A workshop that explores the hallucinatory power of artificial intelligence by challenging our relationship with sources and knowledge.

‘Fonti Sintetiche’ (Synthetic Sources) is a project curated by Guido Segni for GIUNGLA and the State Library of Lucca. The workshop investigates the complex relationship between history and fiction in the age of artificial intelligence, in which the most advanced technologies create hallucinatory visions that challenge our ability to distinguish the real from the imagined.

Through the use of tools such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, participants will explore the archives of the Biblioteca Statale di Lucca, experimenting with linguistic models capable of generating texts and images that reinterpret and distort history. The objective is the creation of a book that recounts a historical episode of Lucca, which is plausible but never happened. The concept of unhappening, introduced by Guido Segni, is at the heart of this process: the AI generates a narrative so believable that it makes an event that never happened seem real.

This book, a simulated ‘source’, will be included in the library’s collection, inviting readers to reflect on the power of AI to rewrite history and create new collective memories, pushing the boundaries between what happened and what never happened. An immersive journey between reality and fiction, an exercise in fiction design in which memory and artificial imagination come together.