The Department of French and Italian invites you to join a talk entitled "Captioned Landscapes: From AI to the Renaissance" by Marco Maggi (Visiting Scholar in the Department of French and Italian, Stanford; Professor of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano, Switzerland).

Abstract:
Since Roman times, gardens and natural environments have been dotted with writing. This practice has reemerged in waves in Western cultures, particularly during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the second half of the 20th century. With greater continuity, writing has always inhabited natural spaces in the East. The presence of these “captioned landscapes” raises particularly radical questions about the relationship between humans and non-humans. Writing, in fact, has often been taken as a stigma of human difference from other forms of nature. How, on the contrary, can writing inserted into natural environments become a site of interspecies negotiation? In the case of literary writing, questions arise regarding the mediality of the text, which resonate singularly with the questions posed by the current overcoming of what Richard Lanham called the “codex book business.” What can captioned landscapes teach us about an immersive and dynamic reception of literature? And what about the current attempt to bypass words and writing through the construction of “large nature models” with which to train AI to generate images to bring humans closer to nature?

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This event is sponsored by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL), the Department of French and Italian, and the Renaissances Group, a DLCL Research Unit focal group.

Image copyrighted by Hannimari Heino.