In classical culture, the epitaph was a commemorative speech performed by an orator in honour of war heroes. In modern poetry instead, it started to acquire the shape of a short text used as a sepulchral description. Thus, it became an actual literary form used not only by the loved ones of the departed but also by artists, intellectuals and poets to glorify what was done during the life of those who passed away. 

Numero Cromatico raises the question of the future of the human artist within a society in which technologies that simulate human brain activities are becoming increasingly sophisticated.

 

Advancing the hypothesis that the human-artist can be replaced

in the near future by the machine and that technological advancement will mark the end of the writer and the artist as we understand it today, Epitaphs for the Human Artist offers new key readings to the user, for the activation of a critical process of the present. Taking up the literary form of the epitaph, through a text generator (designed in collaboration with Professor Simone Rebora - Università degli Studi di Verona) based on Artificial Neural Networks, the intimate gesture of commemorating

the deceased - intrinsic to the literary form of the epitaph - is here referred to a machine that, symbolically, dismisses the human

artist from the world of the living, decreeing his end. 

The printing of the artist’s book is realized in collaboration

with La Legatoria, Rome.

​

[from the catalogue of the exhibition

Re:Humanism 2 - Re:Define the Boundaries].