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Theoretical analysis uncovers shared rhythmic structures between painterly abstraction and AI-generated figures, highlighting aesthetic continuity between modernist art and algorithms.
The notion of rhythm in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings provides an understanding the composition of paintings. Because rhythm is also entangled with concepts such as non-organic life, milieu, coding, and the binary opposition between background and figure, it is a concept that can be applied to AI generated images. With the help of Paul Claudel, Rosalind Krauss, Henri Maldiney, Pascal Michon, Jacques Rancière, among others, rhythm is seen as a way to get to an aesthetics of spatial abstraction that in turn informs the notion of non-organic life and algorithmic art. Deleuze and Guattari’s rhythm manifests this most clearly in the paintings of Rembrandt and Bacon. AI generated nudes by Robbie Barrat have a surface resemblance to abstract figures painted by Bacon. Non-organic life, with its proximity to chaos, is also contrasted to abstract painting’s penchant for the scientific and the algorithmic, which provides way of historically associating computer-generated art to modernist masters. Rhythm as an aesthetic concept can provide points of analogy between two different artistic mediums, one which is painterly abstraction and the other AI-generated figures.
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Jakub Zdebik (2026) studied this question.
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