RIscARTI Festival

XI EDITION. Focus

Riscarti's upcoming edition goes beyond the tenth, with the idea and fear of entering the future, into that imaginative space where everything takes on blurred contours and light-dark tones: trespassing beyond the Pillars of Hercules of the known world to generate reflections and images of what lies ahead.

Will the thirst for knowledge towards the unknown that our mind craves change our body and our thoughts, or are there boundaries that should not be crossed? Technology is making giant strides and the future has more and more to say.

During the festival, this year the works of art and installations on display, pushing the public to consider the material and evocative value of waste, will become the starting point for a profound reflection through images, especially regarding technology. Riscarti is the perfect opportunity to bring generations together across the board and inspire creative and visionary minds to create a better future together.

Artificial like generative intelligences or artisanal like traditional skills, what will our future be? According to some analyses, the real risk of technology is that it will increase inequalities. The alarm also came from the Pope, in his latest Encyclical he explains that if environmental damage is the price of progress, according to the technocratic paradigm, we must learn to use natural resources without being dominated by his logic.

The challenge that the development and diffusion of intelligent technologies are representing, with ever greater pervasiveness and impact for human beings, calls for the need to mobilize the wide range of cultural tools that humanity has developed. The shared objectives, indispensable principles and common strategies will need to be rediscussed and defined.

In the recent Oppenheimer film, the alternative between the positive use of the atom for the benefit of humanity in the search - yesterday as today - for an inexhaustible energy source and, on the contrary, its use for war purposes with effects such as to compromise the habitat and the very survival of the human race is the real crux of the matter.

Epochal questions that pit the potential of artificial intelligence on the scales: opportunities or risks?

There are heated debates about the aesthetic and cultural relevance of images produced by artificial intelligence. “Artificial intelligence creates nothing but copies existing works, by existing artists, altering them enough to escape copyright laws.” The world-famous linguist Noam Chomsky states this from the columns of the New York Times (March 2023)

Having lost the anthropocentric approach to reality, screwed to the new intelligent machines, we must change perspective.

Michelangelo Pistoletto, one of the first artists to join the Arte Povera revolution, the radical movement theorized by Germano Celant, very critical of a system that wanted the artist to be «a new jester committed to satisfying refined consumption and producing objects for the palates cultured" states in his upcoming exhibition at Castello di Rivoli that AI "contains everyone's information. It's scary because it's very powerful, it's true, but its characteristic is to collect memory to provide certain, objective and exact data."

We find ourselves faced with a system capable of classifying the cultural heritage of the past, of moving between different styles, techniques, currents and schools. Art has always had to deal with the technological innovations of its time, taking on attitudes of distrust or acceptance from time to time. It was the same for photography. Despite the fears, the new technology did not kill painting, on the contrary, it gave it the freedom to go beyond the representation of reality.

Where: @lavaccheria

When: from 13th to 28th APRIL