Aesthetics of the New Media

The first part of the course (the first class of each week) will address the increasingly urgent question of interaction with artificial intelligence. Students will be encouraged to ask themselves whether, and under what conditions, this interaction can be creative, and a series of visual, musical, and theatrical works created with AI will be examined. In class, Plato's Apology of Socrates will be read together in a theatricalized form, and the philosophical concept of dialogue will be discussed, with particular attention to whether and how a dialogue with AI might be possible. In addition, the concept of dialogue will be explored through the thought of Bakhtin, focusing on his text on Rabelais and selected passages from his work on Dostoevsky. Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais will be read together during the final part of each class, as it will serve as the starting point for the second, experimental phase of the course. Finally, some classes will be devoted to a text by David Bolter, Digital Plenitude, which will allow the discussion to expand from AI to the broader sphere of the digital and its consequences for our perception of the world. Bolter's text will be discussed collectively in class in the form of a "trial": instructors and students will debate the author's arguments, also drawing on their own personal experiences.

The second part of the course (the second class of each week) will be experimental in nature and will be devoted to a creative project that students will carry out in three phases, producing a piece of music (first phase), a text (second phase), and a video (third phase) with AI, starting from what is known as "slop", that is, the set of low-quality materials (increasingly plausible, also precisely thanks to AI) that can be found online. One class will be devoted to the concept of slop and its different typologies, after which the practical work will begin. The aim will be to combine the three components—musical, textual, and visual—into a short video of about ten minutes, which will be presented in May during a final conference day. The starting point for the video will be provided by passages from Gargantua and Pantagruel read during the first part of the course. A guest of the final day in May will be computer scientist and musician Bob Sturm, who will present his project on music created from spam, along with two other artists: a visual artist (Massimo Balestrini) and a writer (Davide Morossinotto).

The third part of the course (the third class of each week) will be devoted to the broader digital sphere: how have digital technologies transformed, and how are they still transforming, not only artistic practices but also the very way in which human beings perceive the world? Several scholars—esthetics scholars, media scholars, and artists—will be invited to discuss specific topics with instructors and students (the idea of the metaverse; virtual reality; the transformation of photographic practices and of the very concept of photography; the relationship between word and image). These contributions will offer a critical and multidisciplinary overview of the potentials and consequences of the digital in the fields of aesthetic production, design, and innovative experimentation, fostering a direct dialogue between research, practice, and new technological perspectives.