Abstract

This article examines the radical reconfiguration of spectatorship in contemporary art through the lens of delegated agency and posthuman aesthetics. Building upon Roland Barthes' seminal concept of the "death of the author" (1967) and Jacques Rancière's "emancipated spectator" (2008), I propose a critical framework for understanding what I term the "death of the spectator"-a paradigmatic shift wherein human viewership loses its privileged status as the primary locus of meaning-making in artistic practice. Drawing on Boris Groys' theorization of the internet as an apparatus of algorithmic surveillance and recent posthumanist philosophies including new materialism (Karen Barad, Jane Bennett) and object-oriented ontology (Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton), the article traces how contemporary artists are creating autonomous aesthetic ecosystems that operate independently of human observation. Through close analyses of works by Ian Cheng, Hito Steyerl, and Trevor Paglen, with particular focus on Pierre Huyghe's Variants (2021-present), I demonstrate how algorithmic processes, environmental data, and biological systems now function as co-constituents of artistic meaning.