MARCO SIGNORINI

Metronom: The portrait is a genre that has crossed and crosses the canons of the history of art. Photography has broadened the potential base of subjects and at the same time contributed to writing more recent history. It is therefore perhaps no coincidence that the representation of the human figure, in particular of the face, is the basis of research in the field of artificial intelligence. Recent news, the development of AI Portraits Ars, which is defined as an ‘artistic project’. How much art and  artistic planning can be found in this type of research?

Marco Signorini: In reference to the portrait, photography inevitably played an important role because it allows a detailed identification of the person, a precise copy of his appearance. Compared to the identifying portrait, Jean-Luc Nancy poses in a different way “the other portrait” meant “withdrawn”, which withdraws from the face represented and becomes something else. Nancy also examines the gaze as an essential element of the portrait, through which the subject still relates outside himself, as if observing an infinity that coincides with the spectator’s gaze. Yet, if during the lesson at the Academy I show students the photographs of Marjaana Kella, from the Reversed Portraits series – half-lengths of people shot from behind – these are equally perceived and defined as portraits, despite the absence of glances. The portrait / gaze issue is very complex, with my students we work a lot on the spatial and expressive balance that the gaze determines with respect to the perception and creation of all images. It is technologically intriguing, but it remains on the surface, that an evolved system but still limited by the information of “our” history of art has the interpretative ability to repaint photographic faces, as AI Portraits Ars can do. I thought of Pascal Chabot’s The Philosopher Robot, a philosophical drama projected in 2025 in which a machine programmed to be a thinker who, like his illustrious examiners, must demonstrate his knowledge of philosophizing is staged. To questions like – Do you exist? How would you define yourself? – The robot concludes in a very determined way: “You initially imagined us as an absolute simulacrum that manages to imitate everything in an extremely exact way. To express myself in this register, I will therefore say that I am also the one who pretends […] In turn, animal, man, God, would I be nothing but a mask? Wouldn’t my identity be that of a camouflage? […] In truth I tell you, I am the future. ” The mimetic logic, which underlies the more or less evolved capabilities of an artificial entity to reproduce what we humans are or represent through various languages, is the seemingly insurmountable limit of our design horizon. The fact is that we can’t imagine a world other than the one we know, so we pass it on to a robotic system. Even if reality is different from what it appears to us, we cannot leave the representation of the visible and experienceable. There is a register, how to say, an artificial flavor in the faces reproduced by AI Portraits Ars, but still in the wake of our visual memory. In the development of Chabot’s work, in the hypothesized dialogue between man and machine, we come to address issues that go beyond the relationship between man and technology, to the point of asking: “what is the use of being human?”
Here, in the progress of a new aesthetic and conception of the world, it is essential to reconsider our role, to reformulate “human” to overturn the perspective.

M: Your project Anagram, carried out since 2014, draws on exactly this type of material, often produced in an unconscious way, or in any case for extra-artistic purposes, by its creators / developers. Can the representations of the figure, of the body, which you have created, also express in a certain sense the ‘taste’ of time, can we say?

MS: Of course, the taste of time is what identifies contemporaneity even if it is difficult to grasp it at the moment, but only in retrospect. Anagram is consequent and necessary to my previous works where the human figure, the body and the face, have always been present as elements of an emotional landscape, more imagined than real. Anagram is not a digital vs analog project despite showing less defined, noisier images than the description of the world in a photorealistic sense. It is not a glitch project, much less a work on the destruction of the image, which I find a somewhat bizarre attitude. Rather the attempt to formulate a hypothesis of instantaneity different from the improper term “shot” which, in photography, seems to be resolved in the consoling instant of the surprising, as far as it refers to the known, the visible. Alas, not being able to get out of the mechanism of representation, I rather sought relationships with the past, with classical art, noting that the naive idea of experimental, in photography often dismissed as “digital” today, is linked to forms that the image assumes without considering the process of creation. Some of the applications I use allow to obtain certain results in real time; why should they make the document less reliable? On the basis of the recognizability of the form with respect to the subject being photographed? Materially I do not add anything with respect to the language used. For example, if I shoot a subject with my smartphone and add a sticker to the live shot, this is made of the same “nature”, it is writing the code, even though it is graphic and not photographic. So for all the apparently strange shapes, the anagrams due to the shuffling of the pixels; these are worth as much as the alleged original more faithful to reality than the one already seen. The idea behind Anagram is to consider the image as an event, not because it represents something that someone’s eye has glimpsed, but an image / instant otherwise not perceptible in its formulation or dissolving continuously. I find this a way to reconnect with the taste of time, also understood as a question regarding the physical reading of reality.

M: The debate on how the humanities are an essential training also for scientific research seems increasingly evident. You are dean of the Design and Applied Arts department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara, how do you deal with these thematic and design issues in a training context?

MS: The Academy is a place of artistic training but we know that being considered “academic” is not a completely positive qualification with respect to an individual’s ability to express himself through visual languages. If knowledge remains only an experience of information and technical / cultural acquisitions, this knowledge, this uniformity of training, however qualitative and necessary it may be, leads to something generic. Seen in this way, all schools, of every order and degree, are “non-places” with homologated results. There is this risk, especially where studying the practices of art should respect a certain sensitivity to life. Differently, each training center should be such as to generate a Genius loci, an entity that takes care of the person by developing the most creative aspects. Personally, I find the culture of the project positive to work individually but also together, a mutual learning between teacher and student, each open to the possibilities, to the unexpected. For me, James Hillman’s letter written to Italian teachers in 2002 is significant, which begins like this: “teaching and learning must not be confused with education and can even be prevented by education.” A concept of training that must be rethought for an idea of beauty, ethics, morality that does not take a program or a constituted form, but sought in each of us. What Hillman calls “a humanist way of thinking or what may also be called a poetic basis of the mind.”

M: The word ‘creativity’ becomes more and more central in trying to read the contents produced in AI, the challenge is the difference between the ‘training’ work to teach the machines behavior options and the moment / place in which the models intelligent people will be called to make decisions with decisive impacts on man and the social context in which he lives. But beyond the level of sophistication and options of behavior, how can what is generated through these ‘intelligent’ models or machines be read and interpreted in a context of artistic production?

MS: The term “creativity” is misleading, leads to the idea of originality and invention, without thinking about the production of meaning that this originality produces. My students often look for an original idea as a basis for working on their artistic projects. They are quite disappointed when I tell them, simply: start producing or archiving images, by any means. In fact it seems a contradiction, compared to planning a project, but it serves not to focus on “what” thematically, compared to “how” linguistically. This year, with the course aimed at the various two-year academies, I imposed the acquisition of images only in the classroom where I usually teach, focusing on us and the space occupied. The title I had hypothesized, to bring together the works in a collective exhibition, was Room / Moor. Hoping that, starting objectively from the room / room, we could all get lost and romantically roll into Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights moor / moor. Everyone was free to deal with the material later, remaining in the photographic or venturing into the “moor” of the software to obtain the most varied elaborations, coordinating the progress with me from time to time. It was very interesting, perhaps there is little originality or invention in the works obtained, but a lot of creativity compared to the starting assumptions. With reference to this simple experience, I cannot help but remember, and connect to what has been said previously, to the case of “Portrait of Edmond Belamy”, the work produced by the French collective Obvious through an algorithm and sold at auction by Cristie’s Last year. I am fascinated by this certainly inventive technology, but not very creative as it is functional. Physicist Roberto Cingolani and scientific director of the IIT of Genoa, argues that it cannot be otherwise, defines these machines as “differently intelligent” because they are only calibrated on the function to be performed, devoid of emotions and feelings. The result, however surprising of “Portrait of Edmond Belamy”, is still a picture of a rather traditional painting. Already “painting” is a form of work that is not at all imaginative with respect to new conceivable structures. After all, it is the creators themselves who have stated that it is their intention to “refine the algorithm, to create works that increasingly seem to be made by a human being”. (from Artribune).

The time of the replicant Rutger Hauer to look out into the unknown of the non-human still seems far away: “I have seen things that you humans could not imagine”.

Marco Signorini (Florence, 1962) lives and works in Florence. He is a teacher of photography at the Brera and Carrara Academy. After his academic studies in scenography he became interested in video and photography, studying in particular the authors of Italian landscape photography. He has exhibited at the Fotomuseum in Winterthur (2005), the SK Stiftung Kultur in Kohln (2006) and the Center d’Art Ville Nei Liicht in Dudelange (2012). In Italy he has exhibited at Fotografia Europea, Museum of Contemporary Photography of Cinisello Balsamo, Triennale di Milano and Francesco Fabbri Prize for Contemporary Arts (2013), as well as personal exhibitions at the Livia Bottardi Milani Cultural Center in Pegognaga (2013), METRONOM (2009 and 2016) and Galleria Manzoni, Milan (2008).

1/08/2019