MARTA DI FRANCESCO

Tiresias is a meditation on seeing, foreseeing, and blindness. Inspired by the blind prophet of Greek mythology, the piece explores machine seeing and the loss of inner sight, interrogating the recursivity of GANs, as vision and foresight collapse onto themselves.

TIRESIAS is a meditation on seeing, foreseeing, and blindness. Inspired by the blind prophet of Greek mythology, a liminal being mediating between humankind and gods, darkness and light, present and future, the piece critically examines AI's recursivity, by reflecting on the tension between inner sight and machine vision. The blind prophet Tiresias can no longer see in the dark because even the dark is gone. 

Here, blindness is not merely the absence of sight but its saturation: being overwhelmed by infinite reflection. Large language models create recursive loops, mirrors reflecting mirrors, where infinite reflection becomes a bottomless gaze into a void. This is false foresight: not opening possibility but narrowing it, repeating what already exists. What once was darkness, a space of mystery, concealment, and prophecy, has been colonised by artificial light and reflection, filled with the noise of prediction, saturated by images that fold back on themselves and endlessly reproduce themselves. The hypervisibility of AI is a light that blinds. When every surface reflects back another, depth collapses and foresight dissolves; only by reclaiming uncertainty is it possible to escape the reflective blind stare.

Tiresias was created with StyleGAN2, a generative AI model, trained on a carefully curated dataset, together with Touch Designer, volumetric capture, Processing, and poetry. 

The work stages the impossibility of looking forward when the horizon has flattened into repetition. The shifting, doubled figure of Tiresias embodies this contradiction: a prophet who cannot foresee, a seer who no longer prophesies. Tiresias asks whether another kind of vision is possible: one that embraces uncertainty, acknowledges the limits of prediction, and holds space for what we cannot yet see. Without the unknowable, without genuine uncertainty, there can be no imagination, only visualisation. By the end of the monologue, it is no longer clear whether the voice belongs to Tiresias or to a machine.