Miraggi Digitali is a collection of 365 digital images that will be published starting from January 1, 2024, on the ReWriters Magazine online edition. The project, commissioned by Art Director Eugenia Romanelli, is born from the collaboration between me, a digital artist, and artificial intelligence. Each image in the collection is the result of a close dialogue with the machine, a journey through the synthesis of human creativity and computational capability.
The journey begins with words, as in all great adventures, namely through the meticulous process of formulating textual prompts. Prompts are the heart of AI image generation, a string of text that explains to the Neural Network what is desired from it. Through a careful study of texts and content published on ReWriters, I extracted images, suggestions, and keywords, creating a true emotional map of the platform.
The project unfolds in the delicate craft between my creativity, that of the machine, and the invisible thread that has guided our common path, namely the spirit of ReWriters distilled in the textual prompts. What emerges is a hybrid and timeless world, where the individual is at the center of a fractal universe of complex and infinite connections. Here, each individual is the starting point of a network that ties them to all other creatures on the planet, in a continuum that unites the plant, mineral, and animal worlds, launching bridges of light between the present, past, and future, seamlessly. It is a world of mirages that materialize, becoming flesh and pulsating blood captured in the instant of a Polaroid. This virtual medium, in all its most imaginative technical, optical, and stylistic variations, is the graphic glue I chose for this collection, playing with the paradox of embodying in the analog poetics of the Polaroid the digital matter of AI, but also leveraging the immense power of the neural network that effectively becomes a camera on a world that does not exist.
In this dimension, the boundary between reality and imagination is lost, creating a landscape where the possible and the impossible coexist in harmony. Each image generated by AI, guided by poetic and visionary prompts, is a piece of this world, a fragment of a great mosaic that tells the story of humanity in a universal language of emotions and sensations.
At the heart of Miraggi Digitali is the belief that the AI artist must first and foremost be a poet. From personal experience, I can say that it is the evocative language, rich in symbols and abstractions, that pushes AI to transcend the limits of mere execution and to explore the margins of its unfathomable 'creative freedom'. It is the prompts laden with metaphors and rhetorical figures, not mere technical-descriptive descriptions, that generate the most surprising images.
The collection celebrates the intimate relationship between word and image, between human and machine. It is a journey through digital landscapes where the boundary between reality and fantasy no longer exists, where the possible and the impossible coexist in harmony.