Sensory Capacity vs. Intelligence: Reconstructing Artistic Subjectivity in the Age of Intelligence

As generative artificial intelligence continues to expand its capabilities in computation, reasoning, and content generation, we tend to imagine the future in terms of “more powerful intelligence,” while asking far less often: as algorithms take over an increasing number of creative tasks, where does artistic subjectivity reside? Drawing on the theoretical traditions of the phenomenology of bodily perception, embodied cognition, and enactive cognition, the speaker proposes the concept of “sensory capacity”—the human ability to engage with the concrete world through the body and to develop perception, judgment, and meaning through lived experience, action, and encounter. In contrast to machine intelligence, which renders the world data-driven, probabilistic, and calculable, sensory capacity preserves what is distinctly human: embodiment, difference, agency, and lived experience that cannot be fully encoded.

The speaker argues that what we should truly be wary of in the age of intelligence is not machines becoming more like humans, but humans becoming more like machines. As machines acquire ever more powerful content-generation capabilities, artistic subjectivity should no longer be grounded simply in the traditional logic of “who makes the work.” Instead, it must be redefined within the ongoing tension between “sensory capacity and intelligence.” The artist’s subjectivity is shifting away from absolute control over the production process and toward the organization of experience, the construction of relationships, the exercise of value judgment, and the assumption of responsibility for meaning. Thus, “sensory capacity vs. intelligence” is not a simple human–machine opposition, but a creative tension through which artistic subjectivity can be reconstructed. Machines continue to expand the boundaries of what can be calculated, predicted, and generated; the value of art, however, lies precisely in reawakening our capacity to endure uncertainty, integrate contradictory experiences, and actively construct meaning. Artistic subjectivity, then, is no longer a matter of exercising absolute control over technology and outcomes. Rather, through ongoing collaboration, friction, and resistance in relation to machine intelligence, it lies in preserving the complexity, multiplicity, and openness of human experience—and in affirming the irreducible “sensory capacity” that makes us human.