12-04-21

Two inkjet prints on acetate sheets, 140 x 260 cm

Publication, 35 x 70 cm, 55 g newspaper paper

Images and visual languages are the building blocks of contemporary forms of propaganda. The
new images of control are mimetic and memetic, they hide and alter their content based on the
data they acquire. Pattern finding represents the current language and process of manipulation. To
study the new forms of mass manufacture means to study the language itself, to search for the
individuated common denominators in individual activities is the key step to understand how the
new forms of propaganda spread and replicate.
Al bias is an anomaly in the output of machine learning algorithms derived from prejudices in
the training data. However, biases offer a great tool to discover and analyze influences in the
inspected datasets. Through the analysis and re-synthesization of more than two million images,
biases embedded in pictures used as propaganda by extremist news websites on both sides of the
political spectrum are clustered and visualized.
12.04.21 is a project carried out using the same tools used by propaganda images and
procedures themselves, a research on the covered processes and on the digital Image as a
conveyor of stories, morals, and narratives, as the representation of the time it is conceived in, and
as a spreader of memetic genes.
Pictures are visual data able to speak and communicate, to tell through their resolution, colors,
and time of creation the story they were built to tell. Images are storytellers, and if clustered,
resynthesized, and inspected they can trace the broad portrait of the narratives and processes
hidden inside them.