Unum
Video, 2026 · Unique
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About the artwork
Thevisual poem Unum draws on the same narrative frame that, from Huxley to Pluribus, stages a regulated, all-encompassing happiness that can turn harmony into a form of control – only to invert it.
Unum examines the ontological dissolution of the individual within the technological fabric; the work assumes that the human being has always been an extended mind and that its agency is inextricably woven into that of its tools. Through artificial intelligence, the archive of collective memory acquires an autonomous voice; this animation of memory triggers a Copernican trauma that pushes the subject to retreat into a solitary individuality. This attachment to the separateness of the ego manifests as a strenuous defense that produces suffering; the illusion of an isolated identity clashes with the reality of a consciousness diffused throughout the world.
The promises of technological happiness and the fears of conformism are interpreted as specters arising from the failure to recognize our collective nature; the vision suggested by the video leads to a kind of ecstatic enlightenment. Influenced by cosmotechnical thought and Buddhist philosophy, the work highlights how identity is devoid of intrinsic essence and is instead always distributed. The final liberation lies in the reunification of the self with the universal vastness, moving beyond the perception of a loss of identity.
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.