The art of observation in the age of AI

Eva Giolo and Ali Cherri, award winners at the Anacapri Landscape Festival, use video to challenge the viewer’s perspective. Their works suggest an encounter with artificial intelligence: not merely producing images, but learning to observe them.

The landscape is not merely what lies before our eyes. It is also what we carry within us: memories, desires and fears that shape our focus. It is in this light that the winners of the Jumeirah Capri Palace Prize can be viewed: Eva Giolo for "Becoming Landscape" and Ali Cherri, with a special mention, for "The Watchman". The jury was chaired by the French critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud.

‘The Observer’, the title of the Anacapri Landscape Festival curated by Arianna Rosica and Gianluca Riccio, signifies a shift: from the landscape to the viewer. It is not enough to ask what an image represents. One must ask who chose the frame and what relationship it establishes with what it depicts.

Giolo takes his cue from everyday life. His video, installed in the kitchens of Villa San Michele, seeks out traces of intimacy and memory in ordinary moments. The award citation highlights a discreet and sustained observation, capable of engaging with a place without imposing itself upon it. The landscape becomes something to be experienced, not consumed: a lived reality, whose pace one must accept.

Cherri explores archaeological and natural heritage, questioning the narratives through which we construct the idea of nation and progress. The Watchman has been recognised for its cinematic quality and for its reflection on the gaze, on waiting and on the human condition. Her work invites us to consider the weight of the observer: looking is not necessarily an innocent act; it can be a way of surveilling, defining boundaries and assigning an identity.

Video offers contemporary art a tool with which to address these questions: duration. It does not merely present an image, but organises its transformation over time. A repeated gesture can take on a different meaning; a period of waiting can become the subject. The viewer must grapple with the time required for something to be revealed.

I see artificial intelligence as an opportunity for collaboration, not competition. The convergence of video and AI could serve to experiment with editing, link archives and imagine landscapes. However, it should also make the choices visible: what is documented, what is reconstructed, what is invented. The artist would not only have new images; they would have new ways of questioning the trust we place in them.

It is the inner landscape of modernity, with its demons: haste, control, the desire to eliminate all uncertainty. Giolo and Cherri suggest a response: to allow the images time to make us question ourselves. AI can enter this laboratory. Not to put an end to every question, but to help us formulate better ones.