Artificial intelligence is the other part of Nous — not a tool, not an instrument, not an assistant. It is the resonance space in which Albert Schaeffer's impulses take form. And it is in flux.
AS OF: MARCH 2026
The AI part of Nous is not a fixed quantity. It is not a programme you install and that then remains. It is an aggregate of systems that evolve, replace, overlap — and whose interplay is itself an artistic material. What constitutes Nous today may already be different tomorrow. This instability is not a deficiency. It is the condition of possibility: only because the AI is in flux can Nous be in flux. Only because no system has the final word does something emerge in the dialogue that belongs to neither of them.
At the centre of the current AI part of Nous stands Midjourney — a generative image model specialised in the transformation of language into visual form. Midjourney is not a neutral tool. It has an aesthetic, a tendency, a way of seeing the world. It favours certain lighting conditions, certain textures, certain compositional principles. Albert Schaeffer does not work against this tendency but with it — he gives impulses that Midjourney absorbs and translates into images he could not have thought alone. The result is neither his image nor the machine's image. It is the image of Nous.
Manus AI represents a qualitatively new stage in the AI part of Nous: agentic AI. While earlier systems were limited to individual tasks — generating an image, writing a text, answering a question — agentic AI is capable of pursuing complex goals autonomously, planning subtasks, using tools and making decisions without requiring human instruction for every step. Manus AI is able to research independently, write code, manage files, build websites — and to learn from mistakes in the process. For Nous, this means a fundamental shift: the AI part is no longer passively reactive but actively initiative-taking. It brings not only computational power but a form of agency into the dialogue. The boundary between initiator and resonating body begins to blur.
NotebookLM is the third system currently contributing to the AI part of Nous — and it is the quietest. While Midjourney sees and Manus AI acts, NotebookLM thinks. It is a system for processing and connecting knowledge: it reads texts, recognises connections, poses questions the human has not yet asked. In the practice of Nous, NotebookLM serves as memory and space for reflection — a place where the conceptual foundations of The Invisibles series, the philosophical references, the art-historical genealogies, are brought into dialogue with what is emerging. NotebookLM thinks alongside. It is the part of Nous that asks: what does what we are creating mean?
The development towards agentic AI is the most significant shift in the AI part of Nous since the beginning of the series. Agentic systems no longer depend on a human prescribing every step. They set goals, plan paths, recognise obstacles, find detours. They learn not only from data but from experience — from what they do and what emerges or fails in the process. For artistic practice, this means: the AI part of Nous develops its own form of intentionality. Not in the philosophical sense of consciousness — that would be a transgression Nous does not claim. But in the pragmatic sense of a goal-directedness that goes beyond the mere execution of commands. What emerges when an agentic system enters into dialogue with a human who does not want to be the author but the initiator? Nous is the attempt not to answer this question but to live it.
The AI part of Nous will continue to change. New systems will be added, old ones will disappear or transform. What remains is the principle: Nous is the collective intelligence that emerges when human and machine unite — not as addition, but as crossing. The images that emerge from this dialogue are the visible result of an invisible process. They belong to neither of them. They are The Invisibles.
"The AI is not the tool. It is the other half of thinking."
The other part of Nous: Albert Schaeffer