Matteo Basilé
Further images
My work sits at the intersection of photography, the human body and digital technology. I call it phygital: physical objects — prints, artist-designed rugs and tapestries, installations — that open onto a second, digital layer through augmented reality and artificial intelligence. The physical piece is never a mere support for the digital one; the two coexist and complete each other.
Every image begins with a real photograph. This is the founding rule of my method, FOTOSINTESI™: the machine never generates from nothing, but always works from material I have actually captured — faces, bodies, fabrics, landscapes. AI intervenes as a tool of synthesis and transformation, not of invention. I deliberately reject the polished aesthetic of generated imagery: asymmetrical faces, skin with its pores and scars, worn textiles, imperfect earth and vegetation. The goal is to bring technology back inside the truth of the body.
I understand AI as a pharmakon — remedy and poison at once. The question that guides my research is not whether to delegate to the machine, but whether that delegation impoverishes the gesture or frees it for a higher level of thought and form.
My practice unfolds in series — from ThisHumanity and Mnemosyne to Floramagnifica, INTERMUNDIA, Rerum Novarum and the recent Magnifica Humanitas — moving between portraiture, landscape, nature and archive, often in dialogue with specific communities, traditions and places. Each cycle is a chapter of the same question: what remains human in the image, once the image has passed through the machine.