Draft:Posthuman Pop
Submission declined on 26 July 2025 by MediaKyle (talk).
Where to get help
How to improve a draft
You can also browse Wikipedia:Featured articles and Wikipedia:Good articles to find examples of Wikipedia's best writing on topics similar to your proposed article. Improving your odds of a speedy review To improve your odds of a faster review, tag your draft with relevant WikiProject tags using the button below. This will let reviewers know a new draft has been submitted in their area of interest. For instance, if you wrote about a female astronomer, you would want to add the Biography, Astronomy, and Women scientists tags. Editor resources
|  |
| Submission declined on 24 July 2025 by Jlwoodwa (talk). Your draft shows signs of having been generated by a large language model, such as ChatGPT. Their outputs usually have multiple issues that prevent them from meeting our guidelines on writing articles. These include: Declined by Jlwoodwa 5 days ago.
| |
Posthuman Pop
[edit]Posthuman Pop is a cultural and aesthetic movement that blends themes of posthumanism in which human identity is no longer central or univocally fixed within an organic entity,[1][2][3] with elements of popular culture (such as Pop Art) and mass art, particularly in music, visual arts, and virtual performance. In a technologically saturated world, Posthuman Pop blurs the artistic boundaries between the natural and the artificial, the human and the machine, aiming to explore new forms of identity and interconnection in which machine, technology and humans co-exist, while still remaining grounded in human experience and emotion.
Overview
[edit]Emerging in the early 21st century, Posthuman Pop reflects a cultural response to the merging of human and machine, partiularly due to the widespread diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in computational[4] as well as in creative[5] and communication fields[6], including visual arts (such as photography, cinema), music, literature and mass media. The term draws from posthumanist theory, which critiques the centrality of the human subject in favor of decentralized, hybrid, and interconnected identities.[1][2][3]
Characteristics
[edit]Common features of Posthuman Pop include:
- Hybrid human-machine aesthetics (e.g., AI-generated vocals, avatars, virtual personas).
- Themes of digital alienation, synthetic intimacy, and emotional simulation.
- Use of generative or algorithmic tools in music and visual art like Glitch visuals, lo-fi textures, and hyperreal or digitally distorted imagery
In Music
[edit]Posthuman Pop music blends elements of electronic pop, ambient music, glitch music, and experimental genres. Vocals are often processed through autotune, vocoders, or AI synthesis, often creating an emotionally ambiguous or post-natural voice. Lyrics frequently explore emotional disconnection, surveillance, and the search for identity in an algorithmic world.[7]
Artists frequently associated with Posthuman Pop include:
- Holly Herndon – Her work explores the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI), voice synthesis, and identity. Albums such as Platform (2015) and PROTO (2019) feature machine-learning-based collaborators, including her AI vocal agent (i.e., virtual persona), Spawn.[7]
- Yeule – Known for dreamy, glitch-influenced pop that explores themes of cyber-identity, trauma, and digital melancholia.[8]
- Arca – Combines human and synthetic sonic elements to challenge convenctions around gender, body, and sound.[9]
In Visual Arts and Performance
[edit]In the visual domain, Posthuman Pop includes:
- Generative AI art using neural networks
- 3D avatars and digital performers
- Glitch art and post-internet aesthetics
- Virtual influencers (e.g., Lil Miquela) who question the boundary between human and artificial identity[10]
- Artists and performers often engage with augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and other immersive technologies that foreground the instability of presence, body, and location.
Relation to Pop Art and Posthumanism
[edit]Posthuman Pop can be seen as a 21st-century parallel to Pop art, which in the mid-20th century transformed mass media, advertising, and consumer imagery into the subject matter of fine art. Just as artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein appropriated the aesthetics of print media and popular culture, Posthuman Pop uses the language of pervasive digital media, synthetic and virtual identities, and algorithmic systems to explore a redefined human condition.[11][5]
Unlike academic posthumanism, which centers on theoretical and philosophical analysis,[1][2][3] Posthuman Pop focus more on emotive and artistic expression. It emphasize the emotional and media-based communication aspect over the philosophical theories, presenting a more popular and accessible digitally mediated cultural for of expression.[12] Its aim is to intercept and convey human emotions through synthetic media, rather than to represent or analyze the machine consciousness and its implications on society.[13]
Posthuman Pop can be seen as a 21st-century parallel to Pop art, which in the mid-20th century transformed mass media, advertising, and consumer imagery into the subject matter of fine art. Just as artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein appropriated the aesthetics of print media and popular culture, Posthuman Pop uses the language of pervasive digital media, synthetic and virtual identities, and algorithmic systems to explore a redefined human condition.[5][11]
Criticism
[edit]Some critics argue that Posthuman Pop risks aestheticizing or commercializing complex ethical questions surrounding AI, automation, and identity.[14] Others see it as a continuation of pop culture’s long-standing engagement with technology, transformation, and spectacle.[5]
See also
[edit]- Posthumanism
- Cyborg theory
- Glitch art
- Pop art
- AI-generated music
- AI-visual art
- Post-internet
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
References
[edit]- ^ a b c Ferrando, Francesca (2013). "Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms" (PDF). Existenz. 8 (2): 28:30, 32 – via existenz.us.
- ^ a b c Wolfe, Cary (2011). What is posthumanism?. Posthumanities (3. print ed.). Minneapolis, Minn: Univ. of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-6614-0.
- ^ a b c Hayles, N. Katherine (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226321462.
- ^ Russell, Stuart J.; Norvig, Peter (2020). Artificial intelligence: a modern approach. Pearson Series in Artificial Intelligence. Ming-wei Chang, Jacob Devlin, Anca Dragan, David Forsyth, Ian Goodfellow, Jitendra Malik, Vikash Mansinghka, Judea Pearl, Michael J. Wooldridge. Hoboken, NJ: Pearson. ISBN 978-0-13-461099-3.
- ^ a b c d Miller, Arthur I. (2019). The artist in the machine: the world of AI powered creativity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-04285-7.
- ^ Hohenstein, Jess; DiFranzo, Dominic; Kizilcec, Rene F.; Aghajari, Zhila; Mieczkowski, Hannah; Levy, Karen; Naaman, Mor; Hancock, Jeff; Jung, Malte (2021-02-10), Artificial intelligence in communication impacts language and social relationships, arXiv:2102.05756
- ^ a b "Electronic Pop for the Surveillance Era". The New Yorker. 20 May 2019. Retrieved 22 July 2025.
- ^ "Yeule's digital ghost pop is redefining emo". Financial Times. 18 Jan 2023. Retrieved 22 July 2025.
- ^ "Arca: Xen Album Review". Pitchfork. Retrieved 22 July 2025.
- ^ "How Lil Miquela Became a Virtual Star". The New York Times. Retrieved 22 July 2025.
- ^ a b Kuhn, Laura (2016). "Bodies and Digital Discontinuities: Posthumanism, Fractals, and Popular Music in the Digital Age". Science Fiction Studies. 43: 104. doi:10.5621/SCIEFICTSTUD.43.1.0104. Retrieved 22 July 2025.
- ^ Lee, Yoon Kyung; Park, Yong-Ha; Hahn, Sowon (2023), A Portrait of Emotion: Empowering Self-Expression through AI-Generated Art, arXiv:2304.13324
- ^ Lomas, James Derek; Maden, Willem van der; Bandyopadhyay, Sohhom; Lion, Giovanni; Patel, Nirmal; Jain, Gyanesh; Litowsky, Yanna; Xue, Haian; Desmet, Pieter (2024-05-28), Improved Emotional Alignment of AI and Humans: Human Ratings of Emotions Expressed by Stable Diffusion v1, DALL-E 2, and DALL-E 3, arXiv:2405.18510
- ^ Zylinska, Joanna (2020). AI art: machine visions and warped dreams. Open Humanities Press. ISBN 978-1-78542-085-6.
- Promotional tone, editorializing and other words to watch
- Vague, generic, and speculative statements extrapolated from similar subjects
- Essay-like writing
- Hallucinations (plausible-sounding, but false information) and non-existent references
- Close paraphrasing
Please address these issues. The best way is usually to read reliable sources and summarize them, instead of using a large language model. See our help page on large language models.