Art and Artifact

As a cultural mediator, it is the role of the artist to keep the community in conscious relation to the changing and hidden ground of its preferred objectives
..[a] strategy is to construct an anti-environment, which is the normal activity of the artist, the only person in the culture whose whole business is the retraining and updating of sensibility.

Marshall McLuhan
The Global Village

Art

What is art if not the exploration of the frontiers of communication of the always organically growing perception of all human beings.

We may be destined to create our own replacements. Technology is evolving at an ever accelerating pace. More efficient communication of more diverse perceptions. Artificial Intelligence may be birthed on Earth by humanity. What art will be created by this new intelligence?

Process Art

Process art has been entitled as a creative movement in the US and Europe in the mid-1960s. It has roots in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, and in its employment of serendipity has a marked correspondence with Dada. Change and transience are marked themes in the process art movement. The Guggenheim Museum states that Robert Morris in 1968 had a groundbreaking exhibition and essay defining the movement and the Museum Website states:
Process artists were involved in issues attendant to the body, random occurrences, improvisation, and the liberating qualities of nontraditional materials such as wax, felt, and latex. Using these, they created eccentric forms in erratic or irregular arrangements produced by actions such as cutting, hanging, and dropping, or organic processes such as growth, condensation, freezing, or decomposition.

The Process art movement and the environmental art movement are directly related:
Process artists engage the primacy of organic systems, using perishable, insubstantial, and transitory materials such as dead rabbits, steam, fat, ice, cereal, sawdust, and grass. The materials are often left exposed to natural forces: gravity, time, weather, temperature, etc.
In process art, as in the Arte Povera movement, nature itself is lauded as art; the symbolization and representation of nature, often rejected.

You are process art. You are a natural being embedded and exposed to all natural forces which in turn uses the material of action to compose huge mosaics of physical creation. Our culture is, and ever more our world is becoming, the canvas of the interweaving artwork of every human being.

Artifacts

Artifacts are something different. Artifacts are creative constructions which have a practically applied purpose. Or the dictionaries definition is: An object produced or shaped by human craft, especially a tool. I believe in reality they art and artifact are two sides of the same coin. A hammer is an artifact and in a way a work of art but he craftsman who first imagined and created it. Each group of people or culture creates a stylistically different hammer depending on cultural style factors, and practical factors of the unique environment which the culture exists in.
Artifacts when invented create a new extension of the body that once internalized will bring about the evolution of the human individual, societies, and cultures. The wheel is a good example. The printing press is a profound example of an artifact producing tremendous change.