Prompting the Real

Saturday, November 15 and Sunday, November 16, 2025, at Palazzo Poggi, will take place Prompting the Real — two days of exhibitions and public events exploring multiple practices of co-creation between artists and artificial intelligences.

The works on display — spanning sculpture, performance, poetry, music, dance, photography, and audiovisual media — reflect radically different approaches: some artists recognize AI as a co-author, while others use interaction to expose its mechanisms of power and systems of control.

For machines, a prompt is a command that guides generation; in this exhibition, the perspective is reversed: prompting the real becomes a creative and critical act by artists to question our present and future relationship with intelligent machines — what imaginaries it activates, what structures it replicates, what forms of power it conceals or reveals.

Prompting the Real is a project by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Alma Human-AI, and the University of Bologna’s University Museum System; curated by Sineglossa, in collaboration with the National Center for Research in HPC, Big Data and Quantum Computing (ICSC) and the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), with the patronage of the European Union – NextGenerationEU | Italian Ministry of University and Research | Italia Domani | FAIR – Future Artificial Intelligence Research.