A multidisciplinary artist, Luciano Rigolini explores the nature of the photographic image, namely its ambiguity in its relationship to reality. In Apparere (“to appear” in Latin), he presents a visual corpus generated using first-generation artificial intelligence algorithm software. The images result from highly detailed indications that he himself has given to this AI software, effectively establishing a dialogue with the machine that blurs the boundary between the photographic and pictorial nature of the works. In this way, Rigolini questions our visual perception: what do we see? This ensemble evokes both the formal experiments of the avant-garde and the aesthetics of photographic abstraction.

To accompany this body of work, a text by the philosopher Élie During explores the relationship between photography and technology, and the idea of the optical unconscious through ufological imagery, laying out the contours of a photographic fiction.