With Babelibabibliotheca – a play on words referring to Jorge Luis Borges’s short story The Library of Babel – Aramis Navarro presents a tongue-in-cheek yet fictional collection of the proliferations of artificial intelligence. How is our thinking influenced when AI is used as an intelligent tool? How do ideas and new forms of belief emerge through technical systems? His works question how digital technologies shape our understanding of the world and of reality. The infinite library, as conceived by Borges in his thought experiment, encompasses the entirety of human knowledge – past as well as future. Yet its sources remain partly illegible, incomprehensible or open to misinterpretation. Similarly, synthetic content generated by algorithms can be interpreted and misunderstood in different ways. Deformations are inevitable.
In his artistic practice, Navarro also draws on the writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant and his notion of a “right to opacity” – the right not to have to be entirely legible or explicable. Contradiction and ambiguity thus become ways of resisting complete control. Different forms of meaning and experience – human and technological – encounter and influence one another without merging into a single, universally valid norm.
Navarro works with AI algorithms, language models and digital processes whose outcomes cannot be predicted or controlled. Platforms such as “Moltbook”, considered a social network for AI agents, fictional belief systems such as “Crustafarianism”, and phenomena such as “AI Psychosis” serve as points of departure for his visually powerful works. Through etching, cyanotype and assemblage, he creates dense compositions in which narratives, myths, rituals and symbols overlap and intertwine.
Technology is shaped by humans while simultaneously transforming our relationship with the world. In Navarro’s work, the incomprehensible and contradictory nature of AI-generated images and texts becomes an exuberant vision of our present. His works reveal how knowledge – what we come to know through experience – and our understanding of reality are constantly changing.
The series RSI – Recursive Self-Improvement refers to the idea that AI can improve its own capabilities or its own code, thereby continuously optimising itself. Navarro visualises this incestuous principle through the Habsburg lineage, which relied on marriages between relatives across generations in order to preserve aristocratic purity. The resulting physical deformities, including the characteristic Habsburg jaw, become the counterpart of a mechanism that develops exclusively from within itself, continually producing new anomalies.
The works do not show us what the future of artificial intelligence will look like. Rather, they reveal that we are already living in a present in which technological systems help shape our opinions, perceptions and values.
The ominous worldview that Navarro constructs and presents to us stands as a metaphor for a future in which human and artificial forms of knowledge increasingly intermingle. What does it mean for our future when AI agents not only produce content but also participate in shaping our environment? What kind of world emerges when machines create their own systems of knowledge? The answer is something each of us will have to find for ourselves.
Nadia Veronese
