Arquà Manuscript Tapestry I
by Luca Gruber · Wiesbaden, Germany

The debut work of BGGB Studio, the collaborative practice of Sara Bologna & Luca Gruber, is an inquiry on speculative evolution through the means of AI, inspired by medieval bestiaries. The studio presents the centrepiece of the collection, the Arquà Manuscript Tapestry. Speculative evolution is a common trope in sci-fi literature, focused on hypothetical scenarios in the evolution of life. What would animals look like in the far future on Planet Earth, long after humanity has vanished? With Earth’s ecosystems undergoing extreme transformations due to millennia of unchecked evolution, climate shifts, and new symbiotic relationships, new species will emerge.

This imaginary journey in Time is ideally entrusted to Artificial Intelligence, which, just like pre-modern explorers of exotic lands, reports (more or less) reliable descriptions of what it finds on this unknown Earth, eroding the treshold between perceived and imagined reality. Another generative Artificial Intelligence is then asked to translate these descriptions from text to image. Similarly to what happened in the Middle Ages in the compilation of Bestiaries, the passage from text to image through AI also involves frequent loss of information, and remixes of stock repertories of familiar animals. On a deeper level of the analogy with the Middle Ages, the work aims to trigger a reflection
on the nearly eschatological sense of the creative practice. If today we delude ourselves about the scientifiability of the cosmos through technology, the medieval conception of the world was able to embrace the magical and the miraculous instead as the natural implication of the physical realm, which in turn was intrinsically symbolic because it mirrored a superior reality. Prodigious creatures like the amphisbaena and the manticore, for example, were natural realities that man plainly was not meant to experience. They might seem monstrous but not necessarily “unreal”.