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Apolinário (@multimodal.art)

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Apolinário has been a covert agent from the humanities inside the world of programming for 11 years. Based in Vienna and working as head of product at a startup, he turns ideas into paintings art using text-to-image artificial intelligence models.

'an insect robot preparing a meal' series

the title of each work corresponds to the text prompt used by the artificial intelligence to generate each image

In the first pair of series presented here, Apolinário's AI models are asked to dream the future of cooking. This very human activity, which thus far our machines have been quite unable to perform adequately is here carried out by tiny insect robots or humanoid cook-droids. In this as in other works, Apolinário prompts the AI to harness its knowledge of the style of famous painters and illustrators in creating its compositions.

'a robot chef preparing a meal' series

In 'a nuclear fusion plant powering a favela', Apolinário prompts the AI to represent a future wherein nuclear energy has become widespread as a cleaner source of power even in Brazilian favelas. His images suggest a cynical view of the future, wherein technology continues to evolve and become increasingly ubiquitous, while co-existing with historical issues of racial and geographical segregation.

'a nuclear fusion plant powering a favela' series

The same theme recurs in 'a mecha robot in a favela', where giant 'public defense' robots replace policemen in patrolling favelas. One need only remember the normalized use of war drones in real-world wars or the use of grenade-proof tanks by Brazilian police to see that Apolinário's cyberpunk futures are despairingly close to reality. Technology advances unstoppably, but it will only make for a stronger hammer if all we see are nails - until we stop conceptualizing a complex social issue such as deviance as a simple matter of firepower, we will keep producing deadlier bots instead of implementing redistributive - not to say revolutionary - agendas. 

'a mecha robot in a favela' series