The Ontology of the Artist: Creation as an Event of Consciousness Embodied in the Medium

The artist is not primarily a producer of aesthetic objects, but a being who exists through creation. Read through Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Simondon, the artwork appears not as a mere manual product but as an event of consciousness embodied in a medium. From this perspective, the artistic idea (gagasan) is understood as incarnated intentionality: a form of meaning that emerges through gesture, bodily engagement, and material or technical negotiation. Art is distinguished from craft by a recursive capacity to take its own conditions— including the intentional absence of content—as its object. This recursive freedom also marks a structural limit of autonomous AI, whose outputs may be complex and novel but do not arise from a consciousness capable of non-creation. Artistic identity, accordingly, is not a permanent property of the person but an ontological event achieved in acts of genuinely free creation. On this basis, the article offers a framework for thinking about authenticity, artistic agency, and human-AI co-creation in the age of reflective technology.