SWEAT, 2025
SWEAT is a series of staged images born out of a reflection on how technology, particularly artificial intelligence, influence our minds, privacy, social interaction, and human existence in general.
The word SWEAT, in addition to being a word that suggests a human possibility far removed from machines, describes the feeling of cold sweat I experience when I consider the loss of human responsiveness in the face of the constant flow of redundant images, content, and visual information we receive every day from technology and the rise of AI.
Inside us, there is a narrator: one part of the mind creates stories, while another observes them. Thoughts, experiences, and fragments of memory intertwine spontaneously, like prompts that activate each other, generating images. It is a natural, raw, and unpredictable process, similar to dreaming or providing information to a model (in this case, a human) to generate a response. One thought leads to another, without following a defined logic, until it transforms into a complete vision, with characters and details. The images I present are an attempt to translate this process: real human prompts that take visual form.
Our creative potential works by generating prompts, which is exactly what we ask AI to do for us. We are already capable of creating, but we welcome the appealing and easy technological response and allow the machine to take over this intellectual effort that makes us actively original, in a matter of seconds.
Photographed in a physical room in which I locked myself, the series aims to represent a mental room, where human presence embodies a theme and suggests an initial direction of thought. I tried to crystallise these prompts of a few seconds by reflecting on themes such as desire, alienation, communication, identity, digital intimacy, procreation, nature, and extinction, precisely at the moment when I let them be invaded by the risk of technology and artificial intelligence impacting them. This produces a feeling of loneliness, subtraction, annihilation, and loss of the capacity to negotiate and communicate: the absence of “the other” in the room.
– Guia Besana
Sexuality
Procreation
Identity
Planet
Transport
Language
Digital intimacy
Alienation
Extinction
Nature
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