ANIMATI. God, Human, Animal, Machine at MUFOCO

For the first time in Italy, the photographic archive of a public museum is being analyzed through computer vision. A dialogue between art and artificial intelligence takes shape at the Museum of Contemporary Photography.

Overview

A pioneering experiment in which artificial intelligence is applied to the curatorial process, dialoguing with one of Italy's most important public photo archives. Open-AI's CLIP neural network analyzed MUFOCO's holdings, interrogating them with radical and universal keywords: consciousness, soul, death, birth, conflict, family. Through a local search engine created specifically for the exhibition, the algorithm selects images by answering queries revolving around the question: what does it mean to be human today, in the age of artificial intelligence? The result is a new form of augmented curating, where artificial intelligence actively participates in iconographic interpretation.

The exhibition features 137 images by 77 Italian and international authors: from Gabriele Basilico, Lisetta Carmi to Mimmo and Franceso Jodice, from Günter Brus to Bernard Plossu. The photographs are displayed without indicating which keyword they correspond to, leaving room for free associations. ANIMATI is an immersive and reflective experience that redefines the boundary between art and technology and invites us to imagine new scenarios for the future of culture. In a time when machines also learn to see.

Curated by Chiara Bardelli Nonino, ANIMATI. God, Human, Animal, Machine is much more than an exhibition: it is an open workshop on the meaning of images in the algorithmic age, an invitation to reconsider photography not only as a document or art, but as a mirror of our deepest questions. In a world where machines learn to see, the human gesture of observing takes on a new value. An urgent and poetic reflection on our time, on the boundary between natural and artificial, between what we have been and what we are becoming.