ARGO

With Argo, Paolo Bufalini continues his investigation into the remediation of biographical materials through technological devices, which began with the projects Land of Nod (2023) and beloved (2023).

The exhibition applies generative artificial intelligence tools to a series of datasets made up of the digitalisation of the artist’s family albums, covering a time span from the 1950s to the early 2000s. Once the datasets were created, the artist used them to train text-to-image generative models capable of reproducing the likenesses of the subjects represented in the albums.

The result is the generation of an augmented past, a photographically credible representation of something that has not been, but might have been, in an ambiguous overlap between what’s factual and what’s imagined. The family albums provide an opportunity for a more general reflection on archives and their power to open windows onto parallel worlds through a dizzying knowledge that redefines the linearity of time.

The result is a series of syntographies in which the artist’s family members are depicted, at different ages of their lives, in the pose of sleepers. The ambiguity of sleep, where the subject is both absent and present, reflects the more general uncertainty of the image and recalls the dreamlike dimension underlying the entire project.

Argo, from the very title, is intended as a journey – a journey through time and through the artist’s personal history, but also a journey into the technological unconscious, that space containing data that cannot be directly interpreted (in computer science latent space) on which generative models process images through associations precluded to humans. By customizing generative models with biographical and emotionally invested materials, Bufalini operates a poetic re-appropriation of the technological device, subjecting those same materials to the unpredictability of statistical correlations.

Two flasks, containing gold objects dissolved in a stirring acid solution, complete the exhibition. The sculptural work declines a similar idea of latency on a more markedly processual level. The gold – present, but imperceptible to the human eye – refers to the infinite new generative possibilities that can only manifest themselves in its final fall.