Ana Mikadze
Antonio Palacios Rojo
“While Baumgarten proposes conferring on the senses the task of ignoring the ‘inferior’ in favor of a rationalistic perfectibility, Herder makes the aesthetic history of mankind dependent on the constructive acquisition of a dynamic and multiform substance (...). Since humans originally communicated their aesthetic impressions without plot-driven stories, stylistic artifice, or rhetorical attempts at persuasion, basal art distinguished itself through a high measure of spontaneity".
(A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder, Hans Adler, Wulf Köpke)
Art and technology have long colluded to privilege the audiovisual, leaving the body’s other senses—smell, touch, taste—neglected and undervalued. This hierarchy, rooted in Western dualism, elevates sight and hearing as the senses of the mind, while relegating the rest to the 'lower' realm of the body. But in an era of hyper-technological control, this division is not just outdated—it is dangerous.
We need a Basal Art that resists the extractive and exploitative reuse of human images and sounds for commerce, warfare, repression, and surveillance. Smell, touch, and taste ground us in the world, offering direct experience unmediated by machines.
The militarization of automation rests on two dangerous assumptions: first, that geopolitical dominance equals security; and second, that this dominance can be achieved through technology alone. The result? An endless, high-stakes arms race fueled by the ever-expanding military-industrial complex.
This push for automation seeks to erase the human, reducing perception to techno-optics and techno-acoustics. But computers do not see—they detect pixels, hunting for statistical patterns in images. Computers do not hear—they measure sound levels, searching for correlations in data. The more automated the system, the more it relies on crude algorithms to identify and categorize, trained on narrow datasets that exclude the most vulnerable: the disabled, women of color, children... In a crisis, a machine might "perceive" a building full of people but find nothing worth preserving. The computer is never truly present. It cannot touch, smell, or taste the world it acts upon—yet we arm this senseless mechanism with the power to destroy entire populations.
Despite its cold precision, technological warfare is deeply emotional for the humans behind it. Drone operators, for example, often avoid learning about the cultural or social realities of their targets—a deliberate distance to shield themselves from the trauma of humanizing those they are ordered to kill. The logical endpoint is the complete removal of humans from the process. To kill or exploit on a mass scale—whether in war or in civilian life—automation must be deployed to bypass moral resistance from those carrying out these inhumane tasks.
Art, then, must reclaim what is most human: the direct, unmediated experience of the body and the raw sensitivity of aesthetic encounter. Basal Art resists the narratives that both modern art and military technology—such as DARPA’s Narrative Networks—use to manipulate behavior. Images and sounds are ideal for storytelling, but smells, tastes, and touch defy easy narration. They disrupt the constructed scripts that justify or denounce domination.
Some artists still create work that merely visualizes data—remote, detached, and devoid of direct contact with the realities they claim to address. Even in protest, they uphold a philosophy of distance, avoiding true engagement with the suffering they depict. They remain trapped in the same alienating systems they critique.
The problem deepens as major tech corporations abandon their reluctance to collaborate with the arms industry, integrating their AI or software into weapon systems. Artists who rely on these technologies now share tools with machines designed to erase lives. A careless activist might host their work on the same "private kill cloud" used by militaries to annihilate civilian populations. Never before has the line between war and art been so blurred—or so dangerous.
Artists who uncritically adopt these technologies risk becoming complicit in their violence. By relying on the same tools that power militarized automation, they reinforce the very systems they claim to challenge. The question is no longer whether art can be political—it is whether artists will choose to align themselves with the machine or with the body.
We exist in physical space—always. Yet the vast infrastructure and labor that sustain our digital world remain hidden, obscured by language that breathes life into the mechanical, humanizing what is cold and calculated. Technology is sold to us in spiritual, ethereal terms, cloaking its true nature in self-serving mysticism. What we need is art that anchors us back in the physical, forcing us to confront the violence and alienation this technology produces. Without it, we risk becoming complicit—enabling AI to serve as a tool of war, control, and corporate domination.
The virtual has always been an escape, so it’s no surprise we retreat further into its allegorical landscapes. Over time, we construct ever more elaborate mental spaces, shaped by longing and fragmented desires, all fed by a system that knows how to make us hallucinate. Only those who control the data—who hold the keys to this privileged information—truly understand the primal instincts and hidden passions driving this world of pining human yearning.
Two realities now collide: the hallucinatory, mental plane of the virtual, and the degraded, physical world it leaves behind. The infrastructures sustaining the digital demand vast energy, metals, and water—resources torn from the earth, often at the expense of vulnerable communities. Mining waste poisons land; aquifers are diverted from people to servers, and the machine’s thirst is quenched before the human’s. The system’s hunger for data and resources doesn’t just exploit—it displaces, it erases. In the end, the machine is prioritized, and the human is left to wither.
Art can—and must—expand beyond the visual and auditory, embracing touch, taste, and scent to create immersive, sensory experiences. In an era starved of true intimacy, where even the act of touching has become scarce, our well-being suffers. Artists hold the power to restore what has been lost.
This new Basal Art emerges in defiance of the sterile, extractive mindset that tech giants impose through audiovisual dominance. It rejects the passive consumption of data, the endless surveillance, and the virtual circuits that reduce human experience to metrics. Artists must break free from this cycle, forging connections that exist beyond the reach of algorithms.
If technology alienates us from our bodies and the physical world, then art must do the opposite. It must reawaken the senses, creating experiences that cannot be reduced to data or exploited by algorithms. Basal Art is not just an aesthetic choice—it is an act of resistance, a refusal to let human experience be mediated by machines.
Basal Art has been inspired by a concrete site: southern Armenia. Just as basal works are anchored in the reality of what is felt through all the senses, in the same way this undertaking needs a place of birth to call forth artistic action.
We invite intervention in similar places, reclaiming a new creativity. Over time, the surrounding zone has been caught in a cruel and senseless technological war. Therefore, our intuition has proven true. Let us fill with Basal Art those parts of the earth that will soon be destroyed as a consequence of a poor way of thinking, feeling, and creating.
Butterflies do not respect borders; they traverse their own pathways. The Blue Polyommatus Damonides is known worldwide for two populations: one located in Nakhichevan (a western Azerbaijan enclave) and another in the Meghri area of Armenia. The Armenian population was thought to be extinct due to habitat destruction from open-pit mining, but remnants of this species have recently been rediscovered, necessitating strong protection.
Many use plant-derived toxins for defense, making themselves toxic or unpalatable, akin to chemical warfare. The spots on their wings signal this danger to potential enemies. To survive, they create accidental beauty for our eyes. Others mimic these rare color patterns to appear lethal or distasteful.
Another traditional combat tactic used by these insects is camouflage. Some have colors similar to leaves, branches, and other elements of the landscape. When resting, a butterfly often position its wings to cast minimal shadow. A few even distract predators with decoys, such as simulating a false head on their tail to mislead attackers into striking the wrong end. Those that lack these defenses often execute an unpredictable flight, to difficult the catching.
Insect collection, much like wars where AI is employed, involves creating target lists, gathering all possible information about their environment and behavior, and then pinning them. They can be captured passively with traps, some baited with sweet foods, or actively with nets. Ultraviolet light is used for nocturnal bugs. Aspirators capture the smallest ones. Aerial nets catch flying arthropods, while a sweep net is needed for those living among vegetation. Once collected, they are sacrificed for preservation using killing jars or ethanol and water solutions, depending on their type.
The dynamics of human hunting through new inventions often begin by dehumanizing their marks. The drone operators usually called their killings as ‘bug splats’ because that was what they resemble on their screens. In a practice widely used in the past, the enemy is treated as non-human. Each of the "eliminated" has a profile with their data, which first places them on a kill list and then leads to their death. It seems as if they are collecting insects. When people enter certain contested areas, they can easily become targets for states equipped with advanced surveillance tools.
A reality that doesn't get much attention in the news is the so-called trade routes. Historically, these have been linked to armed conflicts: wars, skirmishes, punitive actions, terrorism, etc. This is clearly evident in the case of the Zangezur corridor. In regions like this, coveted by several neighboring powers, small countries tend to appear and disappear; enclaves with strange names that almost no one remembers once they cease to exist (Republic of Mountainous Armenia). We could say that, like a mark on the skin warning of a disease, shifting borders and states controlled by large empires are symptoms of significant commercial interests at play in that part of the world.
Therefore, it is crucial to identify as soon as possible these zones that will become operational fields of technical brutality. Another sign is when, after sudden military incursions, or a full-blown war, there is silence surrounding them. In South Caucasus, many examples of violence have already occurred that barely merited space in the massive flow of information. Even certain instances of ethnic cleansing and destruction of cultural heritage, which in other cases have raised alarms when recorded elsewhere.
For this reason, it is crucial to identify as early as possible those zones that will become operational fields of technical brutality. Another signal is when, following sudden military incursions or large-scale war, silence is maintained around them. In the South Caucasus, many violent episodes have already occurred and scarcely merited space in the massive flow of information. Even certain cases of ethnic cleansing and destruction of cultural heritage, which in other contexts would have set off alarms, passed almost unnoticed.
Another clear signal of capitalist greed has been revealed with the agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan to create a corridor called Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity. Once again, an enclave with a strange name is symptomatic of imperialism, this time from the USA. Since mid-2025 we have been gathering information about the disputed Zangezur corridor. Day after day, headline after headline, the pressures from major powers aimed at controlling a great commercial route connecting east to west became evident. Finally, everything culminated in the war pitting Israel and the United States against Iran, two sides vying for control of the South Caucasus.
Faced with, for example, a genocide fueled by major US technology corporations, or massive bombings marked by the abuse of Artificial "Intelligence", proposals such as Basal Art seem to hold no power whatsoever over the destiny of humanity. Yet the obligation of artists consists in seeking new forms of creation that rebel and that reveal the imperatives of each epoch. Connecting people with all their senses becomes almost mandatory in order to pull them from a state of prostration, anxiety, and hopelessness.
(June 2025 – April 2026)