Imago Resiliens. Signs Between the Visible and the Invisible in Artificial Imagination

Abstract

In the age of artificial imagination, drawing reveals itself as an organism undergoing metamorphosis. Not a singular, unique authorial gesture, but a process that creates a space of interrelation between human and machine, involving both in an evolutionary and co-evolutionary movement, from which an image emerges that always exceeds the author’s semantic intention. The project, as such, must therefore open itself up to an image which, within its own sign, contains something other than itself, reclaiming an ancient semantic role that is both a trace of the beyond and a threshold between the visible and the invisible. The technical and stylistic transformation brought about by new technologies thus invites us to recover an ancient morphological tradition, with Platonic roots, in which appearance is the mode through which the unfigurable manifests itself in an act of re-velation. The paper analyses the thought of three leading exponents of this tradition: Giordano Bruno, Pavel Florenskij and Adolf Portmann. In this intermediate space, where representation – the act of ‘becoming present once more’ – manifests as an intermittent blindness, a new form of aesthetic resilience takes shape: the capacity of images to traverse technical, linguistic, and perceptual mutations whilst preserving their own memory. Artificial intelligence introduces a principle of visual selection: it produces a multitude of variants, of which only some coalesce into forms that are narratively coherent. Aesthetic resilience is thus manifested in the ability to endure amidst change, adapting to new codes without losing symbolic identity. It is a ‘transformative survival of the sign’, where invention and memory intertwine within the image’s evolutionary process. Through examples of synthetic architectural representation, the paper explores this ecology of the resilient sign, in which drawing, as a trace – hybrid and generative – continues to evoke the original act of vision, extending its meaning into new forms of appearance.