ABSTRACT. Cyber-human creativity, or cyber-creativity in short, represents the collaboration betweenhuman and artificial intelligence (AI) in the dynamic universal creativity process (DUCP). In fact,creativity is a dynamic phenomenon, as identified by the dynamic definition of creativity, the onlyone that covers both creative achievement and creative inconclusiveness, stating that creativityrequires potential originality and effectiveness (Corazza, 2016) . The single word “potential”yields the extension from a product-oriented to a process-oriented perspective on creativity. Theadoption of this definition brings as a consequence the possibility to study the phenomenonunder the light of the dynamic creativity framework (Corazza et al., 2022; Corazza & Glăveanu,2020) . Within this framework, and in opposition to the prevailing anthropocentric position,creativity is not a reserved playground for humanity (Corazza, 2019), because the entireevolution of our universe can be studied under the vision of the DUCP, which is posited tocontain four layers of complexity: material, biological, psycho-social, and artificial. Therefore, inthe DUCP cyber-creativity can be interpreted as the collaboration between the two higher layersof complexity, and it is an inevitable evolutionary step. But how can cyber-creativity take a formthat exploits both human and artificial sides? For this purpose, the DA VINCI model for thecreative process (Corazza & Agnoli, 2022) is key, as it allows to clearly guide the creator andidentify chances for collaboration between the human side and AI.

Corazza, G. E. (2016). Potential Originality and Effectiveness: The Dynamic Definition ofCreativity. Creativity Research Journal, 28(3), 258–267.Corazza, G. E. (2019). The Dynamic Universal Creativity Process. In Beghetto, R. A. &Corazza, G. E., Dynamic perspectives on creativity: New directions for theory, research, andpractice in education (pp. 297-318). Cham: SpringerCorazza, G. E., & Agnoli, S. (2022). The DA VINCI Model for the Creative Thinking Process.In Lubart, T. et al. (Eds.), Homo Creativus (pp. 49-67). Springer, Cham.Corazza, G. E., Agnoli, S., & Mastria, S. (2022). The Dynamic Creativity Framework.European Psychologist, 27(3), 191–206.Corazza, G. E., & Glăveanu, V. P. (2020). Potential in creativity: Individual, social, materialperspectives, and a dynamic integrative framework. Creativity Research Journal, 32(1), 81–91.

ABSTRACT. In less than a year, the latest achievements in generative AI (see, for instance, ‘ChatGPT’) have shaken our confidence about some of our faculties, such as the capability of distinguishing human beings and their products from machines, which is – after all – a classic problem of modern philosophy, at least from Descartes onwards. One of the many facets of this wide issue is connected to creativity, which has been overall considered a privilege of human beings – apart from some mild exceptions represented by other higher mammals. More in detail, Informational and Communicational Technologies (ICT) have impacted not only the way we communicate and express ourselves but also opened the possibility for software to come up with new, original, artistic, or creative products (see, for instance, for visual arts, Midjourney or DALL-E). From X and TikTok to TV talks and newspapers, the public scene is full of debates and comments about the creative power of generative AI. How can philosophers contribute to such an issue of public interest? Before dealing with the ethical implications of generative AI, the paper clarifies what creativity is in order to assess how creative generative AI is. In this way, it also claims that the philosophers’ business consists first and foremost in building or strengthening what I call the “conceptual scaffoldings” that allow one to achieve a clear and reasonable idea of certain complex phenomena. To reach this goal, the paper is divided into three parts:

1. Generative AI and public debate: a philosophical analysis. The first part introduces the main topics of the public debate (from Sam Altman’s statements on X to philosophers of technology standpoints).

2. Is generative AI creative? The criteria for creativity. Strongly relying on C.S. Peirce and A.N. Whitehead, two of the most influential voices of the last century in matters of creativity, this part advances an analysis intended to identify the criteria according to which an act can be said to be “creative.” In particular, they can be roughly traced back to the following concepts: 1. Novelty (and the degrees of novelty, see Bartezzaghi 2016, 2021, Brioschi 2020a,b); 2. Ambiguity or Vagueness; 3. Surprise (Expectation broken and Continuity of Desire).

3. On the power of concepts. The last part applies the criteria to the case considered, that is, generative AI, to offer an answer to the question posed by the title. In doing so, it also makes explicit the relevant role that a pragmatist philosopher can play in the public arena today by inventing, adapting, and testing conceptual tools to current, complex, and unprecedented phenomena.

ESSENTIAL REFERENCES

BARTEZZAGHI, S. 2021. Mettere al mondo il mondo, Bompiani, Milano. BARTEZZAGHI, S. 2016. What’s «new»? Ambiguità del nuovo e semiotica della creatività, Versus 123, 2 (2016), pp. 309-322. BRIOSCHI, M. R. 2020a. Creativity between experience and cosmos, Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg im Breisgau. BRIOSCHI, M.R. 2020b. “Novelty”. In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible, a cura di V.P. Glăveanu, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98390-5_116-1. FABBRICHESI, R. 2019. “From Gestures to Habits: A Link between Semiotics and Pragmatism”. In Bloomsbury Companion to Contemporary Peircean Semiotics, a cura di T. Jappy, Bloosmbury, London/New York. FETZER, J. 2004. “Peirce and the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence”. http://www.commens.org/encyclopedia/article/fetzer-james-peirce-and-philosophy-artificial-intelligence GILLEBAART, M., J. FÖRSTER, M. ROTTEVEEL, A.C.M. JEHLE. 2013. “Unraveling effects of novelty on creativity”. Creativity Research Journal 25(3), 280–285. GLǍVEANU, V. P., & GILLESPIE, A. 2015. “Creativity out of difference: Theorising the semiotic, social and temporal origin of creative acts”. In Rethinking creativity, a cura di V. P. Glǎveanu, A. Gillespie, & J. Valsiner, pp. 1–16, Routledge, London. MADDALENA, G. 2015. The Philosophy of Gesture. Montreal/London/Chicago: McGill-Queen’s University Press. MAGNANI, Lorenzo (ed.). 2022. Handbook of Abductive Cognition, Springer, Cham. SCHWEIZER, T. S. 2006. “The psychology of novelty-seeking, creativity and innovation”. Creativity and Innovation Management 15, 164–172. STEINER, P. 2013. “C.S. Peirce and Artificial Intelligence: Historical Heritage and (New) Theoretical Stakes”. In Philosophy and Theory of Artificial Intelligence, vol. 5, a cura di V. Müller, pp. 265-276. Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg. VALSINER, Jean. 2017. “A Semiotic Approach to Creativity: Resources for Re-contextualization”. In Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46344-9_9.

ABSTRACT. The relation between creativity and artificial intelligence has been recently discussed both in the expert community and the broader public, with the discussion being driven not only by the challenges of practice or academic interest but also by a significant factor of the presence of societal anxieties. Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Chat GPT, Midjourney, DALL-E are nowadays the phenomena at the centre of human/machine creativity discussion. Can AI be creative? If so, is the AI creativity of the same nature as human or non-human animal creativity? Who are we going to become if we answer positively to both of these questions? This contribution looks at the AI creativity debate from the perspective of human enhancement underlying the shared linkage of individual and collective identity. The notion of artificial intelligence (AI), now widely used, in the time of invention could be seen as oxymoron – intelligence, a characteristic that seemed to be exclusively ‘humane’, now being assigned to an artefact, something ‘artificial’, man-made. Nowadays, using the AI term widely, we do not usually reflect on the literal meaning. Yet, with a newer notion, AI creativity, the similar contradiction is visible again: a characteristic thought to be exclusively human, with a possibility of extention to non-human animals, now refers to a man-made technological artefact. The contribution aims to reflect on phenomenon of AI creativity through the lenses of human enhancement. Such an approach may be viewed as original: in the current discussion, the definition, roots, and nature of creativity are reflected and debated upon, with the ‘inward’ glance at what the phenomenon of creativity implies. The view on AI creativity as a possible tool for human enhancement, being complimentary to human creativity, is not the common one, as the debate is primarily focused on the dichotomic view on the possibility of a non-human agent (machine, AI system) being seen as creative. While the opponents of the possibility of creativity attribution to an AI system may use augmentation wording while describing the added value of AI tools in a human-driven creative process, the notion is used outside of the human enhancement context. On a conceptual level, we may summarise the concerns on the future of work by the question “Are we becoming ‘less’ than we were?” – in the context of rapid technological development and the possibility of some of these technologies substituting humans in their professional occupations. When it comes to creativity, the very same question extends its existential significance to the ‘highest’ sphere of competence, almost spiritual, that is expressed by the top level of Maslow’s pyramid of needs. The act of creating relates not only to self-expression and realisation but also to the sense of purpose. The creative process itself may be seen as a way of expressing spiritual concepts, beliefs, or experiences. The possibility of self-perception as being ‘less’ than before in the context of artistic expression and consequent self-realisation adds a layer of complexity to an individual’s view on AI creativity. The narratives constituting such a reflection are of an identitarian nature, with an AI system being seen not just as a substitute for human ability – which summarises the concerns on the future of work – but as a competitor, a ‘machine’ that starts to be seen as something ‘more’ than merely a tool or a technological artefact.

ABSTRACT. Il territorio molisano presenta una complessa stratificazione storica che abbraccia territori compositi e storicamente diversificati. La presenza nell’area basso-collinare e costiera delle vie della transumanza e la vicinanza a corsi d’acqua hanno favorito nel corso del medioevo la formazione di una rete insediativa in buona parte inglobata nello sviluppo territoriale contemporaneo.

In questo quadro si inseriscono le ricerche che, dal 2007, la cattedra di Archeologia cristiana e medievale dell’Università degli Studi del Molise conduce nelle province di Campobasso e Isernia allo scopo di esaminare la destrutturazione del sistema insediativo romano, la cristianizzazione degli spazi urbani e rurali e le dinamiche dell’incastellamento e decastellamento. Grazie al finanziamento della Regione e alla collaborazione con la Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle arti e Paesaggio del Molise, è stato possibile intraprendere nel 2023 nuove campagne di scavo a Sant’Elia a Pianisi e Pesche, siti che hanno giocato un ruolo importante nel popolamento delle campagne medievali grazie alla mediazione svolta dai monasteri che, a partire dalla fine del X secolo, si affiancarono al potere centrale e ai signori laici nella fondazione dei siti fortificati.

I dati raccolti nel corso di queste ricerche rappresentano il punto di partenza per le attività di valorizzazione promosse dalla Regione Molise nel 2019 con un progetto che mira a coinvolgere non solo esperti del settore, ma anche un pubblico di non addetti ai lavori, offrendo la possibilità di unire in un sistema di fruizione allargata i livelli – spesso tenuti distinti – della ricerca e della divulgazione.

ABSTRACT. Gli scavi archeologici dei siti medievali e postmedievali del territorio molisano, condotti dall’Università del Molise d’intesa con la Regione e la competente Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle arti e Paesaggio, hanno costituito non soltanto una straordinaria occasione per indagare sistematicamente siti rurali pluristratificati di interesse storico e archeologico, ma hanno rappresentato anche l’opportunità per sperimentare la gestione informatizzata di un’ingente quantità di dati, la predisposizione di innovativi sistemi di fruizione e comunicazione digitale, un test per nuove forme valorizzazione.

Da molti anni, infatti, la cattedra di Archeologia cristiana e medievale dedica grande attenzione ai temi dell’informatica applicata all’archeologia nell’ambito del più ampio approfondimento degli aspetti metodologici della disciplina. È con questo obiettivo che negli scavi di Sant’Elia a Pianisi e Pesche si è avviata la sperimentazione di banche-dati, analisi archeometriche, tecniche fotogrammetriche, rilievi con sistemi CAD e laser scanner 3D, che hanno portato significative novità in termini di valorizzazione, fruizione e comunicazione del patrimonio archeologico dei siti indagati.

ABSTRACT. Le recenti ricerche sulla cultura materiale molisana d’età medievale e moderna hanno condotto, negli ultimi anni, a significativi risultati. In particolare, il progetto Dalla cucina alla tavola. Produzione, uso e circolazione del vasellame ceramico della Contea di Molise, promosso dall’insegnamento di Archeologia Cristiana e Medievale dell’Università degli Studi del Molise, ha sinora permesso di approfondire le conoscenze in nostro possesso per buona parte del territorio regionale, grazie a scavi archeologici e indagini di superficie.

Alla luce delle nuove acquisizioni, in questa sede viene proposta l’analisi di un inedito nucleo di contenitori da mensa provenienti dai siti di Sant’Elia a Pianisi (CB), Santa Croce di Magliano (CB) e Pesche (IS). La maggior parte dei manufatti fa capo a ricerche direttamente condotte dal Dipartimento di Scienze Umanistiche, Sociali e della Formazione dell’Università degli Studi del Molise mentre un più ristretto numero concerne le attività, ancora in corso di svolgimento, promosse nell’ambito del progetto Valorizzazione del patrimonio culturale della Regione Molise, finanziato dalla regione e coordinato dall’Ateneo molisano.

ABSTRACT. According to social changes, the globalization of law has two main regulatory dimensions: the degree to which the world is subject to a set of legal rules, and reference to the certainty that human relationships are governed by law everywhere in the world. Legal rules undergo conversion into obsessive-compulsive rules and become a system that legitimates itself based on its inherently self-generating nature. In addition, the initial concept of legal relations and their components are transformed into a techno-legal order under the influence of a new technical focus. Thus, a new order emerges, characterized by the formation of networks that imply that the globalization of law must focus around commercial and Contract Law, Public Law, protecting human rights and also the growing importance of lawyers, together with the dissemination of contents and legal procedures. All three of these mean that the regulatory authority of the State with respect to these areas is unlimited, although States can decide whether to participate or else to withdraw.

In this work, there is an interdisciplinary and plural concept of what the term globalization means from a point of view of legal creativity that is typical of a flexible law that changes over time. In particular, globalization presents a reference to a social, economic, cultural and demographic process from which law cannot escape. From this perspective, and starting from the new relationship between the public and private spheres, what stand out are the relevance of deregulation as a reality and the need for the State to continue maintaining its functions, albeit renewed in accordance with the demands of the new scenario in which it operates. But the reality of law demonstrates a number of problems which need to be overcome through a new understanding of globalization and the implementation of new legal techniques and formulations.

This paper gives an account of the importance of judicial activity, observing that the clarity or obscurity of a text is relative to its context of enunciation and context of application. Materially, we move in the debate between those theses contemplating the law from power and those contemplating it from freedom. In order to determine if we can really speak of a judicial law and, where appropriate, what the borders of the same are, we analyze what the activity of the judges really consists of, the adequacy of legal rules to the cases in dispute and the types of normative production. Reflecting, in turn, on the differences and connections between law and morality, politics and economics. In conclusion, judges are required to be aware of the primacy of their responsibility in view of the social role they represent.

ABSTRACT. In the last decades, the distinction between the creation and the interpretation of legal rules, one themost controversial topics in legal theory, has attracted increasing interest, due to the central role ofthe judicial power in modern democracies.The classic approach compares an epistemological concept of interpretation, ranging from cognitiveperspectives to other, more sceptical views, alongside with a proper hermeneutic conception ofinterpretive activity as a whole (see, for a synthesis, Modugno 2015; M. Luciani, 2016; Guastini,2017). Such opposition prevents the very concept of creative activity from receiving univocalattribution; conversely, it will refer to different phenomena, some even not necessarily properlycreative, in light of the different underlying theoretical grounds. Moreover, within each and anysuch theory, different notions of creative activity may be present, each referring, in their possibleencompassing of interpretive activity, to different, specific legal concepts.We aim to propose an attempt of methodological distinction between proper juridical creation oflegal rules and juridical qualification activity, based on the axiological consideration of theprocedural structure of the activity involved. Our criterion will help describe the administrativecourt decision-making process (see, on this subject in administrative law, e.g., Portaluri, 2021; F.Saitta, 2023). It will also provide proper foundation for the features of administrative authoritydiscretion, considered in-itself and in its relation with the judicial review of administrative courts(A. Carbone, 2020).

ABSTRACT. This proposal aims to analyze, with a law&literature approach, the topic of the island as a place “other" and therefore a space for an alternative law, starting from a study of the true story of the Rose Island (1968) and comparing its symbolism to the story narrated by Pirandello in the drama The New Colony (1926). First of all, we would like to provide a legal framework for the concepts of natural islands and artificial islands, as a product of human creativity and of a utopian dream of freedom that is re-emerging in the present. The preliminary definition of the international legal framework and of the relevant categories will then allow us to investigate how, by allowing a polysemous dialogue between law and literature, the archetypal symbols of the island have intertwined with the political drift that let to the creation of a place (almost) absolutely other and (abstractly) not subject to the law. On the one hand, there is the story of Giorgio Rosa, an engineer from Bologna, who in 1968 built a small steel platform beyond Italian territorial waters, with the purpose of creating a “new” State. The Rose Island experience, although short-lived, offers the opportunity to develop reflections on the possible (in)adequacy of the legal regime of marine spaces, where human claims were able to find space, even if for a short period, to make another State, with all the utopian and dystopian derivatives of the case. The affinity between this juridical-political case and Pirandello's The New Colony is almost surprising: the drama tells of the utopia of a group of marginalized people who, having colonized a newly emerged island off the coast of Sicily, attempt to create a new State with more just and free norms, outside the rigid social conventions from which they felt totally alien. Moreover, Pirandello frequently winks at legal provisions, not sparing references to councils, judges and specious tribunals, which are ferociously parodied. Just like Rose Island, bombed and destroyed by the Italian Navy, the new colony of ex-convicts also sinks into the sea, condemning all its inhabitants to death, except La Spera and her child, the only hope for future regeneration. The island, a fortunate literary topos, is configured as a liminal place par excellence, separated by water from earthly life and therefore only partially anchored to reality and so consecrated to the extremes of feelings and to rarefied and dreamlike atmospheres. A place without rules, a mirage of an otherwise repressed innocence or a distressing mirror of physical, social and psychological marginalization, the island thus becomes a catalyst of unexpressed impulses, first of all the irreverent dream of social reconfiguration according to the dictates of transgressive reversal or the most drastic anarchist devices. The emotional intensification due to the particular condition of the island ignites human instincts, as can be seen in many literary examples, inducing hallucinations, feral aggressions, even dreaming of the possibility - often illusory - of recreating a primitive golden age. Supported by studies on the utopia of the happy island and on the prolific intertwining of law and literature, this proposal aims to investigate how the archetypal imagery of the island contaminates the process so much literary creative as well as any anti-conventional and/or anarchic projects in the legal field. The utopian or subversive intentions that move Pirandello's characters, in fact, can also be found in the soul of the creator of the Rose Island and in the authors of some recent technological projects which aim to build artificial islands 'without State' and not subject to the law, following well-known utopian visions which - also from an urban planning point of view - prefigured cities and territories completely rewritten removed from common conventions: (New Babylon of Constant Nieuwenhuys; the No-Stop City of Archizoom; the Cities by Archigram).

ABSTRACT. Creativity, the practical as well as the artistic, is the highest expression of téchne, which in turn isthe sum manifestation of human acting as a free operation directed toward an end, whether it be theuseful, the delightful or the beautiful. The whole of human civilization is founded on this creative acting,directed to the most diverseends, which in its empirical phenomenology manifests itself as a summation ofrepeated and coordinated gestures, increasingly perfected, and bearing the capacity to use one’s body asan instrument of tools, as the prime operator of creative operating. The craftsman, the farmer, thesculptor, the scientist, when viewed from this perspective, differ in the way they use habitual gestures oftheir bodies oriented to a concrete purpose, which, in each case, can be without too much difficultymeasured. But what of the poet, the rhetorician, the Legislator, the teacher? To what degree can they, likeall those who do not operateand createdirectly through their hands, that is, through their bodies, butthrough the word, written or spoken, be said to participate equally in this universal condition of man'sbeing that we have called creative? In what way can their operation be said to be a “gesture”and a creativegesture?According to the revolutionary insight of phonology (R. Jakobson, 2011; F. de Saussure, 1967), the complexphysiological mechanisms that make the sound of the voice a language arepredictable andanalyzable, can be learned and employed without difficulty, automatically, and areinseparably connected to their precise psychic processing by the speaker as well as the listener; so thatspeech could also be considered without forcing a gesture. But can the gesture of speech also beconsidered creative? And if so, to what extent? In what contexts? With what effects?In the perspective returned to us by Wittgenstein (2014), nothing that exists would exist in the absence ofwords-a seemingly obvious idea but, if properly pondered, one with very profound implications. This, infact, implies that everything, even the workof the craftsman, the farmer, the sculptor and the scientist inthe absence of word, of language, would have no possibility of existing. Everything that exists is“solidified”word. Everything that is created is creative word that has generated (P. Florenskij, 2003).The paperaims to explore this possibility that language, under certain conditions, is capabletaking on theconnotation of a creative gesture, or a set of creative gestures. A first level of inquiry leads us into theabstract side of such creation, and this is the case -more accessible to the intellect, even immediate -of theartistic word: theater, literature, poetry. This last genre, poetry, and not by chance, has been identified byMartin Heidegger (2022) as the only possibility left, in the fully deployed modernity of technique, to escapefrom the misleading linguistic-conceptual tangle woven by the logosof metaphysics and access the clearingof being, without having to go back, in a challenging and uncertain walk backwards, to the remotest dawnof Greek thought. The question is: Would it be possible to identify a more concrete plane -mind you, notmore real, since being investigated by Heidegger is also -but more tangibleat least in its effects of“generativity”of the word?It seems that a possibility opensin the realm of the legal, in which the word is indeed capable of producingsuch outcomes in its inherent vocation for effectiveness. A not-so-frequented line of philosophical-juridicalthought, the so-called Scandinavian realism, questioned the essence of words such as law, law, etc.,but also the gestures of complex legal “rituality”,discovering that much of their normative (“creative”?) force resided in the belief ascribed to them by the consociates. The words of law while empty of referentialcontent (A. Hägerström, 1953; K. Olivecrona, 1971; A. Ross, 2019), turn out to be as powerful as magicformulas. The paper will precisely attemptto examine these aspects by indulging this key.

ABSTRACT. How can poverty be an artistic method and a founding philosophical concept? In this presentation, I propose to present the art of Giuseppe Penone in the light of Giorgio Agamben's book called Altissima Povertà. Regole monastiche e forme di vita (2011, transl., The highest poverty : monastic rules and form-of-life, 2013).

This analysis is presented as a metaphysical exploration of the relationship between humans and nature, since Penone challenges traditional artistic conventions by adopting an aesthetic of poverty, that has its origins in the Arte Povera artistic movement. Giorgio Agamben offers a philosophical reflection on poverty as a form of life, underlining its intrinsic link with an existence governed by strict rules and devoid of any material appropriation.

This singular conception of poverty, diametrically opposed to capitalist logic, finds a striking echo in Penone's artistic approach. Penone's art thus becomes a profound meditation on the fragility of human existence and our essential relationship with the natural world around us. Through an aesthetic of poverty, Penone and Agamben invite us to re-evaluate our relationship with nature and to adopt an attitude of respect and submission towards it, offering a subtle reflection on the human condition.

ABSTRACT. The question arises from two events occurred in the art field which are closely related to touch. One took place in 2019, Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan stuck a banana (Comedian, 2019) to the wall of Perrotin gallery in Art Basel Miami Beach, thus setting off a series of imitations, satires, and debates on “what art is?”. Just two days after Comedian was exhibited, American artist David Datuna walked up from the crowd, took the banana off the wall, and “ate the work” in front of the public. He claimed that it was a performance called The Hungry Artist. However, which are more surprising are the reactions from Cattelan and gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin. Cattelan said there is “no problem at all”, on the other side, Perrotin quickly replaced the eaten banana by a spare one. The artwork is finally sold for $120,000. Another event happened in October 2022. Two members of the British climate group Just Stop Oil entered the British Museum in London, poured two cans of tomato soup on a Sunflowers of Vincent Van Gogh, then they stuck their hands to the wall beneath the painting to demonstrate against the climate injustice. Due to their aggressive behavior, the protest caused an uproar around the world. The actions are seen as a damage and violation of the work. Eventually, two activists were arrested.

From Sunflowers to Comedian, artwork seem to be changing from “untouchable” to “touchable”. This process manifests itself in shifts regarding the material properties of artwork, its replicability, and its economic and political ownership. In the case of Sunflowers, the protesters did not actually touch the work itself, they only soiled the glass protecting the work and slightly damaged the frame, which is clearly rejected by the public. But in the case of Comedian, the physical substance of the work is not only touched, but chewed through the teeth, passed into the digestive tract, and finally expelled out of the anus. The physical materials of the work can be touched, eaten, copied, and replaced, but it still exists! At least the art institutions that still exhibit the Comedian prove this to us. The Sunflowers belongs to an era that Foucault believed started with Manet when the material characteristics of painting were highlighted and strengthened. Meanwhile, it is also during this period that museums flourish in the Western word and increasingly protect the material properties of artworks. Art itself also gradually abandons the “mysterious power” given by religious culture since the Middle Ages and becomes a pure aesthetic “object”. Nevertheless, by the time of the Comedian, art began to break away from this “objecthood” and connect with other “non-objects”. These “non-objects” are different from the religious mysterious power of the past, but represent themselves in conceptual, participatory, immersive, or digital forms. Furthermore, the physical substance of artwork is no longer unique, but can be copied and replaced at any time without affecting its “existence” at all, just like human body organs can be replaced with the help of modern medical technology. As Boris Groys pointed out: “As an artwork’s existing material support decays and dissolves, the work can be copied and placed on a different material support”, then it is immortal. In this sense, the Comedian achieves a kind of “real eternity”.

ABSTRACT. The aim of the talk is to provide an overview of the possibilities of art to create shared horizons of meaning for a community and thus to be a model for social integration and social change. To do this, the main theoretical reference will be pragmatism, and in particular the philosophy of John Dewey and Jane Addams. The presentation will begin with a critique of the traditional aesthetic conception of art as something separate from the life and experiential context in which it is created. Next it will be argued that this position not only prevents a true fruition of works of art, but also misunderstands the moment of creativity involved in their creation. Indeed, just as works of art, in their aesthetic interpretation, would exist in a vacuum of experience, so their creation would be conceived as a creatio ex nihilo, directly descending from the omnipotent subjectivity of the artist. Contrary to this position, an embedded and situated view of both the phenomenon of art and artistic creation will be argued. Creativity is not a creation out of thin air, but rather the constantly renewed attempt to interact imaginatively with the resistances and hardships of experience. Art, in this view, not only does not deny the resistances of existence, but rather cultivates them as necessary and even positive moments for mediating and thus expressing shared meanings that can truly touch people’s lives and lead to a change in the objective conditions of experience. Expanding on the experiential situatedness of art and the role of resistance in artistic creation, it will be argued that art is capable of creating horizons of shared meanings, beliefs, and practices within a community. These horizons cannot be something stable and eternal. Instead, because they are responses to the ever-changing experiential situation, and because they themselves cultivate ever-new resistances, they result in radically and consciously finite creations of meaning. These horizons of meaning, however, never lapse into mere linguistic play or empty contingency: the need to respond to the resistances offered by experience prevents indifference and instead offers a pragmatic criterion for judging the success of a creation of meaning. In other words, horizons of meaning must be creations that are consistent with the situation to which they are to respond, they can serve as reference material for future experiences, but they cannot aspire to universality. The last part of the presentation will touch on the social and political implications of such a view of artistic creation. On the one hand, art can be a crucial factor in social integration, allowing for self-expression, acting as a tool to address, engage and cope with the resistances of a given situation, and giving a voice to underrepresented communities. It can also become a critique of existing horizons of meaning, exposing them as artificial and finite rather than natural and eternal. On the other hand, if the horizons of meaning by which a community lives are creative and finite, then a political thought centered on the notion of creativity must also be aware that any expression of political will and its values is a contingent creation that cannot claim any expansive or temporal universality, and indeed must first and foremost cultivate its own finitude. Thus arises the possibility of a creative democracy, understood as the imaginative effort by which a community constantly creates and renews its horizons of values in response to the ever-changing challenges it faces. In such a creative democracy, not only is resistance not suppressed, but it is cultivated as an element that disempowers crystallized values and promotes renewal.

ABSTRACT. In 1936, Walter Benjamin famously stated that one typical aspect of the contemporary era consists in reducing distances thanks to technology: the surgeon, who directly manipulates the patient’s innards, takes the place of the magician, who acts at a distance by imposing his hands. As this paper aims to show, in the light of some contemporary technologies, Benjamin’s expression remains only partially true. I will therefore consider the case of the phantasmagorical dispositif, and of Augmented Reality (AR) in particular, to investigate its feedback on our manipulation of the world for creative purposes. By AR I mean all those devices, portable or wearable, which integrate digital elements into the physical space. AR allows its users to be either tele-present elsewhere or to act on a space at a distance, by interacting with multimedia images through gestures, movements, and voice command. AR in fact realises the digital augmentation of physical space, also known as “spatial computing”, through the integration of multimedia, multisensory, and responsive objects that solicit the individual’s somatic and motor intelligence. In this sense, AR is a technology that innervates itself in users’ bodies and aims at enhancing human cognitive capacities in order to interpret and design a present or future operating context. As in ghost stories, the exchange with distant environments and objects (in some cases even in time) is not realised through direct contact: users who “touch” in AR merely mimic the gestures they would make acting on a concrete thing. AR assimilates their behavior while at work in a concrete space, transforming eyes, hands and feet into surfaces and fundamental components for the device. Fingers and eyes movements, as well as the use of voice and locomotion in space, are essential to activate and explore the functionalities of “augmented” tools and to interact with the perceivable but intangible elements they make appear. Although distant, “augmented” gestures produce an effect; even if they do not get any sensory stimulation back, they remain as effective as direct manipulation. To be fair, they can accomplish even more: for instance, simply turning one’s head is enough to make the objects or information we are working with follow us as we move. In AR, even gaze is to be understood as a prehensile action. AR creators do not hesitate to consider these operational movements as magical, pertaining to the spiritual realm. I would then comment on the widespread tendency to sponsor AR both as a technology that amplifies creativity, useful for overcoming obstacles in terms of time and space, and that promises supernatural powers like teleportation, telekinesis, mind-reading, seeing through walls, inside bodies, into the future. However, the call form magic is not accidental: throughout history, magic has variously been linked to power and control. In the digital present, and future, the human, corporeal and material component is much more substantial than we tend to recognise: an investigation of digital creativity is therefore more precisely a bio-aesthetic one, which needs to be investigated also as respect to its political implications.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we will present research carried out as a part of a three-year audience development Creative Europe project, ‘Performing Gender: Dancing in your shoes” (PG: DIYS), that involved communities, cultural organizations, artists, policymakers, and academics from eight different countries. The project aimed to promote awareness and social change by focusing on two main areas of interest investigated through bodily practices and dance: exploring gender issues from an intersectional perspective and building communities through co-creation. Each partner organization, throughout the project, implemented a long process of audience engagement through constant community dance practices that culminated with a touring phase in which the co-produced performances by community members and artists took place in project partners’ festivals. The research is based on the following analytical perspectives. The first concerns the role of creative performative spaces in the enactment of citizenship (Isin and Nielsen, 2008), the development of cultural capabilities (Appadurai, 2011), and the generation of an imaginative world picture-making process (Papastergiadis, 2012). The second regards the role of body practices and the “embodiment” process in building “singular-plural” (Nancy, 2000) communities. Indeed, embodied art forms, such as dance and theatre, “offer powerful means to draw on our lived experiences and generate new insights and ways of meaning-making” (Bentz e al, 2022 p.689; Leavy, 2015), and embodiment is “generative of meaning, relationships, and an understanding of self” (O’Shea, 2012, p. 35). Finally, we have framed body practices and dance from the perspective of the “politics of gesture” meant as the non-verbal expression of different identities and contestation of power relations (Braddick, 2009; Rancière 2004), and as gestures ‘socially acquired and laden with cultural significance’ (Farnell, 1996). Drawing on this framework the research, through qualitative methods such as participant observation, interviews and focus groups with the project’s actors - community members, dance makers, audience developers, and artistic directors- analyzed the implemented artistic process, based on body practices and dance, and its transformative effects (outcomes and impacts) on the communities, the dancemakers, the cultural organizations, and the creative production practices. This paper wants to contribute to the debate around the “social values of the art” (Paltrinieri, 2022) and the role of ‘gesture’, offering insights from the lived experiences of project actors, revealing transformative effects of the ‘politics of gesture’. A number of significant findings will be presented and discussed. Firstly, the research revealed a dynamic combination of agency and embodiment. Indeed, the body has emerged on one side as an archive of gestures, connected with cultural matrices and memory, on the other side as a possibility of aesthetic appropriation that gives space to a creative act as an outcome of an individual and collective journey simultaneously. Bodily practices emerged as crucial in the (de)construction of identities and in discovering one's own needs, limits, and unexpected possibilities, through the exploration of one’s own body through others’ bodies, leading to co-creating a common ground for the community, collective empowerment, and a sense of freedom. The connection of bodies through the transmission of movements and dance created a new (collective) body, which, with its gestures, movement, and features, refers to its biographical path, which is marked by the embedded networks of relationships (Ghigi and Sassatelli, 2018). Secondly, the research identified significant changes recognized by project actors, such as the effects in terms of the achievement of self-awareness and collective empowerment, thanks to the possibilities of exploring multiple identities around gender, ethnic, and inter-generational issues, and the sharing memory and (his)stories through «self-representation»; the building of trust, care, safe space and community through the body experiences.

ABSTRACT. Are creativity and intelligence distinct, coincidental, or complementary concepts? Do they determine irreducible distinctions between human and artificial agent? Can they also imply automatism and inability as additional heuristic resources? In the distinctions between human and A.I., research on creative processes examines abilities, actions, behaviors, and conversations: elements that are disambiguable and measurable. However, it is possible to reverse the perspective, distinguishing human and artificial agent from inabilities, automatisms, and ambivalent behaviors. The irreducibility between human intelligence and A.I. depends on the starting theoretical and discursive assumptions accepted by researchers investigating these domains. Integrating ethnomethodology and discursive analysis, the present theoretical and empirical research highlights the irreducible differences between human intelligence, creativity, automatisms, and incapacities by analyzing theoretical assumptions and international tests used by programmers to evaluate chat bot interactions: a) The Classical Turing Test; b) The Inverse Turing Test; c) The Winograd Test; d) The Winogrande Text; and e) The Lovelace Test on the creativity of artificial agents. I will focus on the ambivalent relationship between intelligence and creativity, because from these two concepts descend distinct ways of understanding artificial intelligence. Different ways of defining human and artificial incapability also depend on their relationship. By human inability, I mean the subjective limits of understanding of what is said or shown by a human being: in this sense, each subject has its own deficient nature. By artificial inability I mean an objective set of limitations: 1. Inability to understand semantics; 2. Inability to contextualize conversational assumptions and implicatures; 3. Inability to interact or act unpredictably; 4. Inability to decide in the absence of starting information provided by the program; 5. Inability to boycott the automation of programming systems. Should creativity and intelligence be thought of as two distinct, coinciding, or complementary aspects? This depends on the definitions selected by researchers. Theories always depend on social constructions and cultural ways of understanding discourse terms semantically. The ethnomethodological approach allows us to show how banal or common-sense social discourses, actions and phenomena reveal more revolutionary, creative, and counter-intuitive meanings than we might expect from initial naive observation. It all depends on what questions we ask, how we capture our attention and what starting assumptions we accept, taking for granted definitions that we do not subject to further falsification (Garfinkel, 1991). When researchers circumscribe definitions of words that imply complex concepts, they construct a concatenation of associations with other terms that they consider compatible with their own discursive repertoire (Spillman, 2022, p. 69). Such repertoires imply cultural and ideological assumptions that constrain explicit words, generating specific constructions of meaning. Can we be more creative when we include contradictory thinking to keep searching for a solution? Are we more intelligent when we accept incapacity as an additional inventive resource? There is a paradox in the incapacity/intelligence relationship that is difficult to untangle. What is an 'unintelligent' action? Is it a form of repetitive and automatic behaviour, devoid of adequate reflection? Is it a response of the evolutionary process that allows living beings to skip logical actions in order to randomly construct other more suitable possibilities (Wilson, 1980)? Does it make sense to contrast divergent thinking and convergent thinking, or should we consider them two sides of the same coin? In the paper, I will attempt to answer the above questions by trying to understand the relationships between explorative and transformative creative process. I will attempt to deduce clear distinctions between human and artificial intelligence, including elements that have traditionally been discarded by researchers: the ambivalences in the relationship between intelligence, creativity, inability and automatism of the human being and the artificial agent.

ABSTRACT. The sustainable and resilient reshape of our built environment, which is and remains one of themajor challenges in the upcoming years, seems to overlook or even neglect the individual andpublic propensity towards the aesthetic qualities of our spaces. These factors are often overlookedas potential catalysts for the adoption of sustainable practices, even though urban spaces serve asessential environments for social interaction and gathering.Today, the aesthetic dimension of the built environment appears to be radically de-emphasized.This contribution attempts at redefining the concept of beauty in sustainable architecture with theaim of inspiring the creation of environments that promote well-being for both individuals and theplanet theyinhabit.The contribution discusses the necessity of a constructive, human-based investigation of concretecases, including those conceived and listed as “sustainable” constructions and postulates differentresearch questions:- 1. How is beauty in paradigmatic and/or controversial (i.e., historical, peripheral, modern,etc.) spaces defined or assessed by those who experience it?- 2. Are sustainable buildings and their surroundings designed to be attractive and affordablefor people?- 3. How can architecture and neuroscience cooperate to inform the design of sustainablebuildings?- 4. How do these investigations converge towards the formulation of a theory regarding“beauty in sustainably built environments”?

ABSTRACT. The talk will address the development and study that takes place during the pre-production stage of filmmaking and how from the original idea in the script the final product of the character comes to life on screen. This path will be illustrated through my experience and artistic interpretation.