The Landscape Sees

Deleuze’s Percept and Catastrophe in Painting and AI Art as Painting.

Authors

Keywords:

Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Percept, Catastrophe, Artificial Intelligence, AI Landscape

Abstract

The notion landscape in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings are the origin of two aesthetic concepts: the percept and the catastrophe. The percept indicates visual compound independent from artist, subject and viewer.  Deleuze and Guattari see this manifest most clearly in the paintings of Cézanne.  The catastrophe indicates a transformation from subject to surface of the painting and is a gesture element that can easily saturate the painted field.  Turner is the exemplar of this concept.  In AI generated landscapes that are made to resemble Cézanne and Turner, where do those aesthetic categories reside? Are they still aesthetic or rather indicate a politics of overproduction.

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Published

02-07-2025