Shape
Video, 2026 · Unique
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About the artwork
Shape is a visual poem and the first work generated with Seedance 2, a generative model that opens different possibilities for movement — figures that shift, strain, and resist in ways earlier tools could not quite hold. The piece explores the ego as a form of gravity, a weight so thoroughly internalized that it reads as natural, as ground. The figures in the work cannot rise; they attempt it, and the attempt is the poem. Distortions and structural inconsistencies are accepted as they emerge, treated as part of the emotional texture.
Francesco D'Isa
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.