Basal Art
A project by Ana Mikadze and 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)
Reclaim the Somatic
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 But in an era of hyper-technological control, this division is not just outdated—it is dangerous.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.
Dominance Through Automation
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 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 inhuman 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.
Art as Unwitting Accomplice
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 weapons 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.
The Cloud Is Draining Your River
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.
Virtual Hallucination vs. Real Degradation
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 humans’ 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.
From the Dead to the Living: A Somatic Awakening
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.
No Exhibition, Only Experience
As the first act of this new Basal Art, artist Ana Mikadze will create an object designed to be encountered through smell, touch, and taste. This work will serve as a prototype—open to replication by anyone who wishes to stage their own intervention. The most resonant sites for these acts will be places scarred by technological exploitation or under threat from economic forces that could escalate into automated, ruthless conflict.
The aim is to share a moment of pure sensory and aesthetic presence—one that bypasses the mental and its illusions: narrative, theoretical framing, abstract or spiritual appeals. Everything leading up to this—even this manifesto—participates in the very systems we critique. Language, whether written or spoken, remains an audiovisual construct, distancing us from direct experience and trapping perception within the controlled, destructive frameworks of the mind.
Ana Mikadze’s prototype is not just an artwork—it is an invitation. By creating objects that engage smell, touch, and taste, we offer a model for others to replicate, adapt, and deploy in their own contexts. These interventions need not be grand; they need only be present—grounded in the physical realities of the places and people they seek to honor.
The time for passive observation is over. We must create art that does more than represent the world—it must reclaim it. Let these somatic objects emerge where the weight of the mechanical world presses hardest. Let them remind us what it means to be human.