Idols 1
Video, 2025
About the artwork
Idols 1 is the first piece of a triptych of visions co-produced with AI. The work translates moments of intensity like ove, communion, or brief spiritual clarity into unstable visual forms. Using layered models, mixed LoRA files, and intentional parameter shifts, the piece embraces glitches and divergences as part of its meaning. The result is a sequence of epiphanies where the sense of self loosens, revealing both darkness and joy in the emergence of shared, temporary “idols.”
I did all the audio with Eleven Labs
Audio explanation
Listen to Francesco D'Isa discuss this work.
Francesco D’Isa (b. 1980, Florence) is a philosopher and digital artist whose work explores the aesthetic and socio-technical implications of artificial intelligence in contemporary visual culture. With a background in philosophy and a long-standing engagement with digital media, D’Isa approaches AI as a semiotic and conceptual partner within a distributed creative process.
His practice draws on a sustained investigation of the interplay between language, image, and meaning, using text-to-image models as a space for visual experimentation. Through refined prompt engineering and a critical engagement with the machine’s latent structures, D’Isa constructs images that reflect personal poetics while activating the shared ideograms encoded in our collective visual memory. These works traverse the latent space of generative models like a symbolic landscape, negotiating the boundary between authorial intention and algorithmic emergence.
As a theorist, D’Isa has contributed significantly to the discourse on AI and art, most notably in The Algorithmic Revolution of Images (Sossella Editore, 2024), where he examines the philosophical stakes of image-making in the age of generative systems. Rejecting the romantic ideal of the solitary genius, he advocates for a model of creativity that is relational, historical, and technologically mediated. His view of AI as a co-author—not anthropomorphized, but understood as an apparatus shaped by cultural and statistical memory—echoes the perspectives of thinkers like Flusser, Latour, and Glăveanu.
His recent works, including Sunyata (Eris Edizioni, 2023), the first AI-assisted graphic novel published in Italy, explore themes of impermanence, paradox, and the instability of representation. Often embracing the “errors” of generative systems, his images find poetic value in algorithmic drift and failure.
Central to D’Isa’s approach is the concept of semantic attractors: words or phrases that act as gravitational centers in the latent space of AI models, pulling visual output toward dense clusters of cultural meaning. By working with and against these attractors, D’Isa reveals how images are shaped not only by prompts but by deep, encoded patterns of interpretation, offering a vision of AI art as both a conceptual instrument and a mirror of our symbolic systems.