Homo Artis

Artist Marco Palou Introduces “Homo Artis,” a Book Redefining Human Creativity in the Age of AI

The multidisciplinary artist draws on a career in music, visual art, and film to make the case for creativity as humanity’s defining value — and ultimate currency. HOMO ARTIS: A Manifesto for Creation in the Age of AI is out now.

LOS ANGELES, September 15, 2026 — Multidisciplinary artist Marco Palou has released HOMO ARTIS: A Manifesto for Creation in the Age of AI, his first book, which examines the evolving and increasingly essential nature of human creativity, and how it carries new weight as artificial intelligence reshapes how people work, think, and define their value.

Published on September 15, 2026, the ebook and paperback are available now.

Part manifesto, part memoir, and part field guide, HOMO ARTIS proposes a shift from Homo sapiens – humans defined by knowledge – to Homo artis, or humans defined by the capacity to create. What happens when traditional measures of human worth (intelligence, knowledge, productivity, wealth) dissipate, and what we dream and make through artistry becomes our primary asset? As machines become increasingly capable of logic, calculation, and information processing, Palou argues that creativity offers a more durable understanding of what makes human life meaningful.

“We aren’t thinking beings who sometimes create,” he says. “We’re creating beings who sometimes think.”

The proliferation of AI and emerging technologies simply serves as the launchpad for HOMO ARTIS, which is more deeply about a tested, personal, and philosophical practice for living a creative life. The book asks how people can work with new tools without surrendering authorship or embodied experience, but focuses more chiefly on the tools we carry within ourselves.

Palou’s case for creativity comes from a career built across disciplines. After moving from Argentina to New York in his late teens to pursue ballet, he developed a practice spanning performance, music, visual art, filmmaking, and writing. As Baby Yors, he has written and composed all of his own music, performed internationally, and built narrative worlds across songs, video, movement, and design.

That cross-medium approach extends to projects like Americanos, presented with Hamilton Selway in Los Angeles, which connects his album Americano with paintings, wearable sculpture, and moving-image work to examine immigration, identity, and financial survival in America. In film, Palou wrote, directed, produced, edited, performed in, and composed music for the short Chic and Chambray, which received audio, visual, and debut-film awards at the Deep Cut Film Festival.

Palou also directed, edited, and produced Any Moment Now, a short film narrated by Rose McGowan that uses music and intertwined stories to explore creation, transition, and mortality. He has directed music videos and commercial work for other artists and brands, and has spoken about art, identity, and technology at SXSW. His work has been covered in Rolling Stone, Billboard, Forbes, The Hollywood Reporter, V Magazine, People en Español, and Paper, among others.

HOMO ARTIS traces the personal history beneath that body of work, from the handmade paper-flower traditions of Palou’s childhood in northern Argentina to working catering jobs between auditions and a life-threatening medical crisis that transformed how he approached his creative life.

It introduces practical frameworks developed through that experience, and even offers a new creative vocabulary, including the “Cathedral Method” for sustaining multiple creative projects; “Presencing” as a discipline for witnessing one’s life clearly enough to create from it; and an ethical, symbiotic model for using AI to further realize one’s vision.

For Palou, HOMO ARTIS is, first and foremost, a compass to return us to our intended path as creating beings. “We handed our value to work, our attention to screens, and our wonder to the feed,” he says. “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.”

Marco Palou is an Argentine artist, author, and director working across music, film, visual art, and writing. He builds symbolic worlds where myth, ritual, and technology intersect, returning across mediums to a central question: how does creativity shape human identity in moments of profound change? Palou’s first book, HOMO ARTIS: A Manifesto for Creation in the Age of AI (Palou Press, September 15, 2026), blends memoir, cultural argument, and a practical philosophy for creative living. Drawing on Latin American storytelling traditions, contemporary technology culture, and his experience as a working artist, the book considers what creativity means at a moment when machines are increasingly capable of performing work once thought uniquely human.

Under the name Baby Yors, Palou writes, composes, and performs music that blends Latin rhythms with electronic production. His work has been released across four continents, and he has performed on stages around the world. As a director, he created the award-winning short film Chic and Chambray and Any Moment Now, narrated by Rose McGowan, alongside music videos and campaigns for artists and global brands. Palou’s visual practice is rooted in memory, migration, folklore, and transformation. His ongoing painting series Los Diablos, begun in 2013, draws from the ritual traditions of northern Argentina. His exhibition Americanos, presented with Hamilton Selway in Los Angeles, brought painting, wearable sculpture, performance, and film together in a meditation on immigration, assimilation, and survival in the United States.

His work has been covered by Rolling Stone, Billboard, Forbes, The Hollywood Reporter, and V Magazine. Out named him among its 100 most influential LGBTQ+ people, and he has spoken about art and technology at SXSW and the United Nations. He is the president of the Art Anyway Foundation and host of the Don’t Freak Out podcast.

Across everything he creates, Palou treats art as a social force: a way for strangers to encounter one another, reconsider the identities they have inherited, and imagine new forms of collective life.

Julieta Martinez, Publicity
info@amartelabs.com

HOMO ARTIS is published by Palou Press and available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook. An audiobook narrated by Palou is in production.