The New Avant-Garde? From Futurism to Artificial Intelligence in Art*

Are we on the brink of a new artistic revolution? This article explores how the radical spirit of Futurism — with its embrace of speed, machines, and movement — finds a contemporary echo in today’s AI-driven artistic practices. Through examples from stage design to visual arts, including Refik Anadol, Mario Klingemann, and Sofia Crespo, we reflect on whether artificial intelligence is not just a tool, but a new creative partner. Is a new avant-garde emerging in the age of code?

In 1909, with Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, it was claimed that art — especially stage design — should not merely keep up with the spirit of the time but radically reshape it. Speed, technology, movement, and the machine were the core elements shaping the aesthetic vision of Futurist artists. The stage was no longer just a platform for performance — it had become a dynamic space. So today, in the 21st century, might visual arts once again be standing at a similar threshold?

 

What Futurism Brought to the Stage

Futurists sought to free theatre from the stagnation of the past by transforming stage design into a living, evolving organism. From Luigi Russolo’s Art of Noises to Enrico Prampolini’s electro-mechanical stage architecture, they created radical, multi-sensory experiences. Fragmented perspectives, light as an expressive tool, and the breaking of the audience-performer boundary brought about a multidimensional and simultaneous mode of expression.

 

AI and the Stage: A New Avant-Garde?

Today, AI-powered stage design applications — from lighting setups to interactive projections, and scenographic systems that adapt in real time to audience feedback — are opening up entirely new artistic domains. AI is no longer a mere “assistant,” but has begun to actively participate as a creative collaborator. A stage’s visual setup can now be reinterpreted by AI in real time, based on audience reaction.

Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations series transforms massive datasets into cinematic and architectural visual compositions. His installations at ZKM Karlsruhe poetically intertwine digital consciousness with spatial experience.

In Overflow, presented by the Alexander Whitley Dance Company, AI-based projections respond in real time to dancers’ movements, crafting a kinetic and ever-shifting body-light relationship on stage.

Rimini Protokoll’s Uncanny Valley questions the nature of performance by placing a speaking android in place of a live actor, pushing us to reflect on the role of artificial beings in theatre.

From Stage to Image: AI and Visual Arts

This transformation is not limited to the stage. Similarly, in the visual arts, AI’s emergence as a generative force is sparking a new aesthetic debate — one that some may see as the birth of a new avant-garde. Examples include:

• Mario Klingemann – In his Neural Glitch and Mistaken Identity portraits, he breaks down the fixed ideals of classical portraiture using neural networks, crafting an aesthetic of uncertainty and distortion. His techniques are rooted in Pix2Pix and Pix2PixHD GANs, but refined through years of experimentation to reduce typical GAN artifacts and enhance control over details.

• Sofia Crespo – In her Neural Zoo project, Crespo generates AI-powered “living forms” that resemble organisms from nature — but don’t belong to any known taxonomy. Her work invites us to reimagine nature itself through an algorithmic lens. These pieces challenge the boundary between biological and artificial aesthetics and question whether neural networks can become tools not only of analysis but also of poetic creation.

As the above examples illustrate, just as Futurists defied traditional theatre, today’s AI-generated stage and visual art practices challenge our current artistic paradigms. Meyerhold once referred to the actor as a “living machine” — and today, the machine is becoming an active presence within the creation of meaning. But what does this shift truly signify?

 

Instead of a Conclusion: Questions I’d Like to Explore With You

• The Futurists saw technology not merely as a tool, but as an artistic subject. To them, the machine was a poetic figure, speed, a new form of beauty. Could artificial intelligence today be not just a technical innovation, but a catalyst for aesthetic and intellectual transformation?

• Like the Futurists, if AI-driven stage and visual production redefines our artistic norms, could this signify the emergence of a new artistic epoch?

• Just as Futurist artists revolutionized performance in the early 20th century, might today’s AI collaborators be the forerunners of a 21st-century avant-garde?

 

 

*This essay is inspired by my academic article titled “What Futurism Brought to Stage Design.” You can access the full article [here].
**The visual accompanying this article was generated with the support of artificial intelligence, in alignment with the theme.