Photographing the imagination
Artificial intelligence and human sensibility in a project by Massimo Gardone for Foscarini. A visual narrative that combines the sensitivity of an artist with the generative capabilities of artificial intelligence, to create a new way of narrating light.
In constant pursuit of original and unexpected languages – not only in terms of product, but also its communication – Foscarini explores a new visual horizon together with Massimo Gardone, the photographer and long-term collaborator of the company. The project investigates the potential of artificial intelligence as a tool of expression, but always guided by a sensitive, conscious human touch. A story in which technology is a means of amplifying the human gaze, where settings generated by AI contain lamps photographed in their physical presence.
The research conducted by Foscarini with Gardone and his studio Azimut has a very simple but quite ambitious objective: to teach the computer to “see” like the photographer, reflecting the suspended, delicate gaze that sets Gardone’s work apart, moving forward over the years in the world of flowers, the elective subjects – together with the sea – of his personal explorations. Thousands of floral images have invaded the digital memory of the machine, in a long, methodical process where every nuance, every detail of the petals, becomes a chromatic vibration that is absorbed and re-encoded.
With this photography project, that same sensibility has been transported into spaces, in a fascinating shift of scale from small to large, natural to imaginary – from the fragile and natural closeup of the flower to the creation of domestic landscapes that contain Foscarini’s lamps. The fixed points along this path are the lights by Foscarini, which remain real, photographed to preserve their authenticity and to inhabit spaces that belong to the boundary between reality and imaginative vision. The outcome is not a replica of reality, but an act of poetic translation.
“My visual research always stems from curiosity, from the desire to let myself be contaminated. I have learned how to move between analogue and digital, as if in a continuous dialogue; two different languages that touch and complete each other, opening up new possibilities at every turn”
Massimo Gardone
/ Photographer
Technological experimentation is a territory shared by Gardone and Foscarini: for both, technology is not an end, but a means to grant form to ideas. In Gardone’s work this approach translates into a dialogue between analogue gesture and digital potential, in which artificial intelligence is guided, instructed, gauged to amplify the human gaze, not to replace it. The photographer grafts sensitivity and intuition into the technological process, generating a novel narrative of Foscarini’s lighting: a balance between material and imagination, reality and vision.
“With my gaze I have crossed eras and technologies: the first experiments were with a large format, the Polaroid 20×25, a film that captured the impalpable nature of the flowers; with digital methods I have wagered on an inverse result; I wanted to delve into the materiality of flowers, but immersed in an evocative, suspended world. I have always been fascinated by technology. I began with a Commodore Amiga 1000. I spent hours playing with the light of the cathode ray tube, placing photographic film on the screen and re-photographing with the Polaroid, intervening on the colours of the monitor. Gestures that now seem prehistoric, and bring to mind Wim Wenders, who in Until the End of the World imagines an instrument that would capture dreams from the activity of the brain, transforming them into images. This vision was decades ahead of today’s research on AI”
Massimo Gardone
/ Photographer
“Inside Foscarini experimentation is never an end in itself, but a way to open up new horizons. With this project, together with Massimo Gardone we have explored the potentialities of AI as a tool of creativity and narration, without ever overlooking the human sensibility that is part of our identity. It is an approach that offers us new possibilities of communication and allows us to establish a dialogue with our audience in always original and distinctive ways”
Carlo Urbinati
/Founder and president of Foscarini
The project represents a new chapter in Foscarini’s attitude of experimentation and exploration of tools and languages capable of triggering new opportunities. A new way to assert the identity of the brand, which exists in light, but also in thought and visual culture.
For What’s in a Lamp?, Spanish illustrator and art director Jorge Arévalo portrays Foscarini’s lamps and designers with his unmistakable style: essential lines, bold colours, and graphic elegance. A suspended dialogue between the object of design and the mind that imagines it.
For the What’s in a Lamp? project, Italian artist Beppe Conti imagines lamps not simply as sources of light, but as instruments that reveal the invisible. In his digital collages, fragments and hidden layers emerge from the darkness, shaped by the light of Foscarini lamps into dreamlike spaces.
With his unmistakable style defined by essential shapes and bold colors Peter Grundy transforms Foscarini lamps into visual archetypes of the concepts and values that define the brand’s identity for the editorial project What’s in a Lamp?. An exercise in synthesis and vision that invites us to see light not only as a source but as meaning itself.
Helen Musselwhite’s artistic universe is made of paper cutouts, folds, and shadows that narrate the wonder of the natural world. For What’s in a Lamp?, the artist reinterprets some of Foscarini’s lamps, transforming them into dreamlike paper landscapes.
Ery Burns brings the free-flowing spontaneity of doodling to Foscarini’s What’s in a Lamp? project. In each illustration, light becomes an immediate and imaginative expression, giving life to unexpected stories filled with intricate details, bold colors, and a touch of humor.
Jim Stoten reimagines Foscarini lamps in a series of hypnotic, infinite-zooming animations that feel like gateways—inviting viewers to explore universes within universes and pulling them into vibrant worlds of color, form, and imagination.
Giona Maiarelli’s latest series for What’s in a Lamp? blends Italian and American cultures, using collages to reinterpret the iconic Foscarini lamps by combining imagery from old magazines, books, and photographs, all reworked through the lens of memory and imagination
Bennet Pimpinella brings his cinematic art to the What’s in a Lamp? project. Through his signature technique of scratching directly onto film, he transforms Foscarini lamps into symbols of emotions and memories, crafting intimate scenes infused with a surreal, grunge atmosphere.
Mattia Riami’s series of illustrations for the project “What’s in a lamp?” transforms Foscarini lamps into magical objects using a touch of surrealism and fantasy to shift perspectives and bring a sense of wonder to everyday life.
Antje Damm integrates Foscarini lamps into enchanting matchbox dioramas portraying home stories within the limited space of a matchbox in her series for Foscarini “What’s in a Lamp?” project.
