ENVIRONMENT | Magical AI

He’s 28 years old and has a blog on Instagram; he’s an art director and consultant. Since 2017, he’s worked in artificial intelligence. Rivista studio called him a ‘pioneer’ of prompt art, which uses a varied set of artificial intelligence tools and text commands.
We asked Vittorio Maria Dal Maso to tell us what’s happening in the ai multiverse and to illustrate it with a few images, printed here

By Francesca Molteni

FM Let’s start with a bit about you, Vittorio. What is your profession, exactly? How do you define it?
VMDM The definition of what I do is quite fluid, but in short, I’d say artist and designer, even if my work involves a lot of consulting, creative direction and special projects. But if I manage to do things that are beyond belief, there isn’t a true definition. And it’s also the symbol of the new technology I work with, which will become a part of all industries. My objective is almost philosophical consultancy, tied to the symbolism of what brands want to convey. My motto is ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same.’ Insofar as we can create images, what remains is and always will be the symbol, the archetype. Whether I generated a photograph of a bear or whether I took it myself with a camera, the bear symbol remains the same. And so, given total freedom to act, the most interesting thing will be to fine tune and hone the intention behind the creation of each image. I read the other day that we’re going from the information age to the age of curation. In one way or another, we’ll all become output curators. Today on Instagram, I shared a tweet by Elon Musk, in which he responded to another tweet saying that by 2040, we’ll have one million humanoid robots roaming about Earth.
You’ll have yours and I’ll have mine. If many practical things can be done by robotic arms, all that’s left for us is intent, the decisions about how to make these machines move.
 

FM Tell us about how you got here, how does one become a curator or digital artist?
VMDM My story is a bit odd. I studied branding at IED, I come from a very work-oriented familyfrom the Veneto region. I’ve always had this sort of approach, but I’ve also always had a more artistic sensibility. My father’s job, a lawyer for serial killers for 20 years, was especially important. I grew up hearing all kinds of stories and seeing all kinds of photographs. To the degree that I began questioning the truth behind good and evil. So, I began studying that which in philosophy is called determinism, the idea that everything which happens, whether good or bad, is determined by things that you can’t control. I then began to study Indian culture, alchemy, hermeticism, and the Tao. And I realised that I was seeking out maestros—in Italy there are the maestros of a workshop, and then there are the apprentices.And I decided that I wanted to be an apprentice. I managed to find such maestros. For example, Giorgio Di Salvo, a writer and designer who is well respected in the international underground design world. He curated the first brand launched by Kanye West and he has an almost monastic practice in his approach. Then there are others, less tied to the world of images and appearance. They taught me to interact with symbols. I’ve met alchemists, interesting characters who helped me understand that in the end, everything we see out in the world is symbolic. And, in part inspired by the words of Rudolf Steiner, who says that the era of riding the tiger is over and that the era of permeating the skin of the dragon and dominating it has begun, I thought that I should become part of the system.
And I became part of the world of images. I’ve never sent out my CV, I’ve never worked for a company but, dot after dot, I plotted a line that led me to combine my research on symbols with that which is the demand of the entertainment industry today, which needs nothing more than to sell images. Images are closely connected to magic, which is a topic I care deeply about, and which is related to the imagos. Magic requires three basic elements: a magic signet, a magic formula and a magic ritual, which is an action to fortify the symbol. Like Harry Potter and all the unique magical entities of today: brands. Because a logo is a signet, it offers a magic formula, and an advertising campaign is a ritual; the intention is always that of selling a product. So, I decided to become part of it, to get to know the codes and work for the good. And artificial intelligence is my lightsabre because I can generate worlds.
Last week, Samsung began selling its transparent screens, so the technology to have a screen in your glasses is arriving, it’s something similar to headsets. It will be like going into different worlds. Any brand or person, instead of having an account, will have worlds that they can enter, and we’ll have to be careful. The multiverse era, that of multi-dimensionality, of new spaces for experiences, has begun.
 

FM Can you explain how artificial intelligence works, when it spits out an image which you’ve generated through a machine?
VMDM Just yesterday I was watching a TED Talk with Francesco D'Isa, a digital artist which I really respect who is also the director of a magazine called L’Indiscreto. The first thing he always says is: ‘Will artificial intelligence kill art? It’s a question we’ve been asking for 1,000 years, but art hasn’t ever died’. And then he asks: ‘Are you the one creating the work of art, or is it the machine? It’s you who creates the work of art, with the help of a machine.’ In the same way in which our use of a paintbrush, which essentially is a high-tech tool compared to petroglyphs, is téchne. The idea of intention is constant, even with AI. What should we do? It’s the new world, the way in which we manage images.
You keep filing it down and filing it down, as if it were a block of marble being sculpted by Canova.
And you keep scraping away at this block, until you create an image. Michelangelo said something like that. The same thing with AI.
 

FM What are your references? Where do you conduct research? I saw a picture on your IG profile with someone you call ‘God,’ who is that?
VMDM That’s Rick Rubin, a mystical figure in the global music industry. He’s a producer, who is literally considered God for having created the first hip hop record label in the world, new rock, and for having worked with some of the biggest rock stars in the world. He made Johnny Cash popular again, after he had left the scene, and he produced almost all the albums by Kanye West, Slipknot, the bad boys of hard metal, and even Adele. He wrote a book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, which was an international bestseller. We talked about artificial intelligence, and I asked him what he thought, and in the end, we agreed that, like I said, the more things change, the more they stay the same. There will always be a soul that controls things. For example, I have friends who are really nostalgic about the past, but all the people from the past which they respect, from Fellini to Battiato, played with the new technology of their time. Fellini could have become a painter, but instead he used a camera which was high-tech at the time. Battiato used modular synthesisers, which had just come out, a tool which musicians wrote about in newspapers, saying that wasn’t real music. In general, all music, in the way it’s enjoyed today, is only possible because of technology. Art itself is the exact world in which things are not given, but which we try to define from time to time. I have a lot of painter friends and I think that the most revolutionary thing you can do today, in our digital world, is to pick up a paint brush and paint. But at the same time, another way to talk about contemporary life is to reflect on these technologies through art. And that’s what I’m preparing to do. I think that, if they had AI, many of the brilliant minds of the past would be having a lot of fun.