This paper articulates a theoretical and methodological framework for understanding the visual apparatus of ViaggIAccademici as a locus of negotiation between human cognition and algorithmic generativity. Rather than treating generative AI as a merely operative tool, the study conceptualises prompting as a form of visual dramaturgy through which the theatrical text is reconfigured into a sequence of iconogenic units. The integration of LLM-mediated descriptions, hand-drawn studies and diffusion-based image synthesis reveals how artistic intentionality is modulated, refracted and at times destabilised by the latent structures governing machine-learning models. By incorporating a customised painterly dataset, the research examines stylistic drift, the epistemic status of the glitch and the emergence of visual indeterminacy as constitutive aesthetic conditions rather than technical contingencies. The resulting corpus of images and videos operates not as representational support but as a critical dispositif that expands the dramaturgical field, interrogating the boundaries between authorship, perception and algorithmic inference. The paper ultimately argues that contemporary artistic practice in the context of generative AI demands a shift toward a paradigm of co-emergent imagination, in which human and computational agencies converge to produce novel regimes of visual sense-making.

Walter Benjamin’s seminal 1923 essay «Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers» (The Task of the Translator) provides one of the most profound philosophical frameworks for understanding translation as a transcendent act that reveals the «pure language» underlying all human expression. In the era of large language models (LLMs) and neural machine translation, Benjamin’s concepts of textual «afterlife», linguistic kinship, and the philosophical versus practical divide in translation take on unprecedented urgency. This essay examines how the scaling of intelligence – from Qwen2.5-32B to 72B parameter models – simultaneously approaches and reveals the fundamental limitations of computational approaches to translation, particularly in the context of classical Chinese texts. Through analysis of contemporary scaling laws, linguistic challenges specific to classical Chinese, and emerging human-machine collaborative frameworks, this work argues that effective translation in the AI era requires what The Economist termed «cyborg translation» – a synergy that preserves human interpretive authority while leveraging machine computational power. The essay demonstrates that while scaling laws show diminishing returns and performance plateaus, the integration of philosophical understanding with technical innovation offers pathways toward translation systems that honor both Benjamin’s transcendent vision and practical computational constraints.

This essay takes its cue from the collective volume Foucault's Aesthetics of Existence and Shusterman's Somaesthetics. Ethics, Politics, and the Art of Living (eds. Valentina Antoniol and Stefano Marino, Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) is a timely and ambitious work that discusses two major philosophical approaches to the body and subjectivity. While the book's essays explore the intersections and tensions between the aesthetics of existence and somaesthetics—highlighting their shared concern with embodied practices of self-formation, ethical transformation, and resistance to normative power structures—my reading gradually turned into an extended reflection on the notion of the Bio-Soma that emerges from these dialogues. The collection explores the intersections and tensions between aesthetics of existence and somaesthetics, highlighting their shared concern with embodied practices of self-formation, ethical transformation, and resistance to normative power structures. Through a rich and well-structured set of contributions, the volume maps the body as a critical medium, political agent, and aesthetic space of creativity and reciprocity. Contemporary debates on the ethics and politics of embodied subjectivity are relevant for rethinking the relationship between bio- and soma-power today.

This paper examines how AI-generated images reconfigure key aesthetic and epistemological categories within contemporary visual culture. Drawing on Nelson Goodman’s distinction between autographic and allographic art forms, we argue that AI image generation occupies a hybrid position, functioning as a “mixed case” where linguistic prompts serve as notational structures and generative outputs as autographic instantiations. Through the notion of semantic attractors, we describe how lexical inputs act as gravitational forces within the model’s latent space, guiding the emergence of visual and affective configurations. This dynamic is interpreted through conceptual blending theory, revealing how AI systems integrate heterogeneous domains into novel perceptual and semantic syntheses. Finally, we introduce the concept of the image-ideogram to analyze the cultural impact of deepfakes and synthetic imagery, suggesting that photorealistic synthesis now operates less as an epistemic index and more as a visual and linguistic resource within the accelerated economy of contemporary visual discourse.

The article then examines how modern notions of human omnipotence persist and are reinforced by digital technologies, and argues for a shift toward new forms of interaction between humans and technological artefacts. Instead of domination or complete delegation, these relations should take the form of mobile, negotiated exchanges that preserve difference and enable creativity.

This essay tracks the sudden bloom of AI-generated plants across social media and argues that their plausibility precipitates a crisis of ecological realism. These “algorithmic botanicals” borrow photography’s rhetoric of evidence while severing any indexical bond to the living world, producing images that are photographic without being photographs. Situating this phenomenon within lineages of realism—from Renaissance naturalism and Dutch still life to taxidermy, staged wildlife, and the spectacle— the essay shows how generative imagery weaponizes botanical desire for attention, clicks, and sales. The result is a miseducation of the gaze: an aesthetic norm calibrated to impossible perfection that diminishes the ordinary wonder of actual plants. Read through capitalist realism, AI flora offer frictionless connection without ecological consequence, anesthetizing care. The essay concludes by calling for new visual literacies and curatorial protocols, and by reframing realism as attunement—an ethics of looking that restores discernment between the living and the lifeless.

The following introduction opens the present issue of Itinera by gathering a selection of the papers presented at the conference Artificial Intelligence to the Test. Creativity and Humanistic Knowledge Today (Università degli Studi di Milano, May 8–9, 2025). The issue examines how contemporary art engages with artificial intelligence not as a neutral instrument but as a dialogical partner in thought and creation. Moving beyond polarized narratives that cast AI either as a threat or as an enhancement of human capacities, the introduction explores the relational space in which human and machine agencies interact, generating new meanings and aesthetic possibilities. By foregrounding interaction rather than autonomy or technical performance, it proposes a framework for understanding AI-based artistic practice as a site for rethinking authorship, intention, and the co-constitutive evolution of humans and their technologies.

The aesthetic category of the grotesque has traversed the centuries, adapting to different genres and historical, philosophical, and artistic contexts, while maintaining its ability to reflect on the human condition and its contradictions through degradation, distortion, and transgression.This essay aims to analyze the grotesque as a critical lens on reality, free from judgments and rules, with particular attention to the cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos, in which it becomes a privileged tool for deconstructing social conventions and power mechanisms. In works such as Dogtooth and The Lobster, dynamics of power, madness, hypocrisy, loneliness, and alienation emerge, revealing a society built upon human fragility; whereas in The Favourite and Poor Things! the grotesque manifests itself through caricatural and paradoxical figures that challenge the very notion of normality. The goal is to show how, in Lanthimos’s film language and, more broadly, in any form of artistic expression, the grotesque assumes a critical and cognitive function, offering a perspective capable of illuminating contemporary reality in its ambiguous nature, constantly oscillating between the comic and the tragic, the absurd and the real.

The emergence of cinematography, radio, and Television in the early decades of the twentieth century revolutionized the relationship between the arts, not only the literary ones, and knowledge with the various economic and cultural elements that constitute mass society. At the core of this revolution was the narrative act, which until then had been considered the basic principle of all religious, philosophical, scientific, poetic, and artistic literature. From that moment on, the narrative act also became central to the media which, starting with cinema, began to recount not only the lives of rulers, the great nobility, politicians, and revolutions with Lenin, but also those of the common people, the marginalized, and the tramps, with Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. The power of the narrative act, until then dominated by the individual rhetorical skill of writers, philosophers, scientists, and theologians, was from that moment employed by veritable teams of scriptwriters and directors, to narrate and impose stories and subjects upon the masses, attracting them also with effects like fear and wonder, appealing more to instincts than to rationality. The reaction of literature was almost immediate, as if those new arts had triggered a dialectic, generating the great masterpieces of the twentieth-century novel by James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Robert Musil. Literary criticism immediately became aware of the fruitful relationship between literature and media; in its search for the main aesthetic values, it generated a proliferation of methods and orientations, mainly represented by structuralism and deconstructionism, which led it to a kind of paralysis, as two thinkers like Paul Valery and Walter Benjamin had anticipated. From all those studies, the only certain point, as critics such as Roland Barthes and Franco Brioschi noted, was the centrality of the narrative act, paradoxically applied even to destructuring programs like Blob, which built a plot with fragments of television and cinema. A challenge between media and literature that has now become a dialectic, because ugliness always ends up triggering the search for beauty, of which true art and true literature are always an expression.

The current era is characterized by the production of vast amounts of data across all sectors of society. This is made possible by ubiquitous technologies that can collect data from every human and non-human entity on the planet, as well as any environmental phenomena. Artistic practice offers a suitable platform for the endeavour to isolate specific expressive and signifying features from this indistinct mass of data. This paper focuses on a relatively overlooked field of research, where technology interacts with abstract data to extract what I propose to define as their “aesthetic sense”. Such an expression addresses the peculiar dynamics enabling art to move beyond the purely informative function of data, towards a different goal – designing experiences that turn the audience into perceptive participants, engaged in the otherwise imperceptible events and relations that are recorded and communicated by data. Technologies thus become media of polyphonic expression, able to give voice to other ways of feeling and being in the world. Emerging through computation is a sort of feeling that permeates the entire fabric of reality, of which any entity in the universe can become the protagonist. As a result, art stands out as a privileged gateway to a particular experience of reality. This kind of experience will be theoretically analysed in the present essay starting from the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, specifically from his notion of “feeling”.