When Art And Artificial Intelligence Heal Corals

There are many clichés in the world of art, one of which suggests that digital art is almost exclusively the domain of young nerds passionate about computers and technology or, even worse, a lofty offshoot of the vast universe of memes and so-called memesthetic, which developed about twenty years ago with the explosion of the first social media platforms. Of course, we must honestly acknowledge that the noticeable bubble of NFT speculation between 2020 and 2021 intertwined with phenomena linked to the world of gaming and computer graphics. But it would be shortsighted to reduce the issue to this. In fact, digital art has a history that spans several decades, populated by top-level protagonists and great experimenters who fully belong to the contemporary art scene. Throughout this long and glorious trajectory, digital art has often intertwined with its older sister, media or multimedia art, in an innovation journey that has accompanied humanity in its daily relationship with emerging technologies. However, art and technology, advancing together, have often overlooked the two central themes that have always nourished creative production: the conceptual and poetic dimensions of the work. For this reason, today, digital or media artists can claim the right to define themselves, fully, as “conceptual artists” - perhaps even more conceptual than the “old” conceptual artists - because they work with the immaterial as the primary element of their creation. This is the case with Andrea Paoli and his digital work As it is in Heaven so it is on Earth, inspired by the famous quote attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. Paoli uses immateriality to tell a new contemporary duality, one that no longer pits the earthly world against the higher spheres, but shifts the conflict to the highly relevant ground between what exists beyond the screen and what Is inside the screen. The play on the word “Is” becomes a refined, ironic, and philosophical device that connects the realm of being with the phenomenal world, in a post-human reinterpretation of Parmenides’ thought. For those still unconvinced by the thesis of this text, let the example of Coral Sonic Resilience, a project by Italian artist Marco Barotti, a leading figure in the Berlin media art scene. The work consists of underwater installations that send sound signals to coral reefs with the aim of regenerating them. And what do data and computing have to do with this, you may ask? The sound produced by these fascinating underwater totems comes from a complex - and surprisingly lyrical - processing of shamanic chants gathered by the artist from around the world, transformed through artificial intelligence algorithms into a therapeutic symphony for sick corals. The result? It works. What could be more poetic and conceptual than a work that uses AI to tune into nature and heal it? This is the kind of art we love.