In March 2023, the Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani and the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art signed a strategic cooperation agreement which will lead to a series of collaborations such as exhibitions, artistic residencies, seminars and publications. The project is supported and promoted by the Italian Cultural Institute of Shanghai. At the same time, the second edition of the “Chinese and Italian Humanities and Art Dialogue Forum” entitled ‘Arts, technologies and AI’, jointly organized by the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art and the Institute of the Encyclopedia, took place as scheduled. Italian Treccani.
The theme of this edition is ‘Arts, technologies and AI’. In today’s world of art, AI (Artificial Intelligence) has already surpassed technology and has itself become a language of creation. The Chinese and Italian guests present at the forum discussed what are the sparks that ignite the dialogue between art and AI. AI, applied to the artistic field, loses its original connotation and, on the contrary, becomes a brush, a musical instrument, a type of imaginative power.
Creators and artists in different fields of knowledge have applied technology to their expressions, also sparking unprecedented controversies. With their professional knowledge and broad perspectives, the artists thoroughly discussed what is the future of art, whether artists’ authorship will be affected and what will be the value of man-made artworks, opening a discussion session which, according to Massimo Bray, director general of the Institute of the Italian Treccani Encyclopaedia, was very significant.
This is a topic close to the heart of Sun Wenqian, director of the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, who believes that no matter where we are and technological changes, the artist’s vitality is in itself the essence of art. Human emotion and imagination are the wings that hover above technology, and human thought as well as technological progress will continue to evolve hand in hand. This is precisely the purpose and meaning of the dialogue between the Sino-Italian humanities and arts.
What is referred to as the “digital age” is not only the age of technological progress, but also the age in which technology profoundly dominates our ways of perceiving, our belief systems and the world around us. The art curator Valentino Catricalà, who, despite his young age, has been working for many years in the field of digital art, and the art historian Daniela Cotimbo, who has chosen to focus her research on different forms of expression, in particular new technologies, share a dialogue that represents an avant-garde vision and voice of the art world.
An AI, knowing hundreds of brush strokes of classical Chinese landscape painting, is perfectly capable of painting a soulful landscape. Chinese artist Qiu Zhijie, one of the first to experiment with a work of artificial intelligence, believes that something really big is yet to come. According to Chinese artist Han Bo, technology will pervade every field of human knowledge. Socrates argued that Daedalus’ works must be bound otherwise they would escape. The new digital age that humanity is facing today is no different from the labyrinth of Daedalus: a cycle that is the destiny from which human beings cannot escape.