#ariosto

[diana-andraste]

Gustave Doré's 1878 illustration Ruggiero Fights the Sea Monster that Threatens Angelica, from Ariosto's epic poem Orlando Furioso 

Engraving

x x <- Original Italian and English translation

[hercorrupterofwords]

some bradamante ideas from when I was reading the orlando furioso

[a-book-of-creatures]

Monsters in Astolfo’s path.

Illustration by Gustave Doré for Orlando Furioso.

[art-mirrors-art]

The photo shows one of the moments of 'interaction' with - well - an interactive installation called Mirror, Mirror, created by Kokoschka Revival, an Italian art collective (mainly these are Ana Shametaj and Andrea Giomi, joined by a changing number of other collaborators).

In essence, the system records the movements of a viewer and then reenacts them, with the help of AI, in the movements of a digital avatar, making it all look like a magical hallucinating mirror.

The only trick is that it is not one and the same avatar, but a carousel of fourteen digital 'twins', representing - very loosely - different characters from Orlando Furioso, the famous epic poem by the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto:

For a brief moment you can imagine yourself as one of the poem's fantastic creatures - some of them quite phantasmagorical:

The installation was designed as part of Palazzo di Atlante - which I understand was some kind of performance - itself part of Museo Furioso, which apparently an exhibition held at the so-called Rocca Ariostesca, or Ariosto's Castle, in the tiny Italian town of Castelnuovo di Garfagnana (Oh, those Italians - even their 'explanations' need their own meta-explanations to be understood).

Curiously (or perhaps indicatively) the AI programming for this 'mirror' was done not by Kokoschka Revival, but by the Amsterdam-based studio 42-LAB. Judging from the videos - you can watch a few moments here - they were still using a fairly early AI tools, and the quality of these 'reflections' is rather poor. But for this particular subject that may be not a bug but a useful feature.

[girlruggiero]

Funniest text-to-footnotes ratio ever

[rossodimarte]

Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki, Astolfo and the ogre Caligorante, 1771

[lunamarish]

Ariosto mi insegnò che sull’incerta luna dimorano i sogni, l’inafferrabile, il tempo che si perde, il possibile o l’impossibile, che è la stessa cosa.

Jorge Luis Borges

[3steart3]

“Le donne, i cavallier, l’arme, gli amori, le cortesie, l’audaci imprese io canto”

- Orlando Furioso, by Ludovico Ariosto

character design part 1