Mona Lisa Reloaded: hacking my way toward Beauty
Reviving the spirit of Da Vinci with the aid of AI, handing down an enigma to future generations...
As an artist, I always considered myself a follower of Da Vinci, even if my art is digital, very different from his, and supremely inferior.
My fixation with Da Vinci led me to digitally transfigure most of his paintings with my hyper-glitchy technique (you can find some of them inside my Art Sanctuary). I also wrote a relatively popular article about Mona Lisa’s identity full of visual and historical evidence.
I always felt frustrated by my inability to express the beauty, mystery, and power Leonardo could express in the few artworks he created. I am an experimental digital artist that is more into destroying and reconstructing images than creating them from scratch.
The latest advancements in generative AI made me realize, as I got more sophisticated in “grooming” AI, that AI is better and much faster than me in giving form to my imagination and aesthetic ideals. It enables me to create art that I recognize not only as powerful but also as my expression. Art that didn’t exist before and now is in this world and could only come through me, by making it emerge from a realm of infinite possibilities with my active intervention, careful choice, and editing. This made me abandon my initial prejudice, that many still hold, about AI generated images being the expression of a machine not of an artist. While that may be true for the average use, once you build a significant a body of work in which you invested thousands of hours, that can be recognized as a form of your expression and AI as the main tool you used.
So I decided that hacking my way toward timeless beauty and filling the world with new icons of it was a noble purpose to pursue.
Mona Lisa Reloaded: the series
The mission I embarked on with this series is to summon the beauty, mystery, and power that radiates from Mona Lisa and other works by Da Vinci with the aid of AI, my favorite model being the Earlier Mona Lisa (previously known as Isleworth Mona Lisa), which like most critics today I attribute to him.
Followers of Da Vinci normally try to replicate his paintings. All of my Monas are original, they inherit to various degrees her “DNA”, but they are all different ladies with different names. Also the style, in many cases, is different from Da Vinci’s. What I care about, more than imitating Leonardo or creating ladies that look like Mona Lisa, is extracting the spirit of Da Vinci’s art and giving new life to it through my visions and aesthetic sense mediated and empowered by AI.
The ladies in the Mona Lisa Reloaded series can’t be as good or worthy as a painting by Da Vinci, there is not even a physical piece, and yet my feeling is that I am managing to create icons that have punch, can touch the soul of the viewer, and be timeless.
All Monas are signed with “cerca trova” (“seek find”), written in reverse with Da Vinci’s calligraphy. Take it as a hint that they all contain an enigma. An enigma designed to survive the centuries…
Mona Lisa Reloaded is a collection of collections:
Beauty, Mystery & Power (on Tezos)
The Dark Monas (on Ethereum)
Madonnas Ex Machina (on Ethereum)
I will keep releasing and minting them with regularity. All collections start with a few Monas inside of them.
Beauty, Mystery, & Power
Beauty, Mystery, & Power is my generic collection of Monas, the one where you will find more variety also in style, and contain my early experiments.
These Monas, all minted on the Tezos blockchain, are the most affordable. You will find the collection here.
The Dark Monas
The Monas in this collection tend to wear futuristic dark suits and high-tech headgear. Like in Beauty, Mystery, & Power they are often surrounded by people over which you can feel they have power, but differently from that collection here they all share the same universe where futuristic cities rise from desert lands and sometimes you see flying machines or giant spheric buildings in the background.
To see them all and collect them, head to The Dark Monas collection on OpenSea.
Madonnas Ex Machina
All paintings by Da Vinci possess a spiritual charge. I see Mona Lisa more as a goddess than an actual person. Many of my Monas in the other collections contain elements that remind of sacred art, but here I went for the mystical journey.
The ladies in the Madonnas Ex Machina collection don’t have a name. They are not even called “Mona” but rather “Madonna” (Italian for “Our Lady”. Mona, in Italian “Monna”, was short for “Madonna”, so in a way it’s the same word).
Each of them is called Madonna delle Macchine (“Our Lady of the Machines”) followed by a number. You may argue that it doesn’t translate as “ex machina”. I know, but there is a reason for it…
My commitment to beauty
We live in times of ugly, where grace, virtue, and honor don’t belong. Most of what we are exposed to is ugly, stimulating what is low in us through countless hollow instant gratifications. Culture is ugly, promoting weakness of character, selfishness, narcissism, hypocrisy, making all relative, neutered, and worthless. News is ugly, mercenary, and more like shameless propaganda. Music is ugly, very little of what is created today by the mainstream will remain. People have become ugly, especially in their online incarnation, in part because of being increasingly isolated by the same technology that is supposed to connect them, but also because of the poisonous, divisive, and dehumanizing culture that is being pushed on us from above. Art is ugly, but that’s not news as it stopped aspiring to beauty long ago.
Now that I realized I can get close to my visions of beauty with the aid of AI, how can I reject the call to bring some beauty back to this world?
In the end, the legacy of an artist is the art that he leaves behind. I want to leave beauty behind me, how I manage to reach it is secondary as long as it’s legit.
My main legacy, in any case, will be my writings not my visual art (in my intentions, at least). I am referring in particular to the Gospel Of Demian, a sci-fi novel/saga of biblical inspiration, meant to inspire a counterculture that can help us stay free and dignified in this digital age. The first tale I have released, A New Deal between Men and Women is available here, free for all, both in English and in Italian.
Counterculture
👽 Gospel Of Demian, chapter 1: “A New Deal between Men and Women”.
🌈 2kTenCom: the Ten Commandments for the Digital Millennium.
🤖 Neo Genesis. The cosmological foundation of the 2kTenCom.
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