ALICE BARALE
A playful sublime: nature represented through artificial intelligence
In 2023, the gallery Spazio Solo in Madrid hosted a digital art exhibition centered on the theme of the sublime. Protection No Longer Assured brought together various contemporary works inspired by this concept, focusing on what the sublime means today. Most works depicted nuclear disasters or ecological crises, and the role of technology in them. However, this paper will take as its starting point a rather different work: a series of strange animals created with artificial intelligence, titled Bestiarium latens. These slightly deformed creatures evoke not terror, but tenderness. What are they doing in an exhibition about the sublime?
The paper will address this question by analyzing several works that depict animals through AI. All of them suggest a notion of the sublime that diverges both from the "classical" concept developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, and from the technological sublime theorized in the 1990s. The form of the sublime that emerges through these works concerns neither nature nor technology in themselves, but rather their relationship. Moreover, it is not characterized by fear, but rather by tenderness (as mentioned) and play, pointing to a new interesting direction that can be explored.