Paolo Curtoni

BIO

Paolo Curtoni was born in Bologna, Italy, and now lives and works in Barcelona. His artistic path has been shaped by a nomadic background and a strong interest in cross-cultural influences. Since discovering computers in the 1980s, he has used programming languages as his main tool for creative expression, alongside a deep fascination with human language.

Over time, he has taken part in exhibitions, contributed to scientific publications, and developed original approaches that connect code, language, and artistic practice. His experience across technology and the arts informs his work on interdisciplinary projects, especially those that explore the relationship between research, creativity, and computational processes.

His visual and sound pieces have been shown at venues such as Palo Alto (Barcelona), the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, BYOD in Tokyo, and Sónar in Barcelona, and have been published on platforms including ALBA.art, Objkt, and FxHash.

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Dream Project: Neural Prometheus (Responsive Dreams 2025)

↑ Click on the image to start the artwork

It seems that fire changed us forever, when Prometheus challenged the gods and gave humans the flame of language, of thought. Thanks to that stolen flame, we learned to speak, to build, and to remember. That spark ignited our minds, elevating us to humanity.

Thousands of years later, distracted and eager humans replicate that passing of the torch almost without realizing it. They throw open the gates of an infinite city made of words: written streets, palaces of sentences, squares of thoughts. And a creature enters, explores, assimilates and organizes.

The gift passes from hand to hand: from the gods to us, from us to the machine.

Today, that flame has taken a new form: training datasets. Immense archives of language that teach machines to speak; our Promethean fire, in text format.

Neural Prometheus directly incorporates into its source code a real extract from a dataset commonly used to train large language models (LLMs). A sample cut from that enormous corpus of texts that trains AI systems to understand and communicate. Phrases extracted from articles, manuals, blogs, conversations and reviews; fragments of poetry alongside assembly instructions. A slice of human reality crystallized into language. But here the dataset doesn’t train an LLM; it becomes visual matter, a landscape across which the form unfolds.

The generative algorithm operates on this textual terrain: a process of “space colonization” guides a branched form to expand, embedding and immersing itself in the semantic substrate. In a laboratory, you might call it a culture medium: here, fire — knowledge, writing — becomes the platform on which a new entity grows and evolves.

The forms that appear resemble neurons, with elongating branches and synapses that connect to the network of sentences. “Neural” is the metaphor we use to describe learning machines. And since Ramón y Cajal described the structure of neurons more than a century ago, the neuron has come to symbolize the basic functional unit of intelligence, the physical building block of thought. Cajal represented them with an artist’s hand, in ink and watercolor on laboratory paper, with desaturated palettes and sharp strokes, and those drawings remain a crucial reference and a source of inspiration.

What form does the space of meaning take? Who colonizes it? What transformations of meaning occur there? Under what regime of control does all this happen? Are we giving away our humanity?

The intelligences we train—or the golems we are shaping—constantly ask us for more material, more semantics, more words to chew. Today the goal is profit and performance; tomorrow, who knows. The colonization of thought begins when someone appropriates our meaning for purposes we have not negotiated.

We now need slow time, to contemplate and understand.

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What is Responsive Art to Paolo Curtoni?

In my artistic practice I use code as a tool and as a language at the same time. I work on the unstable balance between structure and unpredictability, aiming to paradoxically bring a formal system to generate unexpected results, often surprising even those who created it. I use visual and algorithmic elements as symbols that form a language, with an almost linguistic approach that recalls generative grammar.

In recent years, with my work I have found myself going beyond the boundaries of the digital, integrating physical objects and natural processes into generative systems. Maintaining the aspiration of creating moments of revelation: those moments in which a system — digital or hybrid — begins to show something unexpected, something that appears independent, almost alive.

In this creative process, responsiveness adds a further level of unpredictability, qualitatively different from the use of pseudo-random numbers. Thanks to responsiveness, unpredictable external contextual elements are also inoculated into the work: the size of the browser window, the physical conditions of the exhibition space, the actions of the visitor... These elements are integrated into the generative system, giving the environment and the spectator the power and the duty to directly influence the work. Responsive art, then, embraces a dynamic of adaptation and participation, where the work is shaped and harmonized in its context.

/ TGAM's NOTES

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Paolo weaves code and language into poetic systems, shaped by a nomadic life and a love for cross-cultural dialogues.