Carolina de Bartolo

I’m exploring the space between past and present—where a brush stroke meets a neural network, where decades of typesetting inform algorithms, where analog grain meets computational noise.

It seems like there’s something almost alchemical in using the most advanced creative tools to make work that could have existed centuries ago. Not nostalgia, but more like archaeology. (Nostalgia just ain’t what it used to be anyway.) I’m sorting through layers of visual language, pulling up fragments of material textures and vintage photographic imperfections, asking the machine to remember what it never knew.

The serendipity is everything. In decades of design work, I tried to control every space, every letter, every color value. Now I set some parameters and let it run. The AI becomes my darkroom, my easel—unpredictable, temperamental, and luckily...occasionally brilliant. Each iteration like a conversation. Chat much?

What fascinates me beyond the technology itself is the way it makes me (re)think. Just like my work in creative direction, I’m not just making images—I’m designing systems for making images. It’s like I’m teaching algorithms to dream.

So the work sits in this odd temporal space. Viewers can’t always tell when it was made—and maybe that’s the whole point. A piece generated today carries the DNA of techniques from 1850, filtered through silicon and math and my own insistence that new tools honor old wisdom.

Calling myself a visual explorer feels more comfortable than artist, but nobody knows what that means either. Piet Mondrian said, “I don't want pictures, I want to find things out.” These images are investigations. I’m not trying to replace traditional methods—I’m trying to understand what they really were.

At least that’s what I’m telling myself lately.