When artificial intelligence comes to the Chinese calligraphic landscape: The coming transformation

Abstract

The rise of Artificial intelligence (AI) heralds potentially profound impact on the Chinese calligraphic landscape (CCL). Considering AI's increasing agential capacities, the anthropocentric conception of CCL that presupposes the priority of human identities, emotion, and creative work has been challenged. However, geographers remain quiet about AI-induced transformations up to date. To fill the research gap, this paper seeks to infuse more-than-human geographies into CCL. By taking a post-human approach, cultural geographers would have a novel understanding of human being in the creation of CCL. This paper initially discusses three prominent changes brought by deep learning (DL) in such landscape: a new ontological actor, transitory, and represented space. Responding to these transformations, the paper reconceptualizes the CCL as a post human term and unravels socio-spatial practices and diverse more-than-human geographies beneath such landscapes through three recent foci, namely robotic approaches to the CCL via DL, modeling experience brought about by AI, and human-AI collaboration for the creation of the CCL. Ultimately, this paper inspires geographers to profoundly comprehend CCLs in an era of AI. Through all these attempts, this paper advances insights into CCLs as more-than-humans-made.