Making a Play for Identity: Exploring the Posthuman Condition of Generative AI Through Language-Based Artistic Research by Elena Peytchinska

In this project, we address the relationship between generative AI and principles of play from a posthuman perspective, drawing on our work in Language-Based Artistic Research. We position Language Arts as a committed expressive practice that is productively distinct from creative writing while capable of generating insights relevant both within artistic domains and beyond. Moving past binary positions of technological apocalypse or uncritical affirmation, we adopt an artistically reflexive approach to generative AI and its cultural, particularly posthuman, implications. To illustrate this relationship, we experiment with large and small language models trained to play a game based on the structure of "Who am I," the experience of which we will demonstrate during our presentation. This approach addresses not only the linguistic expression and linguistic constitution of identity but also examines the underlying principles of play itself. Our artistic research draws on James P. Carse’s (1986) and Simon Sinek’s (2019) models of finite and infinite games and explores the challenges of relating these artistic and theoretical frameworks to one another. In our experimental setting—alongside philosophical considerations, game-related elements such as rules and improvisation, and combinatorial aesthetics—we focus on two key areas for artistic investigation through a posthuman lens: First, we explore principles of playful, polyvalent experimentation that resist orientation toward reproducible results or unambiguous truths in a scientific sense. Second, following Johanna Drucker's reflections (2023), we examine the concept of agency as a more relevant focus for AI than intelligence or sentience, distinguishing between AI's core functions of synthesis and simulation and acknowledging that AI's capabilities align more closely with pattern-based processes than with the human concept of creativity. Through this methodological constellation, we combine our fundamental positioning in Language-Based Artistic Research with game theory frameworks to question how generative AI engages with concepts of playability and artificially generated identities. This research contributes to emerging conversations about the nature of machine agency and the evolving boundaries between human and machine-generated expression.

Making a Play for Identity: Exploring the Posthuman Condition of Generative AI Through Language-Based Artistic Research

Game: What Am I

From "Who Am I?" to "What Am I?"

assymetry of

"cognitive frameworks"

creative misalignment

transparent articulation of the playbot’s computational non-humanness

abstract concepts

unstable, evolving identities

non-human entities

While we cannot avoid anthropomorphism—we see with human eyes and think with human brains—anthropocentrism can and should be contested. Anthropocentrism positions humans “at the center” conceptually, politically, socially, and economically, declaring that humans are the most important species on Earth and the most entitled to exploit Earth’s resources for their/our own benefit.

N.Katherine Hayles, Bacteria to AI , 2025

Playbot: the replicant

from finite to infinite game structure

[...] I will risk a prediction. Short of environmental collapse or nuclear war, from now on, the trajectories of human and artificial intelligence will evolve together. For better or worse (perhaps for better and worse), the course of our futures and those of AI, our nonhuman symbionts, will run together.

N.Katherine Hayles, "Modes of Cognition", 2025

Questions:

Are asymmetrical, non-hierarchical co-authorships possible?
Do we need a new "creative" vocabulary to articulate them?
What problems or further questions might arise through the training process of the playbot?

How to make a play for identity by differentiating between actants, operators, agents, agency and cognition?

Actant, recall, is Bruno Latour’s term for a source of action; an actant can be human or not, or, most likely, a combination of both. Latour defines it as "something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general." An actant is neither an object nor a subject but an "intervener," akin to the Deleuzian "quasi-casual operator." An operator is that which, by virtue of its particular location in an assemblage and the fortuity of being in the right place at the right time, makes the difference, makes things happen, becomes the decisive force catalyzing an event. Actant and operator are substitute words for what in a more subject-centered vocabulary are called agents. Agentic capacity is now seen as differentially distributed across a wider range of ontological types.

Bennett, Vibrant Matter 2010, 8-9

[...] anything that perceives its environment through sensors and acts upon that environment through actuators

Russell/Norvig Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach 2010, 34

Luciano Floridi: AI as "artificial agency" and not intelligence (AI Ethics, 2023)

Johanna Drucker: "Designing Agency" (2023) – different types of agency

(Relational) New Materialism(s): i.e., Barad (emergent, inter-active), Bennett (thing-power)

N. Katherine Hayles: Integrated Cognitive Frameworks (Bacteria to AI, 2025) – agency vs cognition

nonconscious cognition

cognitive assemblages

Unthought 2017, Bacteria to AI 2025

mechanical agency

probabilistic agency

intentional agency

Tip

Tip