APOPHENIA
curated by Lucrezia Nardi (in collaboration with Megan Volpe)
NEWS!
Data:
17-22 february 2025
Luogo
IAAD. Torino
THEME AREA
From Muse to algorithms: reinventing creativity
Designers can collaborate with algorithms that produce endless creative variations, accelerating and expanding traditional ideation. AI can inspire, offering new directions and styles that might otherwise remain unexplored. Yet, this partnership also provokes key questions: when does machine suggestion overshadow human intuition? What is creativity in the age of AI?
WORKSHOP
How can AI amplify creative processes? This workshop explores the role of artificial intelligence in artistic design, expanding the concept of design to include the planning and creation of functional and aesthetic solutions for objects, spaces, or experiences. Under curatorial direction, participants will collaborate with Megan Volpe, an artist who uses AI to generate dreamlike video works, exploring emotions and creative processes through advanced technological tools.
The term Apophenia refers to the perception of connections between unrelated elements, a dynamic that reflects both the workings of the human brain and AI processes. Both rework inputs, memories, and data to generate new and meaningful patterns. Nothing is created from nothing: just as generative AI, through Deep Learning, synthesizes new content from pre-existing models, the human creative process is a continuous transformation.
The workshop will culminate in a process similar to creating a tangible exhibition, a synthesis of the dialogue between human and machine, visceral and post-human.
TEAM LEADER
Lucrezia Nardi
University lecturer at IAAD. in Turin, teaching Contemporary Art History, Social Art History, and Phenomenology. Independent curator and member of the Barriera Design District, she
develops interdisciplinary projects exploring the intersection of art, space, and objects, with a focus on new media, hyper-contemporary phenomena, countercultures, and their social impact.
RESULTS
The workshop concluded with the creation of a hybrid installation combining AI and video art, synthesizing the collective research and production process. After the theoretical sessions, participants developed apophenic narratives through a transdisciplinary process based on the experimentation of traditional media and generative technology, applied to the various disciplinary and productive fields explored.
A text creation team crafted short stories, which were then transformed by the graphic team into a poster for the exhibition and a teaser video. The installation design team created a render of the exhibition space, generating furnishings with AI, while a music team composed a soundtrack, enriching a video – originally created by Megan Volpe as the workshop’s starting point – with music and ambient sounds. Finally, the texts were used as voice-overs in the two final videos.
The entire process followed an interconnected dynamic, in which each group influenced the others, creating emergent meanings from random inputs, much like the concept of apophenia. The result is not just an audiovisual work but an immersive and participatory experience: an exhibition conceived as a shared space, where each produced element becomes part of a narrative ecosystem that transcends disciplinary boundaries, actively engaging participants and future viewers in the construction of meaning.
