The Liminality of Generative Creation: The Artistic Process between Intuition and Algorithm

Abstract

This study theorises artistic collaboration with generative artificial intelligence through the concept of generative liminality, understood as a transitional and unstable zone in which human intention, cultural memory, and algorithmic inference enter into negotiation. Grounded in a case study of Rafani’s exhibition Everyone Has the Right to Everything (Gallery 8smička, 2025), the analysis examines how AI-assisted creation operates within a small-language, post-socialist context shaped by ideological ambivalence, satire, and distrust of universalist promises. Developed in Czech and structured around locally specific political references, the project exposed the frictions that emerge when globally trained AI models engage regional realities. Rather than functioning as neutral tools, these systems selectively translate, flatten, and recompose local imaginaries, design vocabularies, and rhetorical forms. Such distortions are approached here not simply as technical limitations, but as epistemic symptoms of the asymmetries embedded in contemporary generative infrastructures. A central component of the exhibition was an AI-generated audiovisual layer. Four satirical short films, styled as “Pixar-like” animations, presented a tardigrade interviewing four “successful” Czech women, while three additional videos featured fictional male influencers performing polarised monologues on migration, left politics, and the pre-election climate. Produced entirely through AI-based image, animation, voice, sound, and script generation, these works mobilised speculative fiction as a mode of cultural diagnosis. The chapter argues that generative systems participate in the reconfiguration of political and cultural representation, reshaping not only aesthetic production but also the conditions under which locality becomes legible.