The fourth edition of Re:Humanism was presented at the Pastificio Cerere di Roma. Re:Humanism is an award organized by the association of the same name to select some works of art that manage to combine humanism and scientific culture, with particular attention to Artificial Intelligences.
We interviewed the founder Daniela Cotimbo.
We are at the fourth edition of Re:Humanism. The award seems to grow year by year… thinking back, what have been the most representative works among winners and finalists? For what reason?
It becomes increasingly difficult for me to express a scale of value. Every artist who participated in Re:humanism has contributed uniquely to the growth of the debate on art and artificial intelligence. Looking back, I am certainly proud to have been able to host figures like Mario Klingemann, the Entangled Others, or Robertina Šebjanič, pioneering in the field.
With some artists, lasting friendships and collaborations have been formed, such as with Carola Bonfili, Lorem, or Numero Cromatico. I always enthusiastically talk about the projects of Irene Fenara or Giang Nguyen.
Perhaps I have a particularly special memory of him: winner of the very first edition, a very young Vietnamese artist, at the time a student in Brera, he impressed us with the depth of his reflection on machine learning. His project, The Fall, was a performance – nothing particularly complex from a computational point of view – but it demonstrated a deep knowledge of the themes and an extraordinary ability to go beyond the surface.
Thinking about it, every work has become the mirror of the moment in which artificial intelligence found itself – and with it, also us.
The Background of Daniela Cotimbo
What were your studies and why are you interested in the intersection of art, digital, artificial intelligence, technology?
My path has been quite traditional: I started by studying painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, but over time I realized that what really interested me was curating. So I enrolled in the master’s program in Contemporary Art Curator at La Sapienza.
I have always been fascinated by the media, so much so that my thesis at the Academy was dedicated to Second Life and the artists who inhabited that virtual world.
The true encounter with media art, however, came through indirect paths. It was thanks to the stimulation of Alan Advantage, the company that still supports the activities of Re:humanism today, that I began to reflect on the relationship between art and artificial intelligence. They had asked me to think about projects that involved artists in this reflection.
Re:Humanism in future perspective
What are the curatorial projects you would like to dedicate yourself to in the future? Have you thought about expanding the format of Re:Humanism even more?
My desire, in perspective, is to transform Re:humanism into something permanent. I would like an active physical space all year round. Thus, it would be possible to propose always new content, in line with the critical urgencies that the project brings with it.
Another important goal is to make the initiative increasingly international. I consider it a step that I consider natural, given the global dimension of the themes we address.
I would also like to delve into projects capable of investigating the potential of art to interrupt or dismantle the recursive logics of artificial intelligence.
And, if possible, I hope to carve out time to dedicate myself to projects that go beyond Re:humanism. Every now and then I feel the need to return to my “old world”.
The 2025 edition, the theme Timeline Shift
This year the theme is Timeline Shift – literally “shift of the timeline” –. How would you explain this concept in a simple way to the readers and how is it embodied in the selected works?
Time, as we experience it today, is not something absolute. Time is a cultural convention, born with the development of a specific technology: the clock. There are many different ways of experiencing time, which vary according to cultures, identities, and our inner selves.
Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, has been designed to replicate only one temporal model: the Western, linear one. The past precedes the present and projects a future. Yet, the present, in this scheme, tends to disappear. AI relies on past data to predict only one possible future.
What does it mean? That everything new, unexpected, divergent is excluded. What happens is brought back to what has already happened.
Then it becomes natural to ask: is this really the world we want? A predictable, repetitive world that reinforces stereotypes and distorted concepts? For some, it may be reassuring, but for others, it is profoundly limiting, if not dangerous.
The artists of this edition have demonstrated that it is possible to work with alternative temporalities, moving away from the recursive logic on which AI is based.
We already live immersed in a present full of tensions and conflicts: with Re:humanism we invite not only the artists, but also the public, to make a shift, a radical change. To move beyond this “wrong timeline”.
The winners and the finalists of the fourth edition of Re:Humanism
The winners were Lo-Def Film Factory, in second place Isabel Merchante, and in third Minne Atairu. Why?
The complexity of the projects made them deserving of this classification.
What struck you about the other finalist projects?
Each project is unique in its own way, both for the aesthetics it proposes and for the thought it carries forward. The idea of time, in this edition, transversely crosses different and profound themes. It ranges from gender to race, from interspecies relationship to the relationship with spirituality, up to ecology and contemporary economy.
Never like this year do I believe we have managed to return such a wide spectrum of possibilities, perspectives, and imaginaries.
“`htmlThe Jury
“`Who are the experts who supported you in the selection of the finalists?
The jury was composed of Alfredo Adamo, CEO of Frontiere; Lorenzo Balbi, director of MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna; Alice Bucknell, artist, writer, and educator; Claudia Cavalieri, director of Fondazione Pastificio Cerere; Daniela Cotimbo, founder and curator of Re:humanism; Niccolò Fano, founder and director of Matèria Gallery; Anika Meier, writer and curator; Paolo Paglia, CEO of APA – Agenzia Pubblicità Affissioni; Federica Patti, curator of Romaeuropa Festival; Walter Quattrociocchi, professor at Università La Sapienza di Roma, head of the Center of Data Science and Complexity for Society; Diva Tommei, director for Italy of EIT Digital; Joanna Zylinska, professor at King’s College London.
APA Prize and Re:Humanism
The winner of the APA Prize was Franz Rosati. What kind of prize is it and why, in your opinion, was this artist chosen?
The APA Prize is an absolute novelty of this edition. It is an award designed for a digital work. It will be destined not only for the courtyard of the Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, but also for the advertising spaces scattered throughout the city of Rome.
This type of exposure to digital art is very common in large international metropolises. We are grateful to APA for giving us the opportunity to experience it in this context as well.
Franz Rosati won the award. Not only for the quality of the work, but also for its effectiveness in an urban context, in a “passing” fruition. The work presents itself as an open narrative flow of generated images, which evoke landscapes in continuous transformation.
Seen on the streets of the city, it becomes a sort of portal between different worlds. A powerful image of what artificial intelligence can represent in our perception of the real.
Re:Humanism and the new technologies
What are the next concepts you would like to investigate related to new technologies?
At this moment, I am still very focused on the analysis of how artificial intelligence influences our construction of reality. I watch with a certain dismay the ease with which AI today allows the generation and dissemination of deeply distorted scenarios, as in the case of the recent video circulated even through the official channels of the President of the United States.
Apparently, whoever created it did not have malicious intentions. Yet, it is precisely this carelessness in production and sharing that I find unsettling. Perhaps in other times someone would have reacted with a “What the fuck?”, while today we seem completely anesthetized to these contents.
Let’s think, for example, about the phenomenon of the Italian brainrot: a style of communication that fuels the spread of absurd, surreal, or deliberately nonsensical content, which nevertheless exerts an inexplicable collective attraction.
All this to say that today AI has the power to construct narratives that, for many, end up assuming the status of reality. And it is precisely this shift that interests me to explore.
We also do it within the exhibition at the Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, through works like those of Silvia Dal Dosso, Franz Rosati, or Daniel Shanken, which each in their own way address the mechanisms by which artificial intelligence shapes our perception of reality.
“`htmlChatGPT and writing
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What do you think of ChatGPT as a writing support?
I think that AI can be a very useful tool, as long as it is considered exactly for what it is: a tool, and not a substitute for our intellectual abilities. I don’t say this for a matter of principle or ethics, but because it involves concrete risks.
The first is that it tends to return results based on what is statistically most likely, and therefore, if not guided consciously, it risks producing content that is unoriginal or creatively weak.
The second is that it flattens the voice of the one who writes: personal style, tone, nuances risk being lost.
In summary, I find that AI is very useful for drafting calls for proposals, social media posts, or more technical and administrative texts, and also for revising one’s more creative writings. However, one must always maintain a certain degree of critical distance and not rely completely on what it suggests.
Image-generating AI
What are the image-generating AIs – starting from prompts – that, in your opinion, can support artistic creation without any harm to the work of the artists themselves?
This is a complex topic, because today many artificial intelligence tools work best when they have access to large amounts of data. However, often these data are not free from rights, which raises legal and ethical issues.
An interesting experiment in this sense is Public Domain 12M. It is an open source dataset composed of public domain images, designed specifically for the training of generative artificial intelligence models. The goal is to offer a secure legal base and high-quality content, without risks related to copyright.
Among the creators of this project are also the artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, prominent figures in the contemporary debate on AI. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention.
Augmented Intelligence, the auction with works created by IA
What do you think about the first auction with works made by A.I.? Augmented Intelligence which we discussed on Econique.
In the article on Econique, we immediately find the image of a work by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, along with many other very important names for the contemporary art scene related to AI. This is to say that an unnecessary storm has been created around this auction: the works present are the result of reflections by artists more human than ever, who have often used AI also to question its critical aspects.
In some cases, like the one we saw a little while ago, they have trained their own models that do not draw from the data of other creatives.
The operation has definitely been hyped for marketing reasons, but frankly today it doesn’t make much difference to organize exhibitions of only painting or only artists who work with AI.
She has collaborated for many years with art magazines such as Artribune, XIBT Contemporary, ArtApp, Insideart and Espoarte, preferring contemporary art in its many facets and media drifts.
