There are moments when history feels like it’s starting to cannibalise itself — when the sacred gestures of art, ritual, and rebellion fold into a grim spectacle of techno-fetishism. Enter Stefano Cagol’s We Own the Futures, a fire-lit performance staged in the medieval heart of Brixen, South Tyrol, with an SOS flare in one hand and a humanoid robot in the other. The scene: a Baroque cathedral, light bleeding like arterial spray into the Alpine night, a humanoid emissary from Silicon Valley’s underworld shuffling across cobblestones toward the artist. The message: an urgent, smouldering telegram to a species on the brink.
South Tyrol, that jagged cultural borderland between Austria and Italy, has long been a site where identity politics, mysticism, and imperial ambitions overlap. Artists from Paul Klee to Alighiero Boetti have found refuge or inspiration in these valleys. The region’s legacy as a liminal space — where Germanic stoicism meets Mediterranean sensuality — makes it fertile ground for Cagol’s own project: an invocation to fire, light, and apocalypse in the Anthropocene’s last act.
“I often use light as pure energy derived from very bright combustions”, Cagol tells me on the occasion of his newest work. “Burning gases and reflections of photons bounced off shiny surfaces, which travel through time and space”.
Cagol strikes as somehow more energetic than most artists his age. His hair, a fervent, closely cropped blonde, matches his sporty yet business look. “My position is perhaps more shamanic and radical in the use of light than other artists”, he says. “Fire has represented the Anthropocene since the myth of Prometheus: we have combined matter and elements, from the fusion of metal to the fusion of the atom itself in an H-bomb. The AI robot is the plastic representation of anthropocentric ambition”.
Light-based art has always carried with it a religious pulse. James Turrell built temples to the sky, slicing open ceilings to let infinity leak in. Dan Flavin turned industrial tubing into minimalist icons, hollowing out the sacred and replacing it with the secular sublime. Cagol belongs to this lineage in form but not in spirit. If Turrell’s light was meant to illuminate inner consciousness, Cagol’s is a distress signal fired from a sinking ship. His combustions are neither meditative nor aestheticising — they’re frantic, ancient, and dangerously unstable. Think of Prometheus, not Apollo.
This isn’t new for Cagol, who has long trafficked in environmental dread and techno-anxieties. But introducing a humanoid robot into this circle of fire turns the work from eco-ritual into an unsettling tableau of future relations. If art once offered solace from the brute march of history, now it seems determined to meet the monster head-on, torch in hand.
And what of AI, this epoch’s great and terrible idol? From an art historical perspective, artificial intelligence isn’t just a tool; it’s a philosophical crisis. The question isn’t whether AI can make “good” art — it can, in the same way a factory can make fake and real Balenciaga sneakers. The problem lies in what it means to create when algorithms mine the entirety of human culture, stripping it for parts to feed machine learning models. The risk isn’t just plagiarism; it’s cultural homogeneity, a flattening of idiosyncrasy into an infinite feedback loop of midwit pastiche.
Cagol seems acutely aware of this, refusing to let the robot co-create. The humanoid in We Own the Futures isn’t an artist; it’s a ritual object, a silicon golem. It watches. It participates. But it doesn’t decide. There’s a defiance in this stance, a refusal to surrender authorship, even as AI threatens to subsume the role of artist, editor, and critic in a single codebase.
The larger problem is epistemic: AI functions through pattern recognition, meaning its creations can only ever be derivative. It’s the ultimate simulacrum generator, regurgitating the known while convincingly feigning novelty. Art, in its most vital form, is anti-pattern — a rupture, an error, a scream in the void. Cagol’s burning SOS signals precisely that: ugly, primitive, unmediated, a spectacle no algorithm would design because it resists optimisation.
And yet, a paradox looms. As AI infiltrates the cultural sphere, the line between human and machine creativity blurs. Cagol’s work gestures toward a future where the circle of trust between humans and their creations becomes a fatal embrace. Will artists hold the line as sovereign agents of disorder, or will they become curators of machine hallucinations, shuffling styles like stock portfolios?
As Walter Benjamin warned in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), the danger lies not in the loss of the artwork’s aura, but in its politicisation under regimes of control. AI isn’t merely a tool; it’s a medium of power, capable of recoding desire, memory, and meaning.
“The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. Chemical analyses of the patina of a bronze can help to establish this, as does the proof that a given manuscript of the Middle Ages stems from an archive of the fifteenth century. The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical—and, of course, not only technical—reproducibility. Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis à vis technical reproduction”. — Walter Benjamin
And in this charged tableau, Benjamin’s old warning hums in the background like a tinnitus whine. “The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity”. Cagol’s flames are original because they can’t be copied without risk. The robot can record, replicate, even simulate this performance — but it cannot experience the heat on its face, the primitive terror of combustion, the ancient muscle memory of torch-bearing revolt.
This is the core paradox We Own the Futures presents: as AI threatens to flatten culture into a frictionless loop of generated pastiche, the artist reaches for fire — the original medium of revolt, of magic, of murder. Cagol’s performance thus refuses to surrender to the fellatio of polite, algorithmically generated aesthetics. There, in situ, fire remains a defiant anti-medium to AI-generated slop.
