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Abstract
This paper explores generative technology’s ongoing aesthetic evolution through the lens of anticipation. It proposes anticipation as an alternative perspective to automation to understand the implications of generative technology in relation to aesthetic production and evolution. By focusing on anticipation, the discussion shifts from merely considering AI’s impact on aesthetics as instrumental to creative production to examining the anticipative behaviors and affective responses these technologies develop, engage, and cultivate through our interactions with them. Understanding generative technology as anticipatory highlights how deeply human and cultural expectations influence the design, recursive adaptation, and future anticipations of AI systems. Viewing our engagements with them as anticipative emphasizes the role of affective experience and behavior in shaping evolutionary processes with these technologies. The focus on anticipation introduces a shift in aesthetics research, from analyzing the status and meaning of aesthetic objects and outcomes to examining the anticipatory, processual relations through which outcomes emerge, exist, and evolve. This shift moves aesthetics research towards a deeper engagement with the dynamic and intra-active relationships among humans, technology, and other anticipatory systems, and towards further engagement with the ethical constructs we develop through these relationships.