Today it is possible to dream and imagine in pixels, compose them in harmony through codes and algorithms, and finally download them to the physical world in the form of artworks. It is also possible to time travel and take the pieces of the wildest dreams of artists of all times and re-create their masterpieces through the “mind” of a machine.

Nowadays, artists can smooth these machines’ “rough metal edges” with colour and sugar, coating their binary tongues with some still vibrant feelings of artists from the Renaissance or Baroque. So today, artists can keep painting with a brush that could have been left by Rubens next to a 17th-century masterpiece, carve with a robot hand a touch on Michelangelo’s non-finito (unfinished) sculptures, insert a note from the 21st-century into a Mozart concerto or bring life to Gaudi’s architecture.

Ironically, the most intimate, humane connection between artists from past centuries and the present is possible via an artificial bond. We’ve been witnessing a real-time connection to an artistic work in progress ongoing for centuries. Take, for example, how artist Davide Quayola extends a mechanical AI hand to carve the thoughts of Michelangelo’s Non-Finito sculptures, creating an exquisite harmony of analogue and digital in a glitch of centuries, in his series Unfinished Sculptures (2014 – ongoing).

Contemporary artists are augmenting their capacity to create and reinterpret old art forms with advanced technology, such as augmented reality, virtual reality, data, and code, and reveal a perfect antidote for the fear that digital wires may be a rope around our necks. Instead, these artists reach out to the source of inspiration and gather precious bits and components of paintings, songs, literature, and sculptures, from the past and blend them with the ultimate innovation. They exquisitely fuse the artificial with the human to make it familiar to our organic touch and let it breathe and blend into our collective aesthetic consciousness.

As I mentioned before, Davide Quayola admirably expresses this in his first monographic exhibition, Re-coding, through his sculptures carved by robots, paintings with data and poems of past and present, real and artificial. He salutes Michelangelo, Botticelli, Rubens, and Caravaggio, throughout a mind-storming immersive experience, and as a result, he consolidates his prominence in the future of these novel art forms.

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