When the Model Becomes the Medium: Artistic Intervention in Artificial Generative Space

Research on AI art commonly casts artificial intelligence as producer, tool, collaborator, curator, or interpretive object, with human recipients predominating. Prior work has explored robotic and machinic audiences and art made by and for machines. This article develops a systematic ontology of recipient-specific generative-space art, in which a particular AI functions as recipient and its configured generative organization functions as medium. Generative-space art is defined as a distributed event structure composed of intervention design, recipient-relative reorganization, bounded unfolding, and record. Functional reception is defined through recipient specificity, incorporation, constitutive response, and relational non-substitutability, without requiring phenomenal consciousness or intrinsic intentionality. A preregistered experiment on conceptual armament serves only as a candidate mechanism: holding the generator constant, conceptually equipped configurations were associated with differences in rated originality and in the level of generated questions. The experiment does not establish artistic status or AI reception. The article develops the ontology and boundary conditions of the form, distinguishes artistic practice from optimization, training, and manipulation, and specifies a research programme separating causal evidence of reorganization from artistic constitution. The account relocates the candidate artwork from a generated artifact to a recipient-specific event in which an artificial generative space is reorganized, unfolded, and recorded.