Carolina de Bartolo makes work that lives somewhere between then and now. Influenced by her decades of experience in graphic design and typography, she’s become curious about what happens when historical techniques meet contemporary collective intelligence (a.k.a. generative artificial intelligence).
I make images faster than I can explain them, which has turned out not to be a problem so much as a working method. After years of traditional training and a long career in design, I now spend my time setting systems in motion and paying attention to what happens, keeping the images that continue to speak and quietly letting the others go.
My practice works with generative AI, though I think of it less as a tool than as a form of collective intelligence that requires supervision, editing, and the occasional firm refusal. After several years and tens of thousands of images, I’ve become less interested in production itself and more interested in what survives: how images accumulate meaning over time, how they behave in groups, and how they change the atmosphere of a space when they’re finally allowed to exist outside a screen.
I’m wary of excess, spectacle, and anything that announces itself too quickly. Grain, blur, dust, repetition, and delay tend to hold my attention longer. I’m interested in the afterlife of images, where they live, how they circulate, and whether they want to be printed, framed, repeated, or left unresolved.
The work doesn’t aim to explain itself. I prefer to let it linger, to invite looking without urgency, and to trust that meaning, if it arrives at all, will do so on its own schedule.
Plantæ Collection
