I wished to fill the latent moments with awareness, discovering traces of my identity, humanity, history, recognizing myself in the works by a machine.
SONNO is the italian word for “sleeping”. SONO is the italian word for “I am”. The sleep, the dream, awakening and awareness. Artificial Intelligence based art, and the process of training and timing, inspiring awareness related to identity and space, to one's history. When machine is dreaming human is awakening! Images from the final training cycle session from the process explained above in the ARTIFICIALEMENTE description were selected arranged to complete a selfportrait to identify myself with the city where I live and I was born. The artworks used in SO[N]NO are from the same training as those in ARTIFICIALEMENTE but are different images.
Some might say I am a dreamer, but I am not the only one. Machine is dreaming too and I dream with machine.
Once I closed my eyes. I fell into a deep sleep. I had a dream. It was a powerful dream, a revealing dream. It was like taking a journey far away, and from a distance I could see better the place I was leaving, I could see everything. When I returned from this journey I woke up and post awakening I wasn't myself anymore.
I am now made of soil, sand and lava. I have existed through all of history of humanity. I am shaped by earthquakes and eruptions. I have survived all sorts of human destructions. Famine and pestilences never broke my back. I am heaven and hell. I am myself and everybody, I am one of a kind. I became Nhapoly.
I have found always really hard to identify myself with my birthplace, the city where I grew up, the one I left for many years and returned to and where I still am since my return. I always struggled to merge and converge my personality with its customs and traditions, I always believed I was someone else born to be somewhere else. Living away allowed me to look at this place better, like looking at a photo. Looking at all of its details, shapes, colours, I realized that it was like looking at pictures of me. I was there in its streets, squares, churches, buildings, parks, I was in every place. I was made of its soil and water. I was coloured by its sunlight and shades. Inside of me its fruits and garbage, its chaos and peace. I breathed its sea breeze and pollution. It's on my skin, through my hair, in my heart and mind. I was genetically carved and shaped by Napoli. Now, even when I close my eyes, I see it, I feel it. It's inside of me. We always need to take a step back to look at something because if we stay in the same frame we will never see that probably, if we look deep and careful, there is a piece of us in that lanscape, in that history, in the people and in the way of life. Identity is built on different levels. It's chemestry beyond our knowledge but it's there. Imagination is fundamental. It helps us to develop different perspectives, enriches and strenghts our mind sight, it expandes our perception, we stop looking and we start visualizing.
The work is the result of a dream experience with AI based on a concept about the links between spaces, places, culture, identity and the relationships possible thanks to the use of intelligent machines that allow us to think and think beyond assumed and dated paradigms enriching and expanding the meaning of "seeing" and "looking" and "dreaming".
Images are my code, this artwork is code based. My mind is visual and code based. This work was made with images created by an artificial intelligence provided by Playform.io. The AI trained on a dataset of photos selected by me through Google's algorithm. The portrait photos captured by the electronic eye of my smartphone, it was then glitched by a software that through incorrect image data editing (databending) was invited in generating its own interpretation of those informations and so of my portrait photo. This is the way machine imagine me.
A machine helped me to dream. A machine helped me to imagine and to see. A machine helped me to visualize a relation. It became an extension of my mind, of my perceptions. It presented me a vision of the city, its representation, putting me in relation with it through my art and thoughts.
Artificial Intelligence inspired human intelligence. All of the softwares used were complementary, essential forces part of this creative experience that is enriched by new meanings and feelings. New ways of seeing.
Because only thanks to the new photos created by AI I could imagine Napoli beyond it's iconic frames and actually discover a Napoli that it is inside of me, in my subconscious and that it was revealed to me through this creative process, like a revealing dream.