POLITTICO 01 (No. 1 from a series of 14)
This series of artworks stems from the experimental attempt to fuse analogue human and digital machine creativity. Between 05/2019 and 02/2021 the artist was regularly traversing the lagoon of Venice by bus, on foot, bicycle and boat, observing colours and wave patterns at that time. These human observation - also over a long stretch of relative calm during the pandemic in Venice - were put into short poetic descriptions, creating an analogue account on a given date.
In a second step those words sequences where each used as "prompts" and fed into machines, digesting them with their deep learning algorithms. Artificial Intelligence extrapolated and interpreted this poetry with weighed networks trained on huge datasets to produce pictures and visual variations. The quality of the output and closeness to the initial observations are not so important – there may exist endless variations depending on different AI networks which keep learning and evolving. It is used as digital observations deriving from collections of human visual production as a base. AI "dreams up" content of what these words may "mean" to a machine at a given time.
Human and machine results are fused together by hand and arranged in a temporal sequence, displayed as "polittici" (tetraptychs) with the date and descriptions.
The series can be read as an homage to On Kawara's famous "Today/Date Painting "series, a conceptual art classic from 1966-2014. The text is set in 'Aan Arwok' Regular, an open source font face based on the paintings from the 'Today' series of On Kawara.
