This essay delves into the evolving landscape of contemporary art, focusing on two distinct yet influential paradigms: participatory and systemic artistic practice. Participatory art, characterized by its emphasis on viewer interaction and communal experience, transforms the audience from passive observers to active participants. It fosters a platform for diverse interpretations and engagement, often addressing socio-political issues through immersive environments. Systemic artistic practice, conversely, presents a radical reimagining of the practice of engaging with complex, self-evolving networks that intersect technological, ecological, and social systems, challenging anthropocentric framings and acknowledging the agency of nonhuman actors. This essay explores the characteristics, philosophical underpinnings, and broader implications of these two paradigms. By doing so, it offers a critical understanding of how these emerging artistic practices reflect and reshape societal, cultural, and technological narratives.

The Uncanny Valley is a thought experiment that has been colloquially used since 1970 to discuss technology’s sometimes uncomfortable resemblance to human life. Seventy years later, this paradigm is no longer sufficient when discussing technological uncanniness in the world. Topics like synthetic biology, atmospheric engineering, and biomimetic robotics cannot be understood using a singular threshold based on human likeness. This lack of perspective on how technology reflects and impacts the non-human, "natural'' world is particularly apparent in the field of BioArt and BioDesign where critical theory becomes closely intertwined with hard science. Drawing on language from the BioArt domain, this project expands the univariate, human-centric Uncanny Valley by exploring uncanniness along the three axes of the living, the biological, and the natural.

This paper seeks to explore and critically analyse the emergent genre of digital image creation proposed as ‘Synthography’. Drawing upon previous foundational texts by the author, this paper aims to delve into the theoretical implications and practical applications of Synthography. The text discusses the new possibilities in visual arts driven by the advancements in digital tools and artificial intelligence, which redefines the traditional concepts of photography. It explores the process of 3D modelling and its role in product photography as well as the concept of the ‘uncanny valley’ by using the example of a synthetic recreation of a wild boar through Synthography. This theory, which refers to the discomfort experienced when a representation is very close but not entirely identical to the real thing, has significant implications for this new genre. The interplay between the ‘real’ and the ‘synthetic’ in Synthography often walks this fine line, leading to innovative, yet sometimes unsettling, visual experiences.

Visual and digital art mostly represent a field of culture where one viewer looks at one work of art. Personal appreciation of visual objects is a standard condition for experiencing fine art. But in music or dance, for example, this "standard condition" is collective reception. Creation can also be collective. These art forms require co-authorship, taking into account the ac-tions of other participants and the constant adaptation of artistic behavior – important in music, dance and film produc-tion. An interactive artwork may be created by a single artist or team and may be intended for one or more view-ers/participants. This last situation, which is the object of this analysis, is related to the cooperation between the so-called "pre-artwork" and the viewer. The existence of a work is es-sentially an event, it exists as a performance and becomes real through "playing it". The purpose of this article is to analyze works that are purposefully designed for multiple (rather than one) users and in which the artistic concept emerges as a result of the collaboration of two or more participants.

This paper serves as a proposition for an alternate taxonomy regarding systems and media practices. With the digital no longer an adequate term for describing the specificities of media art, we briefly track the histories of various nomenclature with respect to their characteristics. Drawing on a biological metaphor of the living cell membrane we pay particular attention to systems and systems art and suggest an inclusive approach to the specificities of art that sits across numerous classifications. Open and closed systems are recognized as offering a broader approach; however, we see these as embedded in particular chronologies and disciplines. Our proposal is that the term permeability is more descriptive of the breadth of practices that fall into the media art category, and in fact this nomenclature may be applied to all art forms.