Manifesto 2024 - Sentimental Intelligence
Umberto Eco in 1964 defined them as Apocalyptic and Integrated: on the one hand the skeptics and critics, snobs we would say today, of the mass media, on the other the optimists, enthusiastic to the point of naive. 50 years have passed, but history, as we know, is made up of courses and recurrences, so we find ourselves once again dealing with new, destabilizing technologies.
In a world divided between photographers who shoot entire editorials sitting at the PC, with imaginative locations and models generated by AI, and their total detractors who cry madness and lack of professionalism, we ask ourselves only one thing: will the human mind remain sufficiently fresh, lucid and inimitable enough to instinctively recognize what is real from what is produced by artificial intelligence?
This apparently banal concept, but the real complexity of which man has been wondering about since well before the advent of AI, is at the center of the 2024 edition of our festival and, before that, it is indirectly at the center of every magazine that we carefully guard and disseminate. A magazine is not only a tangible, material object, with a shape, a weight, a particular porosity to the touch and also a specific perfume, all characteristics which in themselves make each magazine different from the other, but it is also an object made of choices, passions, sleepless nights, discussions, creative teams that compare and dedicate skills, time and artistic drive to every single release. The second edition of Mag To Mag explores what is behind each editorial project, what makes it unique and extraordinarily human, but also explores hybridizations, the boundaries that blur, the boundaries that are consciously crossed, because we believe that the times are ripe for mixing the human and the artificial which, after all, is nothing more than an extension of human nature.
From risograph laboratories to magazines in the metaverse or dematerialized in 3D, from a workshop on paper types and one on bindings, we talk about experiments for images and words that can be carried out with AI, we get told about the ease with which through tools like Chat Gpt, digital "archives" can be created in just a few hours which would cost human intelligence weeks, if not months of effort. However, man remains at the centre, with what for us is one of his most complete cultural products: the magazine. This perfect union of everything: culture outside of algorithms, depth of reasoning, experimentation, provocation, beauty and materiality.
Human intelligence is and remains, in fact, "sentimental intelligence", and it is precisely this last adjective that separates us and AI, if only because feelings (and we don't mean in the romantic sense) are one of those things that , like Dante's "sweetness at the heart", "it cannot be understood by those who do not feel it" and in a magazine the feelings, like the pages that compose it, still weigh.
