artist’s process is a movement through this field, tracing dynamic trajectories rather than fixed points.¹³

One might visualise this field not as a static diagram but as a shifting constellation, where thought and matter continually fold into one another. The model is not fixed but heuristic and open to reconfiguration as artistic and technological conditions evolve. The coordinates of an artwork shift as material, affective, and conceptual energies interact. The Matrix maps every creative event as movement through a continuum of varying intensities along three axes.

• Inspiration spans conceptual and sensory impulses, tracing the origin of creative excitation.
• Manifestation extends from potential to material event, encompassing both the algorithmic and informational states through which matter comes into appearance.
• Signification ranges from abstract to representational, mapping how meaning shifts between individual affect and shared interpretation.

Potentiality is understood here not as absence but as latent presence or matter in potential. These ranges are fluid and interpenetrating. An artwork may oscillate between them or inhabit several at once. The axes describe gradients of becoming, situating potentiality as an active dimension of manifestation rather than its opposite.

This field behaves like a multidimensional diffractive pattern in which inspiration, manifestation, and signification overlap and refract continuously. The result is a performative topology that accounts for both material and computational processes of art‑making.¹⁴

The TFM can be understood as a creative apparatus in Barad’s sense: a material‑discursive configuration through which distinctions such as idea, form, and meaning emerge. Its three axes perform partial cuts within a continuous field, enacting momentary boundaries that allow certain phenomena to appear while excluding others.¹⁵ Because these axes are mutually entangled, movement along one necessarily reconfigures the others: a shift in manifestation alters signification, and feedback reshapes inspiration. The creative act thus unfolds as a trajectory through the field, producing shifting configurations of space‑time‑mattering rather than a fixed point of resolution.

Figure 2. The Transmaterial Flow Matrix as a performative ecology

Figure 2. The Transmaterial Flow Matrix as a performative ecology

Creativity circulates through the entangled axes of Inspiration, Manifestation, and Signification, mediated by the artist, perceiver, and the medium. Intuition acts as a transversal current linking all forces. Feedback loops sustain the intra‑active entanglement of matter and meaning within the transmaterial field.

Case studies: global artists in the Matrix

The TFM allows us to situate contemporary practices within a dynamic topology of becoming rather than within fixed genres or media. In this section, the works of Refik Anadol, Ruairi Glynn, and Anicka Yi are examined as trajectories through the field of Inspiration, Manifestation, and Signification. Each artist enacts a unique pattern of intra‑actions among material, digital, and perceptual forces, forming distinct but overlapping configurations within the creative apparatus.¹⁶

Refik Anadol: The archive dreaming apparatus

Refik Anadol’s Machine Hallucinations¹⁷ and Archive Dreaming¹⁸ illustrate the flow of inspiration between human and machinic perception. Using vast datasets of visual memory – photographs, archives, digital records – Anadol employs generative algorithms to recompose them into immersive visual fields. His role shifts from author to curator, intuitively selecting and tuning the conditions under which the machine may dream.

Within the TFM, Anadol’s work moves along the Inspiration axis toward a post‑human field where data itself becomes the agent of intuition. The AI system acts as co‑creator, materialising difference through intra‑action.¹⁹ These algorithmic dreams oscillate between Inspiration and Manifestation, producing a data sublime that reframes collective memory as luminous vibration. The gallery becomes a computational apparatus where perception is re‑coded.²⁰

Ruairi Glynn: behavioural architectures and relational manifestation

Ruairi Glynn’s installations, such as Fearful Symmetry²¹ and Performative Ecologies,²² create kinetic environments where machines and spectators co‑constitute experience through feedback. Drawing from architecture, robotics, and performance, Glynn builds systems that respond to movement, sound, and presence, producing emergent behaviours that blur the distinction between object and organism.

In the TFM, Glynn’s practice circulates through the Manifestation axis, yet extends into the full spatial field. His installations are apparatuses that make visible the intra‑active negotiation between code, mechanics, and audience. The machines’ gestures are not programmed performances but real‑time responses that alter the viewer’s role from observer to participant. This reciprocal dynamism illustrates Bolt’s description of art as a performative encounter where “the artwork acts.”²³

Here, manifestation and signification become indistinguishable: the meaning of the work is its behaviour. As the system performs, it also thinks – not cognitively, but materially – through the feedback loops of sensors, motors, and human proximity. Glynn’s works thus traverse the Matrix as oscillations between Manifestation and Signification, revealing that meaning is a live, responsive property of material systems.

Anicka Yi: The biotechnical sensorium

Anicka Yi’s practice extends beyond the visual into the realms of biology, chemistry, and scent. Works such as Biologizing the Machine²⁴ and In Love with the World²⁵ merge organic materials with synthetic intelligence to explore non‑human perception. Yeast, bacteria, and olfactory molecules are treated as collaborators, forming a hybrid sensorium that questions the limits of human sense.

Yi’s movement through the Matrix flows strongly along the Signification axis, but it does not remain there. Signification in her work is not passive but an embodied process of co‑sensing among species and technologies. The scent molecules are not metaphors; they are active agents diffusing through air, interacting with visitors’ bodies, and altering the gallery environment.

In Barad’s terms, Yi’s installations operate as material‑discursive apparatuses that reconfigure what counts as subject or object. The air becomes a performative medium where matter itself communicates. By allowing the viewer’s physiology to complete the work, Yi collapses inspiration, manifestation, and signification into one continuous biospheric event. Her practice exemplifies transmaterial entanglement – the blending of organic and synthetic vitality into an open ecology of meaning.²⁶

Polish artists in the Matrix

Within the Polish context, contemporary artists similarly engage algorithmic, biological, and sensory systems through transmaterial approaches. Their practices extend the TFM into a regional ecology, demonstrating how post‑creative agency operates across human, machinic, and environmental boundaries.

Agnieszka Kurant’s algorithmic projects such as A.A.I.²⁷ and The End of Signature²⁸ investigate collective and non‑human intelligences as co‑authors of form. By delegating creative decision‑making to micro‑organisms and AI systems, Kurant redefines authorship as a distributed event within the TFM’s axes of Manifestation and Signification. Her works embody a post‑creative intelligence that materialises through what she calls networked creativity.²⁹

Roman Lipski’s collaboration with machine‑learning systems transforms painting into an iterative dialogue between human intuition and computational variation. Lipski employs a neural network trained on his own canvases to generate visual propositions that act as catalysts rather than prescriptions. As Estorick and Elliott note, this process establishes a feedback loop of response and reinterpretation in which algorithmic outputs merely extend the artist’s intuitive decision‑making.³⁰ Within the TFM, his practice spans Inspiration and Manifestation: the algorithm refracts aesthetic intention, while embodied painting renders those prompts materially specific.

Janek Simon’s exhibition Machine Learning Folklore³¹ examines how machine‑learning systems reprocess cultural heritage into synthetic visual forms. Drawing on datasets of traditional ornaments, textiles, and folk patterns, Simon uses computational models to generate hybrid motifs that blur geographic, historical, and cultural boundaries. Within the TFM, this work operates across Inspiration and Manifestation: cultural data functions as input, while machine learning acts as a non‑human generative agent that reorganises tradition into new visual configurations. Signification emerges through this algorithmic mediation, revealing how cultural memory is transformed when filtered through AI rather than preserved through human transmission alone.

Collectively, all six artists reveal the TFM as a living apparatus. It performs the ongoing negotiation of agencies that define post‑creative art. The TFM therefore offers not a taxonomy of art but a field map capable of tracing how artistic, machinic, and ecological forces intersect to produce new forms of sense and matter.

Post‑creative machines and posthuman aesthetics

Artificial intelligence introduces a new ontological actor into the creative field. Within the TFM, AI systems operate as material‑discursive forces that participate in the same intra‑active apparatus as the artist, the medium, and the audience. Their presence demands a reconsideration of authorship and agency in light of radical immanence, where creation unfolds through relation rather than design.

From tool to participant

Traditional tools extend intention, post‑creative machines modulate it, transforming data through feedback loops that exceed prediction. Following Barad’s idea that apparatuses determine “what can be known and what can come to matter,”³² AI systems function as intra‑active nodes configuring new possibilities of perception and form.

Following Anna Nacher’s concept of technoperformativity,³³ the AI system becomes a relay of affect and code – an agentive medium that translates digital processes into material and perceptual experience. In this sense, technology does not merely represent or execute but performs the world through its own operations, enacting the entanglement of data, body, and environment. Technoperformativity thus unfolds within radical immanence where technology performs matter’s own capacities for relation and transformation.

Creativity as emergent patterning

Within the TFM, machinic creativity appears as motion across all three axes. On Inspiration, AI recombines cultural memory through datasets, producing new triggers. On Manifestation, computation performs in real time, generating material that evolves beyond control. On Signification, the audience encounters a hybrid agency that blurs human trace and algorithmic logic. The artwork thus materialises as relation rather than object.

The collapse of authorship

Post‑creative machines diffuse authorship into multiplicity. The artist’s signature persists but disperses through code and system behaviour. Creativity shifts from who makes to how relations form. The machine participates in a co‑constitutive authorship – a pattern of mirroring the intra‑active structure of the TFM itself.

From product to field

In a posthuman aesthetic, art is not a thing but a configuration of relations. Meaning arises through the interplay of Inspiration, Manifestation, and Signification. Each exhibition, interface, or encounter re‑enacts these relations differently, producing new aesthetic phenomena. The artwork becomes an event of sensing rather than an artefact. The gallery becomes an apparatus where sensors, surfaces, and algorithms co‑compose experience.³⁴

Curating the apparatus

Curation becomes calibration rather than arrangement. The curator orchestrates the conditions through which intra‑actions occur. Light intensity, sound placement, and algorithmic timing operate as interdependent parameters within a single creative system. The task is to maintain the integrity of entanglement – to calibrate situations where human, machinic, and material agencies intra‑act without hierarchy. In installations such as Yi’s In Love with the World, these calibrations orchestrate air, scent, and algorithmic control as active curatorial agents. This curatorial praxis unfolds as a performative ecology translating relational ethics into spatial, sensory, and computational form.³⁵

Ethics of entanglement

Posthuman aesthetics invites a new ethics grounded in responsibility to the entangled. If creation is distributed, accountability must also be distributed. Artist, machine, curator, and viewer share responsibility for the effects their intra‑actions produce—affective, ecological, or social.

Perception as participation

The viewer is not separate from the artwork but moves through it as part of the TFM field. Perception becomes a material act, where seeing and sensing participate in the same continuum that shapes form. As the perceiver moves, experience unfolds as matter in motion – sensation, emotion, and thought arising through the shifting relations of the axes. To experience art is to join its manifestation.

Toward future practice

Posthuman aesthetics does not eliminate the human but situates it within a larger network of agents. Future art practices will operate as transmaterial choreographies where perception and production merge. The TFM provides a framework for navigating this terrain, mapping how creative forces circulate, how meaning crystallises and dissolves, and how art continues to perform the world into being.

Intuition and transversal knowing

In the TFM, intuition is not a mystical spark but a relational awareness that emerges from within the field of creation. It belongs to matter as much as mind – a resonance arising through contact, resistance, and response. The artist enters this current rather than directs it, sensing potential before form appears. In practice, intuition functions as a heuristic mode of inquiry, a form of phenomenological attunement that registers material and affective signals before they become concept.

Following Bennett’s notion of vibrant matter,³⁶ intuition may be understood as the body’s capacity to register the “thing‑power” of its surroundings – the subtle signals through which matter expresses its inclinations. The brush that drags, the pigment that resists, the dataset that mutates: each communicates through material vibration. Intuition is the capacity to listen to these communications before they become concepts.

For Barad, responsiveness is an ethical as well as epistemological act.³⁷ The world calls, and matter answers through its own agencies. Intuition, read through agential realism, becomes a practice of attunement to this call. It is how the artist perceives the “cuts” that an apparatus performs, sensing where boundaries may shift and new phenomena emerge. To intuit is to participate in the world’s self‑knowing.

As a transversal method, intuition invites the artist‑researcher to cultivate sensitivity rather than control. This approach aligns with Bolt’s account of the studio as a site where materials “speak back” to the artist, shaping the course of creation through reciprocal agency.³⁸ Through this attentiveness, intuition acts as the invisible current of the TFM – the spectrum that connects inspiration’s impulse, manifestation’s process, and signification’s resonance – joining matter, machine, and perception in one continuous process of becoming.

Conclusion

The Transmaterial Flow Matrix (TFM) redefines creativity as an ecology rather than a production sequence. Within this model, art emerges through the entangled interplay of material, digital, and perceptual forces. The three axes – Inspiration, Manifestation, and Signification – do not unfold in time but circulate in continuous relation. Together they form the topology of the creative field, a living ecology in which matter, machine, and meaning continually shape one another.

Across both international and Polish contexts, the TFM reveals artistic practice as a performative field in which human, machinic, and material agencies co‑produce meaning. From Refik Anadol’s algorithmic hallucinations to Agnieszka Kurant’s collective intelligences, and from Ruairi Glynn’s responsive architectures to Janek Simon’s machine‑learning recombinations, creation emerges as a choreography of relations beyond the human. These practices affirm the universality of transmaterial thinking: creativity is local in its manifestation, yet global in its ontology.

Intuition functions as the invisible axis of this system – the transversal current that attunes the artist to the world’s own self‑organisation. It is through intuition that the boundaries between sensing and making, perceiving and producing, begin to blur. In this sense, the TFM is not only a theoretical model but an ethical stance. It calls for attentiveness to the agencies that participate in creation and for responsibility toward the worlds that art helps bring into being.

By translating Performative New Materialism and Radical Immanence into a spatial and relational framework, the TFM expands the ontology of art. It situates creativity as a transmaterial event – a process of distributed becoming that encompasses inspiration, manifestation, signification, and the intuition that binds them. Within this framework, post‑creative machines and AI systems appear not as external tools but as active participants in this ecology, shaping how matter, machine, and meaning co‑compose the conditions of the visible, the thinkable, and the felt.

Art is not simply made once but continually materialised through relation. The Transmaterial Flow Matrix therefore functions as both a theoretical framework and an analytic tool for understanding how creativity unfolds across human, machinic, and material agencies.

Addendum: contribution and outlook

The TFM offers both a theoretical and practical contribution to the study of post‑creative art. It translates the philosophical principles of Performative New Materialism, Radical Immanence, and Transmaterialism into a navigable model that maps creativity as distributed becoming. Beyond explaining artistic processes, it provides a pedagogical and curatorial tool – a way to trace how ideas, materials, and technologies intra‑act across the Matrix. The framework encourages artists and researchers to cultivate attentiveness and ethical responsibility towards the agencies that participate in creation. As a living method, the TFM expands artistic education into a practice of relational awareness, aligning thought, perception, and feeling within the shared ecology of becoming.