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The sleep of reason. From the Enlightenment to artificial intelligence

The exhibition The sleep of reason. From the Enlightenment to artificial intelligence brings together different ways of representing the world and knowledge that, over time, have evolved alongside scientific and technological progress. It is a journey that spans from drawing and printmaking to artificial intelligence, with photography as the central thread that structures this process and, to a large extent, defines the modern gaze.

The journey begins in the eighteenth century, when the drive to understand and classify reality led artists and scientists to capture it in countless drawings and prints: works with encyclopedic ambition, born mainly from expeditions carried across the five continents. Among the most remarkable milestones of this Enlightenment spirit were Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie and Napoleon’s Description de l’Égypte, both featured in the exhibition.

Photography appeared in 1839 and soon joined drawing and printmaking as a tool for science. It gave rise to a new visual culture that pursued detail, precision, definition, and fidelity to the objects and phenomena represented. By lending authority to ideas such as credibility and truth, photography shaped how scientific achievements were described and expanded at the same time the very notion of “reality” or “the real”.

Today, in the twenty-first century, we are witnessing a new revolution: images generated by artificial intelligence trained on immense datasets, combined with ultra–high–resolution technologies, open a fascinating horizon for knowledge while further complicating the question of how images engage with reality. In this new context, the boundaries between what is real, simulated, or imagined blur into one another.

A unique selection of prints and photographs from the Museo Universidad de Navarra and the Fernández Holmann collection, shown in dialogue with digital artworks, invites us to reflect on how visual culture—far from being a passive mirror—has always been, and remains, an active agent in constructing knowledge, mediating our perception of the world, and redefining our relationship with truth.

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Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie

Considered one of the great editorial achievements of the Early Modern Period, the Encyclopédie, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts was published in France between 1751 and 1772 under the direction of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. The original idea of the publisher André Le Breton was to translate from English Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, which appeared some years earlier. However, once the task was entrusted to Diderot and d’Alembert, they transformed it into a far more ambitious project: one that sought to gather all the knowledge of their time through a critical and secular lens.

The Encyclopédie, which became one of the cornerstones of the Enlightenment, perceived art and science as fundamental engines of human progress. It was made up of 28 volumes that systematically compiled the understanding of the world in all its dimensions. Its innovative didactic approach combined texts (in 17 of the volumes) and images (in the remaining 11), so that ones explained the others and vice versa. Its roughly 72,000 articles were written by more than 140 contributors, including Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire, as well as Diderot and d’Alembert themselves.

Among the vast range of subjects it covered, the Encyclopédie devoted entire volumes to Anatomy and Astronomy. The first assembled everything related to the human body, while the second focused on describing the instruments used to study the universe. These two subjects speak to the dual scale of the world—the human and the cosmic—illustrating the scope and ambition of a project that aimed to explain every aspect of reality through scientific knowledge.

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Scientific expeditions and the study of nature

Following the same Enlightenment spirit that brought about the Encyclopédie, the eighteenth century saw the rise of numerous scientific expeditions that included artists tasked with illustrating the discoveries made along the way. Their drawings aimed to record the explored territories with accuracy, paying particular attention to the observation of the natural world.

In this context, the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus stood out, establishing a binomial system of Latin nomenclature to classify the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms, laying the foundations of modern scientific methodology. His ideas were taken up by botanists such as Esenbeck—a pharmacist specialising in medicinal plants, whose publications combined general views of each specimen with close studies of their fruits—and Trew, a physician and botanist who, together with Ehret—one of the leading painters of plants and flowers of the time—issued Plantae selectae, a series of one hundred plates of great precision and beauty. In the same line we also find Rylar, an amateur botanist who compiled a travel sketchbook whose illustrations, based on already published prints, still retain considerable scientific value today.

Alongside them stands Bateman, a renowned orchid specialist, who assembled in England a distinguished collection of those flowers and designed gardens such as the Derby Arboretum, considered the country’s first public park. His publication The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala remains one of the most coveted works of the nineteenth century.

Not everyone, however, adopted the Linnaean system. The explorer and ornithologist Le Vaillant preferred to name species in French and defended direct observation in their natural habitat over the study of preserved specimens. Didactic purposes were also important. Bertuch devised a natural history encyclopaedia for children in which the pedagogical value of the image was central, introducing an innovative learning approach.

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Anna Ridler (London, 1985)
Myriad (Tulips)
2018
Color digital photographs with handwritten annotations
Funded by the EMAP/EMARE program (part of Creative Europe) and commissioned by Impakt

Myriad (Tulips) by Anna Ridler is an installation that reveals the human dimension behind machine learning, showing how artificial intelligence systems rely heavily on human labour, subjectivity, and decisions. The work consists of thousands of photographs of tulips taken by the artist over three months in the Netherlands, each manually tagged. By presenting this dataset as a physical installation, Ridler highlights the slow, painstaking craftsmanship involved in its creation, which is normally hidden in digital abstraction.

Each photograph is labelled according to the colour, shape, and condition of the flower, underscoring the difficulty of classifying even something as seemingly simple as a tulip. This subjectivity, inherent in any categorisation process, raises questions about the biases that inevitably seep into algorithmic systems.

The use of the tulip is no coincidence: it refers to seventeenth-century “Tulipmania”, one of the first documented cases of a speculative bubble, drawing a parallel between the economic value of flowers then and the speculative value of data today. Ridler redirects our attention to the physical and human origins of data through a critical reflection on the role of creativity in the digital age, while making the human effort involved tangible and questioning the perception of data as neutral or automatic.

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The image of ancient civilisations

Together with natural history, disciplines linked to history and art gained increasing prominence under the broad category of “Antiquities.” Fascination with past civilisations prompted the study of ruins from a systematic perspective, based on the cataloguing and inventory of the remains found.

Rome continued to be a powerful centre of attraction, from which both the vestiges of classical antiquity—reflection of Enlightenment society—and the great works of the Modern Age were explored. This gaze into the past was reinforced by the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum, whose excavations laid the foundations of scientific archaeology. The Greco-Roman legacy became a reference point for the social, political, and religious renewal then taking shape, while there was also growing interest in other cultures such as the Egyptian, Nabataean, pre-Columbian, and the vernacular traditions of European countries.

In this context, expeditions and publications multiplied, marking milestones in the history of archaeology. The Prussian astronomer and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, recognised as the father of modern geography, offered a groundbreaking vision of pre-Hispanic cultures—especially in Mexico and Peru—from a scientific and humanist approach. At the same time, the Luxembourgish officer Guillermo Dupaix, in the service of the Spanish Crown, led the first systematised documentation of Mesoamerican civilisations, regarded as the starting point of archaeology in Mexico.

Alexandre de Laborde, a great connoisseur of Spain and companion to Napoleon during his 1808 campaign in the Peninsula, published the first illustrated guide to the country, which spread in France the image of an exotic and mysterious Spain. Years later, his son Léon de Laborde and Louis Maurice Linant de Bellefonds undertook an expedition to Petra that resulted in one of the most influential albums of its era: the monumental façades of the Nabataean city were printed for the first time, inaugurating its visual dissemination in Europe and opening up new horizons beyond the established Napoleonic routes.

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Giovanni Battista Piranesi was a Venetian architect, printmaker, and scholar who, after moving to Rome in 1740, settled there permanently in 1745. His mastery of drawing and etching, combined with his deep knowledge of classical and Baroque architecture, led him to create a series of urban and monumental views highly valued by Grand Tour travellers. These prints, blending archaeological precision with an imaginative approach, can be seen as a forerunner of travel photography.

In works such as Le Carceri d’Invenzione (1761), he combined real buildings with invented architectures, playing with scale and theatricality, while in others he offered a more scientific perspective, such as Le Antichità Romane (1756)—200 plates of antiquities that became a souvenir album for travellers—or Della Magnificenza ed Architettura dei Romani (1761)—an almost documentary record of the ruins as they stood at the time. He often included human figures that, besides depicting local types, helped to give scale to his compositions.

Between 1748 and 1774 he published his most celebrated series, Vedute di Roma, consisting of 135 etchings of ancient and modern views of the city. Its success was such that it continued to be reissued after his death, first by his son and later by the publisher Firmin Didot, until in 1839 it was acquired by the Calcografia Camerale—today the Calcografia Nazionale in Italy—at the behest of Pope Gregory XVI. Later editions incorporated new prints of the Pantheon, the Colosseum, and a map of Rome, consolidating Vedute as one of the great visual albums of the city.

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ScanLAB Projects
Echoes in Light. Fragments of the Roman Forum
2025
Pointcloud animation, multi-channel video, composed audio
Duration: 5 min

This audiovisual work offers an unprecedented journey through the Roman Forum, using advanced laser scanning technology (LiDAR) to reconstruct it in three dimensions. Thanks to this process, we not only gain access to astonishing physical details—such as its surfaces, sculptures, and structures—but also to the ways in which we view, record, and understand the past today.

Although LiDAR and the digital models it generates may seem far removed from the first techniques of printmaking or photography, the work is part of that same tradition: one in which technical mastery and a deep understanding of a tool are fundamental to the process of observing and interpreting the world. The views that are constructed and the camera movements within the scan are influenced—sometimes deliberately, sometimes unconsciously—by centuries of visual representations of the Forum. The history of art, photography, and archaeology continues to define the way we frame and make sense of these new digital images.

The journey culminates in a transformation: from an abstract, black-and-white world we move to a more recognisable, colourful vision. But that transition does not blur the central question of the work: how does our technology shape the way we remember and represent places?

Lead Artists: Matt Shaw and William Trossell
Executive Producers: Matt Shaw and William Trossell
Composer and Sound Designer: wavingwaves audio
Senior Point Cloud Artist: Nicky Ovidiu Baiculescu
Special Thanks to Parco archeologico del Colosseo.

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Description de l’Égypte (1809–1823). Antiquity

In the context of the war between France and England, Napoleon turned his attention to Egypt and planned its conquest to secure control of the Eastern Mediterranean and the strategic route to Asia. In parallel with the preparation of the campaign, a Commission of Sciences and Arts was established, bringing together 167 scientists and nearly 2,000 artists, who travelled to Egypt between 1798 and 1801 with the mission of recording the country’s knowledge from the Pharaonic era to the time of the expedition. Upon their arrival in Cairo, they set up a printing press, a chemistry laboratory, a physics cabinet, an observatory, and several rooms for the Institut d’Égypte, whose aims included promoting scientific Enlightenment through research, study, and the dissemination of Egypt’s natural, industrial, and historical phenomena. The results were published between 1809 and 1823 under the title Description de l’Égypte: a 23-volume edition of both text and plates devoted to Antiquity, natural history, the modern era, and topographical cartography.

The first section, under the general title “Antiquities”, comprises five volumes with a compendium of panoramic views and landscapes of ancient Egyptian ruins, along with monumental views of pharaonic constructions that present plans, elevations, and sections. In many cases, measurements are indicated with scientific precision, using scales or human figures to convey and help comprehend the magnitude of Egyptian architecture. Alongside these are sculptures, hieroglyphs, and mummies—both human and animal—as well as other elements that, from the perspective of art and science, reflect the concerns of a particular period. The way these images were represented, rooted in the scientific rigor of Winckelmann, marked the beginnings of Egyptology as a scientific discipline.

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Egypt in the time of Napoleon

Two further volumes of the Description de l’Égypte are dedicated to the modern era, offering a vision of Egypt under the Ottoman Empire and the rule of the Mamluks. These engravings show broad landscapes as well as urban and monumental views, similar to those in the section on Antiquity but marked by a fascination with the exotic Orient. Together with architecture, the human figure takes on a central role, both in portraits of Egypt’s rulers at the time of the Napoleonic expedition and, above all, in the depiction of local types, which would later become one of the key iconographic themes of photography. Professions of that period are also represented, staged in a theatrical way with workers shown either in their settings or accompanied by technical, scientific, artistic, and ethnographic instruments. The collection of these images can be linked to the French government’s intention to turn Egypt into a colony, which created the need to know it thoroughly so as to enable not only long-term occupation but also the exploitation of its resources.

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Documenting nature

Three volumes are devoted to natural history, with engravings depicting examples of the animal, plant, and mineral world found in Egypt at the time of the Napoleonic expedition. Just as the pharaonic temples were portrayed with rigour and precision, these natural subjects were rendered with the same meticulous care, becoming true “micro-monuments” whose grandeur rivals that of the ruins of the past.

The images follow a scientific methodology similar to that employed in other contemporary works of this kind. The different species are arranged and classified by genus and family, showing their overall appearance, sometimes accompanied by partial studies. This compilation is not limited to large mammals and birds but also includes, often in exhaustive detail, examples of what might be considered minor fauna, such as insects, crustaceans, and molluscs, both terrestrial and marine.

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Wenting Zhu / Beauty of Science
Electrodeposition
2017
Video
Duration: 1 min 58 seg

Envisioning Chemistry is a project that blurs the boundaries between art and science, revealing the hidden beauty of chemical processes through technologies such as macro, micro, high-speed and time-lapse photography, as well as infrared thermal imaging.

In this piece, we observe the formation of metallic crystals during electrodeposition: a chemical phenomenon in which metal ions are reduced at an electrode, generating branched structures of extraordinary complexity. Filmed through a microscope, these crystallisations—of copper, zinc, silver, lead, and tin—allow us to access the invisible, capturing what takes place at scales beyond the reach of the human eye.

Thanks to these visual techniques, science is transformed into an aesthetic experience. What was traditionally studied as a physicochemical phenomenon can now also be appreciated as an artistic manifestation that challenges the limits of what we understand as art. By combining new technologies with scientific knowledge and a creative gaze, Electrodeposition not only reveals processes that were previously unseen, but also invites us to imagine other ways of looking: when the context changes, so does our understanding of the world.

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The birth of photography

On 19 August 1839, sixteen years after the publication of the last volume of the Description de l’Égypte, the invention of photography was officially announced at the Académie des Sciences in Paris. In his remarks, François Arago underlined the veracity and immediacy of the new technique in reproducing the world, noting the immense advantages it would have offered had it existed during the Napoleonic expedition.

In December of that same year, the first photographers arrived in Egypt, following in Bonaparte’s footsteps and seeking the same iconographies disseminated through the Description de l’Égypte. Whereas the images in that work had been produced through drawing and engraving, these were now replaced by photography, a medium that, unlike the “subjectivity” of earlier techniques, offered clarity and precision and presented a tangible world that viewers perceived as authentic. It also made visible the material dimension of a reality still to be discovered, even if filtered through the photographer’s gaze.

The advent of photography brought about a shift in art: new attention was given to scenes that had previously been overlooked, marking the beginning of changes in artistic iconographies, as shown by Atkins and Talbot. Early photographs still relied on drawing and engraving for printed reproduction, though now using the daguerreotype as a matrix, reinforcing the medium’s link with fidelity and reality, as seen in the works of Lerebours or Girault de Prangey. This process was soon replaced by the calotype, used by figures such as Maxime Du Camp, which enabled the wider circulation of images thanks to the possibility of producing multiple positive prints from a single negative.

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Pioneers of photography in the Orient

Driven by advances in mechanics, optics, and photographic technique, as well as the mastery of developing processes, the calotype brought to Egypt the first generation of photographers. Still inspired by the imagery of the Description de l’Égypte and constrained by shooting in full sunlight, they carried out their first experiments. However, they soon began to create compositions more in tune with the possibilities of the new medium and to record reality with precision and detail, offering images to a European audience eager to see and experience an unfamiliar world.

The evolution of the technique provided greater definition, sharpness, and tonal depth, as can be observed in Du Camp’s works printed using Blanquart-Evrard’s process, in contrast to his earlier salted paper prints displayed in the previous room. Teynard, for his part, not only experimented with new compositional approaches made possible by photography, but also captured with complete accuracy the hieroglyphs that covered the walls of temples and palaces, correcting transcription errors found in earlier engravings.

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The advance of photography

The first calotypists were followed by a second generation of European photographers who adopted the new collodion process with its albumen paper prints, capable of offering greater definition. These photographers travelled throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, capturing images of the Ottoman Empire, biblical sites, and the Greek world. Some settled in cities such as Constantinople and Cairo, where they opened photographic studios, aware of the appeal of these representations. Their works were sold to foreign audiences and helped to establish a stereotyped image of those lands and the ways they were viewed. Photographers such as Francis Frith travelled across Ottoman territories, providing Western travellers with a wide repertoire of images in different formats. Auguste Salzmann, for his part, portrayed Jerusalem through the lens of biblical narratives, producing images that already explored the technical possibilities of the new medium. In the work of Wilhelm Hammersmith, as in that of his contemporaries, the imagery of the Description de l’Égypte reappears: views of pharaonic and Muslim constructions, now translated from engraving to photography, which conveyed an added sense of realism and authenticity.

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After the early stages of photography, when foreign photographers dominated the scene, the 1850s saw the emergence of the first local studios. These played a crucial role in shaping the image of the Orient for the rest of the world, often following the standardised model introduced by European photographers. Their images also fed the region’s nascent “tourism”, especially after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The Zangaki brothers worked within the tradition of commercial photography aimed at a foreign audience, much like the works of Félix Bonfils. Western photographers continued to arrive as well, among them the British sergeant James McDonald, who focused on desert landscapes of strategic military interest around Sinai. These views, never before documented, stood out from the usual repertoire and opened the door to a new visual language in the representation of previously unrecorded territories. Henri Béchard’s photographs, while repeating motifs similar to those of other photographers, proposed more original and personal framings, moving away from tourist-oriented approaches.

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Quayola (Roma, 1982)
Storms
2021
Series of 4K Videos
Duration: 31 min 10 seg

Storms is part of a series of audiovisual installations that extend Italian artist Quayola’s research into the tradition of landscape painting, reinterpreted through advanced technologies. Using ultra–high–definition images of the raging sea off Cornwall, the artist generates digital paintings that do not imitate nature but instead translate it into vectors, intensities, and flows of colour.

More than an animation, Storms reveals an inner movement: an eruption of intrinsic dynamics in which the landscape slowly disintegrates and recomposes into abstraction. 

Like Romantic masters such as Turner, Quayola conceives of nature as a universal space, yet his approach is algorithmic rather than gestural. The forces that stir the sea are encoded and transformed into pictorial energy.

These “self-painting paintings” emerge over an expanded timescale, where the natural and the artificial coexist within the same continuum. The result is a form of the sublime that not only confronts the immensity of nature but also evokes wonder at the expressive power of technology. In Storms, human and machine collaborate to broaden perception: a nature both strange and familiar, seen as if for the very first time.

Artwork by Quayola
Produced by Quayola Studio
Giulia Olivieri (algorithmic paintings and recordings, editing, data-management)
Andrea Santicchia (tech research)
Maria Elena Brugora (production and logistics) 

With the support of

Cinematography: Marcus Domleo
Shoot assistance: Henry Keep
Behind the scenes: Matt Robinson
Sound Design: Riccardo Marsana
Software Development: Nikolai Matviev, Kyle McLean, Natan Sinigaglia, Sebastiano Barbieri
Printing & Framing: Artproof 

Developed with the support of Aesop