GENERATIVE AI AS AN EXTENSION OF POSTMODERN AESTHETICS: DECONSTRUCTION AND AUTOMATION IN CONTEMPORARY VISUAL MEDIA

Abstract

This article examines generative artificial intelligence as an aesthetic phenomenon, arguing that the image- and media-generating systems that have proliferated since the late 2010s constitute not a rupture with the history of visual culture but an extension and intensification of the aesthetic logic of postmodernism. Where postmodern theory described a culture defined by pastiche, simulation, intertextuality, the collapse of the distinction between original and copy, and the displacement of the author as the origin of meaning, generative models built on adversarial and diffusion architectures appear to automate and operationalise precisely these conditions. The research traces the conceptual lineage connecting the post-structuralist and postmodern theory of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Fredric Jameson to the technical operation of contemporary generative systems, and analyses how core postmodern strategies — deconstruction, citation, the dissolution of the aura, and the rejection of the singular author — are materialised in machine-generated visual media. A conceptual and media-theoretical analysis framework, presented as a systematic mapping of postmodern concepts to their generative analogues, is applied alongside comparative case study analysis of four paradigmatic generative art works by Refik Anadol, Mario Klingemann, and Anna Ridler, enabling identification of the specific ways in which automation both extends and transforms the postmodern aesthetic inheritance. Critical perspectives that contest the postmodern thesis, including Lev Manovich’s data realism framework and arguments for the persistence of authorship, are examined alongside the main argument. The article gives particular attention to the Azerbaijani design context, examining how the structural underrepresentation of non-Western visual cultures in generative training data intersects with the specific conditions of post-Soviet aesthetic transition and emergent local generative practice. Implications for visual practitioners, design educators, and cultural theorists are discussed.