de Gregorio

Italy

Where do you locate yourself in relation to the systems you work with?

I locate my practice at the friction point between complicity and critique. As a technologist and hacker, I occupy the interior of the black box; I do not observe AI systems from a safe distance, but operate within their logic to expose their contradictions. In The Next Great Wave, I stand in an adversarial position to the very tools I employ. I utilize generative algorithms—systems known for their voracious energy consumption—to visualize the environmental decay they accelerate. My position is that of a "double agent": leveraging the aesthetic capabilities of machine learning while simultaneously blowing the whistle on its hidden carbon footprint. I stand where the digital cloud touches the physical ground, insisting that there is no such thing as a virtual action without a material cost.

Where are you heading, and what is pulling you there?

My vector is moving away from the abstraction of the "datasphere" and crashing into the heavy materiality of the Anthropocene. While my previous work mapped the invisible politics of surveillance, I am now being pulled by the gravitational force of consequence. I am following the supply chain of "convenience" to its terrifying conclusion. This vector resists the techno-utopian narrative that frames AI as a clean, ethereal solution; instead, I am guided by the "Toxic Sublime"—the overwhelming scale of human waste and industrial byproduct. I am heading toward a visual language that merges the seduction of Pop Art (the market dynamics of consumption) with the terror of ecological collapse. The force pulling me is the inevitable "return": the moment when the oceans, and the planet, return our debris to us.

How would you describe the space your practice is currently unfolding in?

My practice unfolds in a recursive feedback loop. It inhabits a distorted coordinate system where the boundaries between "natural" disaster and "artificial" intelligence have collapsed. Spatially, this work does not sit on a flat canvas, but floats in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—a territory that is both a literal accumulation of plastic and a metaphor for our accumulated digital junk. It is a space of "un-forgetting," where the things we throw away (both physical trash and digital data) refuse to disappear. By superimposing Hokusai’s reverence for nature with the flat, bright aesthetics of mass consumption, my work reshapes the space of the gallery into a zone of interrogation: asking how we can find the sublime in a world where the ocean is composed of our own discarded excesses.

Artist Statement

My truth begins in the machine. Before I was an artist questioning the system, I was a technologist building it. I have written the code, engineered the architectures, and understood the logic of surveillance, power, and conflict from the inside out. My art, therefore, is not a critique from a distance; it is a report from the engine room. It is an act of turning the "means of production"—the algorithms, the datasets, the predictive models—against their intended purpose. I don't use AI as a simple tool; I engage it in a dialogue about its own nature, its own inherent politics. My creative code is an exploit. It seeks the vulnerability in the system, not for destruction, but for revelation. To show the ghost in the machine is not a phantom, but a permanent, indelible record of our own humanity, sold in a market we never agreed to enter. This is my truth: you can only truly subvert what you deeply understand. I offer my work as the evidence. The reality is that art is the last space where we can reclaim the tools of control and use them to forge a moment of reflection.

Published in >

The AI Art Magazine, Number 3

, AI generation, .

de Gregorio, , AI generation,

Description

Process

Tools

Image credit:

Essay by

Published in:
The AI Art Magazine, Number 3,
April 2026

Published in >

The AI Art Magazine, Number 2

Retained Reports, AI generation, 2019.

de Gregorio, Retained Reports, AI generation, 2019

Description

In Retained Reports I question the politics of private-data – which surveillance capitalists gather as free raw material, fashioning them in prediction products for behavioural futures markets – and I invite us to imagine alternative socio-economic logics. I turned the surveillance capitalism's means of production against themselves by training an AI to hallucinate portraits of imaginary individuals based on an analysis of the public-domain archive of Acsinte, one of Romania’s most prolific early-20th-century artists. Many of Acsinte’s fragile glass plates were damages over the years due to heat and moisture. The delicate silver gelatine emulsion peeled off and the glass cracked or splintered. Worn down by time the portraits in the Acsinte’s archive are allegories of the impermanence of human artefacts. Their counterparts in Retained Reports, though, are, like private-data in the hands of the surveillance-industrial complex, permanent artefacts of computation and visual antiphrases. It is hard for citizens to delete their data, even when they stop sharing them. They are presented as images persistently retained on powered-off e-ink screens chosen in lieu of traditional archival paper. When asymmetries of knowledge between citizens and the capitalists translate into asymmetries of power, what will be the consequences for democracy? When we lose our private realm how do we assert our moral autonomy? When all our future behaviours are predicted what does it mean to be human?

Process

When asymmetries of knowledge between citizens and the surveillance capitalists translate into asymmetries of power, what will be the consequences for democracy? When we lose our private realm, how do we assert our moral autonomy? When predictions of future behaviours are enabled by knowledge and end up with control, what control do we retain over our lives if companies know more about us than we know about ourselves or than we know about them? Or, ultimately, when all our future behaviours are predicted, what does it mean to be human?    Retained Reports is result of a collaboration between my two parallel careers as cybersecurity technologist and research artist. It is my 25+ years long experience in the industry, government, and academia as a technologist who has innovated at the intersection of cybersecurity, economics, and ethics, to inform my artist practice in both its form and contents. The chief artistic concern is to raise questions about the world and time we live in and imagine more just societies, while focusing my attention on the societal challenges related to my scientific career. In a way, my primary desire is to offer to our fellow citizens – the real cybersecurity stakeholders – alternative lens to problematise where our human communities are heading, and to invite them to engage more with our democratic institutions, so as to ensure their views are reflected in future policies.

Tools

I utilised PyTorch-GAN on AWS to train a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) over the public-domain archive of Costică Acsinte, one of Romania’s most prolific early-20th-century photographers. I programmed the e-ink screens via their driver board connected to a SBC to permanently retain the generated images. The final digital images are hallucinated by the GAN, imprinted on e-ink screens, 17.4cm x 12.75cm x 0.07cm, and encapsulated in a perspex frames.

Image credit:

Essay by

Published in:
The AI Art Magazine, Number 2,
September 2025

_Results

de Gregorio

Italy