Through the Lens of Felguérez’s Aesthetic Machine

Manuel Felguérez was one of the earliest artists experimenting with artificial intelligence (AI) in creating new art-making methods through the computer, foreshadowing generative and AI-based art-making. He developed an iterative process with rule-definition, randomization, and selection as experimental methods. His originality in creative method reflects the very foundational logic of today’s machine learning and has been recognized as an icon in the global history of experimental art and technology. This research analyzes Felguérez’s significance in art and aesthetic development, based on Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment, as well as late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century discourse on phenomenology, intuition, cognition, imagination, human faculties, and AI aesthetics (“Aisthetics”). It examines his approach, which connects the rational with the emergent. It also challenges the Romantic notion of the artist-genius by proposing a distributed authorship between human and system. At the same time, it reasserts the ethical and interpretive dimensions of aesthetic judgment. In this framework, the artist is positioned as both mediator and master of the machine.