System failure

This artwork is the story of (personal) failure.

Having made a mistake on the small painting I had started, I tried to make it right. Unfortunately I failed and because I was nervous with myself, since I had decided to trash the canvas, I burned it in one place because I did not want to see any more the mess I had made. I then decided to cover it with a black color, since I was "mourning" for the wasted canvas and especially because I wasn’t able to right a wrong. I thought of a title of an article I read in “La Stampa” newspaper where the designer of childhood games Cas Holman warns: "Attention, digital natives no longer use imagination". The written warning, which applies to me first and foremost, is a personal warning, because after getting the picture wrong, I lacked the imagination to come up with something that could save what I had done so far. Going back to what was written in the article, it is a warning for the great danger we are in as a society: if the new generations no longer use their imagination, what future can be imagined? Does technological evolution without human imagination have any meaning?

Version 2.0 (2023)

This year, with the advent of artificial intelligence usable on a large scale, I "updated" it as if it were software. The paint was mounted on an slab, salvaged from a decommissioned server case. I had the slab cut and polished. I was interested in a material salvaged from a computer, to symbolize the risk associated with the lack of human imagination, contrasted with the enormous capabilities of artificial intelligence, to which we are constantly delegating new tasks and perhaps one day, imagination as well. On the side of the canvas I wrote a warning: do not allow and do not delegate the artificial intelligence to imagine the future. The plate being shiny reflects blurrily the image of the observer, a final warning to a humanity that is losing its self-image.

 A personal failure and an more serious failure of the system. We are all warned...

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[Acrylic, solid industrial marker on canvas, on metal base]

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<Photo Eva Volpato>