living painting 007
Video, 2026 · Unique
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About the artwork
Living Painting is a series built entirely on my own machine, using older AI models and custom ComfyUI setups. I wanted these models to wander into corners of latent space they rarely visit, the places most interfaces steer you away from.
The idea began with a search; paintings that were never made, canvases that exist somewhere in the model's latent space but that no human hand and no obedient algorithm would normally bring forward. Working locally means working without the usual restrictions. Commercial software tends to smooth over the stranger regions of these models, the ones that produce something unstable or unclassifiable. Here nothing intervenes between the model and its own tendencies.
Once I found one of these unmade paintings, I gave it a few seconds of life through short video generation; a small movement, a breath, enough to suggest that the painting had been dormant rather than finished.
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.