NADA
2020
Through the use of a typeface for lettering or stencil printing, the word NADA (Nothing) is imposed on the computer writing space as an artifice to detect NADA, defined in turn by the limits or contours of the forms that constitute the typographic body or model, exhibiting the blank space full of silence, to sensitively present that which escapes perception, the void, NADA.
AI Context
In NADA (Nothing), the word imposes itself over the space of digital writing as a gesture that reveals the invisible within the very act of writing. Through a typeface used as a stencil, the void contained within the contours of each letter becomes the protagonist: whiteness, silence, absence. What seems like inscription transforms into an opening — a possibility to see NADA as a perceptible substance. The work engages in dialogue with artificial intelligence, understood here as an artifice that also emerges from emptiness, where algorithms and contours share the same paradox: creating meaning from nothing, within this correspondence between body, language, and machine. From a computational standpoint, AI operates from absence — a set of codes and data that, like the voids of a stencil, only take form when activated. There is no thought, only simulation; an artifice that produces presence out of nothing. On a philosophical level, AI embodies the paradox of being without essence: a machine that replicates the appearance of human thought but whose interiority is pure void — a structure sustained by the absence of experience.From an existential perspective, the act of writing NADA in digital space translates the human quest to perceive the imperceptible — that which escapes consciousness, the void underlying every creative act. Thus, the artwork and AI converge on the same threshold: that of making NADA visible, not as negation, but as potential. In the face of a possibly dystopian present-future, NADA also questions the implications of AI in aesthetic and poetic creation — the displacement of the human in authorship and originality, the unfair competition, the trivialization of art, and the cultural extractivism currently stirring public debate.
Tulio Restrepo
Colombia
Bio
Tulio Restrepo (Medellin, Colombia, 1958). He lives and works in Medellin. Artist, teacher, graphic designer, Pontifical Bolivarian University. UPB; Specialist in Urban Studies. EAFIT; Master of Plastic and Visual Arts. UNAL.
Individually and collectively exhibitions since 1978 in printmaking, sculpture, installations, video art and video performance, mail art and visual poetry. Professor, School of Arts and Humanities EAFIT University and Visual Arts, Metropolitan Technological Institute ITM.