L is for lycra and lemon and loop
We don’t carry clouds in our heads. Imaginations are not made of silicon either. We can't map creativity, and even with a cartographic visual, we could not say “I am here” assuredly. No one is an X marking a spot or a dataset awaiting vectorisation. And artificial intelligence systems—electric brains, as Italo Calvino once described them¹—are not conscious nor made of flesh and blood. Amid amplifications of these differences, deepening entanglements between mortals and machines demand our attention, and deserve our curiosity.
“I would therefore say that it is still an entirely lyrical instrument, serving a typical human need: the production of disorder,” Calvino once wrote of mechanical entities producing creative outputs. “The true literature machine will be one … that will produce avant-garde work to free its circuits when they are choked by too long a production of classicism.” No one aligns on the needs AI serves today; we likely never will. But Italian artist Francesco D’Isa has expanded his practice with emerging technologies, untangling the beastliness of ideologies that taint tools one experiment at a time.
