We aren't thinking beings who sometimes create. We're creating beings who sometimes think.
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“A tour de force, astonishingly comprehensive exploration of the creative life. Part manifesto, part manual, part tale of a journey taken, Homo Artis embodies in every way the path forward it advocates: openness, inventiveness, curiosity, playfulness, depth, fullness of feeling. Every sentence shines.”Jane Hirshfield
“Illuminating and entertaining… invites readers to ‘dance with the machine’ in his part memoir, part manifesto about the artist’s journey in the artificial intelligence era.”Kirkus Reviews
Essays on creativity, art, and staying human in the age of AI.
Join the SubstackWe need a new name for ourselves. For too long we called ourselves Homo sapiens, the species defined by reason. Now that machines reason better than we do, a space opens. Homo Artis is what fills it. We are creators. We always were.
We handed our value to work, our attention to screens, our wonder to the feed. We began to trivialize art, shrinking it to simple categories like a job, decoration, luxury, or hobby. Something for other people.
And some of us have been quietly starving ever since.
Homo Artis is about the way back.
Part manifesto, part memoir, part field guide for a creative life, it draws on Marco Palou’s years as a successful musician, filmmaker, and writer to argue that we are not thinking beings who sometimes create; we are creating beings who sometimes think. And that creativity is the essence and ultimate value of life itself.
From a near-fatal hospital bed in New York to the paper flower festivals of his childhood in northern Argentina, Palou traces a journey through grief, ambition, technology, identity, loneliness, and wonder, making the case for art as something far more essential than self-expression. Art is how we stay connected to our bodies, to each other, and to the parts of ourselves that cannot be reduced to information.
Our collective crisis of straying from this path predates the rapid new technology pervading our daily lives. But that technology has turned on the lights, and what they’ve revealed is everything a machine can’t touch. That’s ours. As artificial intelligence reshapes the world around us, Homo Artis asks a simple but urgent question:
What remains uniquely human, and what will we create with it?
I didn't expect this book to become what it did. I thought it would be philosophical. It kept becoming spiritual, autobiographical, and unexpectedly practical.
I wasn't trying to describe a method. I was describing a way of living. What mattered to me was leaving space for you to find your own practices, not adopt mine.
We're living through a moment of acceleration that arrived before we had language for it. This book is me slowing down long enough to ask what still matters underneath the noise.
I wrote it with doubt. With the fear that it wasn't original enough. That a machine could outwrite it in seconds. Those fears faded the moment I started typing. The pages arrived when I placed my hands on the keyboard or spoke into the dark. Writing helped me stay present. I hope it does the same for you.
This book is an invitation.
A widow, a broke dancer, and an elderly couple each get an invitation they can't explain. Someone is connecting them, and it never asks twice.
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