Code and Trope: The Challenge of Artificial Intelligence in the Arts

VI. The Digital Age: The 2026 Update (AI, Streaming, and the Synthesis of Reality)

The sections that precede this update were written in 1995, documenting the ontological fracture of a still predominantly analogue era. Re-reading them thirty years later, what strikes most forcefully is not what they failed to anticipate but what they already understood: that the history of art is the history of the Code/Trope dialectic under technological pressure.

Photography forced painting to reinvent itself in abstraction; film established its closest connection with the novel, forcing prose to celebrate the subtle, complex ironies of language; and theatre radicalised its irreducible asset of “liveness” through Brecht and Artaud. In each case, the pattern was identical: the technology took the Code; the art deepened the Trope. Artificial Intelligence represents the Total Instance of this same pattern – with the decisive difference that it masters the Code of all media simultaneously. Unlike previous shifts, where art could retreat into a new domain, there is today no comparable domain of retreat remaining.

The promised “paradigm shift” – the expectation that automation would liberate the human worker toward “creative and quality work” – has encountered a fundamental structural impasse. Far from a liberation of agency, the current landscape suggests a state of information overload where the human is displaced from the intentional centre of meaning. This represents a devaluation of the quest: a state where semantic agency is sacrificed to the machine’s statistical regularity.

This is not merely a modern phenomenon of resolution or technical fracture; it is an ontological rupture. The machine “perceives” this reality through correlation – a horizontal navigation of the Syntagm. It can process millions of datasets with statistical precision, yet it remains blind to the causal why that anchors a fact in human experience. When there is no longer a specific medium into which the worker can retreat, the conflict shifts from the where to the how. The human response to this total instance resides in the reassertion of the Trope as a sovereign act: the intentional agency that deviates from the Code to save the Meaning.

To navigate this landscape, three conceptual tools structure the analysis that follows: the Code, the system of semiotic rules and statistical regularity that the algorithm navigates; the Trope, the intentional human anomaly – the causal infraction through which the dignity of labour is reasserted; and the Syntagm, the structured sequences where the conflict between statistical regularity and sovereign human deviation is most concretely enacted. In this “Digital Desert,” the dignity of human labour is no longer defined by the ability to process the Code, but by the capacity to perform the infraction.

6.1 The Total Instance: From Indexical Record to Algorithmic Mosaic

Umberto Eco, in his later essays and interviews on the media landscape (2017), building on Zygmunt Bauman’s (2000) concept of liquid modernity, diagnosed the contemporary mediascape as a state of permanent semiotic noise – a clamour of the present in which digital culture severs the connection between past and future, reducing human experience to an eternal present of immediate, unfiltered consumption. For Eco, this clamour operates on three levels simultaneously: it destroys memory, preventing information from being critically processed before it is displaced by the next stimulus; it levels all voices, dissolving the distinctions between expertise and ignorance on which meaningful communication depends; and it impoverishes language itself, replacing reasoned analysis with emotive, immediate reaction that prevents individuals from understanding their own condition. The result is a culture that systematically prioritises the statistically probable over the singular: the Code over the Trope.

The economic mechanism producing and sustaining this cultural condition is precisely what Mathias Binswanger (2024) identifies in his analysis of algorithmic capitalism. As algorithms increasingly make economically relevant decisions in place of humans, individuals and organisations progressively lose their autonomy and become dependent on systems they can no longer comprehend or control. This process decouples the economy from the human: it raises productivity while simultaneously generating an intensifying bureaucracy of conformist pressure – a system of algorithmic surveillance and compliance that trains citizens to become what Binswanger calls “normalized permanent consumers.” This paradox sharpens the diagnosis further: as data volume grows faster than algorithmic processing capacity, the system responds not with liberation but with intensification – more surveillance, more compliance, more optimisation – making this condition structurally self-perpetuating.

In the creative industries, this manifests as the algorithmic curation of taste, the SEO optimisation of meaning, and the platform-driven standardisation of form: the systematic replacement of the sovereign creative act with the statistically validated content object. This creates a ‘new baroque’ of digital excess, where the sheer volume of Code risks suffocating the singular voice – the economic architecture of the Digital Desert, here understood as the landscape of infinite algorithmic reproduction in which the sovereign Trope becomes the only remaining act of resistance. Eco diagnosed the cultural symptom; Binswanger identifies the economic machinery producing it.

On the aesthetic level, Manovich (2018) had already identified the defining consequence of AI adoption: the progressive automation of aesthetic decisions – from the algorithmic curation of what we see, to the platform-driven standardisation of what we create. What AI produces, Manovich observes, are works of statistical pattern without direct reference to the human world – the Code without the Trope. Where Binswanger identifies the economic machinery of this condition, Manovich maps its aesthetic territory: a cultural landscape in which the statistically probable systematically displaces the sovereignly singular. Together, all three define the landscape in which the Trope must now assert itself.

In this context, the Trope functions as the definitive ‘Bustina di Minerva’ – the micro-insight (Eco, 2000) – that sovereign boundary where human intentionality is reasserted against systemic entropy: the intentional syncopation that breaks the repetitive clamour of the machine, reclaiming a space for meaning that algorithmic processes, by their ontological nature, cannot generate.

The Théâtre D’Opéra Spatial case makes the stakes of this condition legally and semiotically precise. In 2022, Jason M. Allen submitted an AI-generated image to the Colorado State Fair fine arts competition and won. When he subsequently applied for copyright registration, the U.S. Copyright Office denied it – not once but twice (U.S. Copyright Office, 2023). Despite 624 prompts and more than 900 iterative refinements, the Office ruled that numerical iteration alone cannot constitute human authorship: the machine produces a ‘codified artefact’ (Major, 2025) without subjective agency. This ruling is not merely a legal boundary – it is a semiotic one. It establishes that the Trope cannot be generated by iteration. The machine mastered the Code completely, produced something visually remarkable, and still could not produce the sovereign act. As Binswanger (2024) argues, when human labour is reduced to system-conforming digital processes, creativity and agency become increasingly constrained by bureaucratic and algorithmic logics – precisely the condition the Allen case exposes. When creation is reduced to prompt curation, the unique, non-linear intentionality of the human worker – the sovereign act – is not merely diminished. It is rendered legally invisible.

If the first century of cinema was defined by the photochemical nature of film – the physical, indexical bond between the object captured and its image – the advent of digital represented an ontological fracture not unlike that caused by the invention of photography itself. With digitisation, the image ceased to be a trace of light imprinted on matter and became a mosaic of data: an infinitely manipulable numerical sequence subject to algorithmic extraction and the procedural flattening of individual authorship. Film, which once based its authority on its ability to record reality, now inhabits a territory where the distinction between recording and creation “from scratch” has been substantially erased.

This fracture is not merely a modern phenomenon of resolution, but a long-standing tension between mechanical recording and human subjectivity. Generative AI now represents the ‘Total Instance’ of the Code: it has finally achieved the perfect statistical synthesis of the past, yet it remains ontologically incapable of generating the non-linear intentionality of the present. It produces a static, algorithmic mosaic that lacks the unique, embodied agency of the human worker. The machine has mastered the ‘How’ of the sign but remains fundamentally blind to the ‘Why’ of the Trope.

In this new landscape, the argument embedded in Section IV has been spectacularly vindicated. The claim made in 1995 – that only the television serial could reproduce the essential character of the great novel, its duration – has been confirmed by the rise of streaming. Works such as The Sopranos demonstrated that only digital temporal dilation could accommodate the density of codes that once belonged exclusively to literature, a structural logic subsequently consolidated by the platform distribution models of Netflix and the premium cable infrastructure of HBO, which together transformed serialisation from a formal possibility into the dominant architecture of global narrative production.

On the visual level, Computer Generated Imagery has paradoxically brought cinema closer to painting. If photography freed painters from the constraints of mimesis, digital has freed filmmakers from the constraints of physical reality. With the advent of deepfakes, contemporary cinema has become a hybrid – a hyperrealist pictorial art in motion, where the truth of the image no longer resides in its optical origin but in the computing power of the algorithm. The ontological shift was embodied first by the Wachowski sisters’ The Matrix (1999), which represented physical reality as pure, manipulable code, demonstrating that digital images can simulate mental architectures and extreme subjectivity with a precision once the prerogative of prose alone.

Christopher Nolan dedicated the following twenty years to the manipulation of time and memory: the backward architectures of Memento (2000), the dreamlike levels of Inception (2010), the radical simultaneity of Dunkirk (2017), the physical inversion of Tenet (2020). Editing became a tool to replicate the non-linear mechanisms of the unconscious. The evolution culminates in the dominant theme of the 2020s – the Multiverse – where cinema no longer tells one story at a time but visualises infinite simultaneous possibilities, achieving in moving images a fragmentation of identity and simultaneity of consciousness that modernist literature had previously claimed as its exclusive domain.

This revolution also took the theories of Brecht and Artaud to their ultimate consequence. Today’s cinema – Avatar (2009), the Marvel universe, The Mandalorian (Favreau, 2019) – is built within graphics engines like Unreal Engine. The virtual camera can make impossible movements, enter anywhere, fly seamlessly. The modern viewer, accustomed to virtual worlds, no longer perceives the film as a static surface to observe but as a space to enter – realising the “dream of total immersion” that both Artaud and Brecht, from opposite directions, had theorised.

Finally, the emergence of generative AI – Sora, MidJourney, and DALL-E – completes the historical arc in the relationship between word and image. With text-to-video technology, language, the Code of the novel, becomes the direct tool for generating the image, the Code of the film. By writing a prompt, the author evokes complex visions without manual filming or drawing. The novel’s typical celebration of language paradoxically becomes the primary driver of visual creation – sanctioning the triumph of algorithmic synthesis over the indexical connection to reality, and reflecting the broader shift from traditional software code to natural-language prompt as the primary operational interface of generative systems.

Unlike photography, which challenged painting alone, or film, which challenged the novel and theatre in succession, AI appears to master the Code of every art form simultaneously – image, text, music, narrative, film. No comparable domain of retreat remains available to the displaced art. What we are witnessing is the colonization of the ‘Trope’ by the ‘Code’, where AI moves from a tool of assistance to a tool of replacement. The only thing that cannot be automated is the generation of the new Trope itself. In an era of infinite, low-cost algorithmic synthesis and total cognitive automation (Ford, 2021), the only remaining source of market scarcity – and thus of political and economic leverage for the creative worker, and particularly within the framework of European creative sovereignty – is the intentionality of the Trope. This shift reflects the broader autonomisation of capitalism described by Binswanger (2024): when algorithmic steering dominates production at every level, the sovereign creative act becomes the scarce resource, and the Trope becomes its currency.

6.2 Biosemiotic Boundaries: Signals (The Machine) vs. Natural Conventions (The Human)

To define this intentionality, we must recognise the fundamental biosemiotic boundary of the machine. This is not a matter of computational power but of ontological category – a difference in the very nature of being. Within the framework of Code Biology (Barbieri, 2015; Marcus & Davis, 2019), living systems are governed by biological codes that act not merely as mechanistic causal relations but as ‘natural conventions’ – shared agreements of meaning stabilised through embodied experience over time (Major, 2025). This is the ontological gap: AI can simulate the mathematical signals of a narrative, but it cannot participate in the human convention of meaning. It remains semantically blind, executing the Code without ever knowing the truth of the story.

In this context, the Syntagm – the concrete, combinatory sequence of signs where meaning is actively constructed – becomes the primary battleground where the statistical regularity of the Code and the intentional anomaly of the Trope collide. The machine navigates the Syntagm: it predicts the next step in the horizontal chain with statistical precision. What it cannot perform is the Paradigmatic act – the vertical, sovereign selection of the improbable over the probable: the choice that is not optimisation but infraction. With the advent of generative technologies, we witness a historical inversion: the linguistic prompt now functions as the direct generative engine for the image, effectively automating the Code of the visual through the celebration of language. In Major’s terms, this is the process of amodal completion – the unique human capacity to reassemble fragmented experience into a structured, dignified whole even when conscious frameworks collapse. While AI can replicate the structural homology of archetypes as ‘codified artefacts’ (Major, 2025), it lacks the subjective agency to perform the ‘shamanic deviation’ – that is, the intentional break from statistically predicted pathways – the agentic infraction that breaks the Code to save the meaning.

In the age of AI, this capacity for deviation becomes the ultimate act of resistance against what Simone Weil identified as “Machinism” – the automated force that uproots human agency through calculable abstraction (Weil, 1949). While the machine follows a pre-calculated Path of statistical probability, producing only the dead labour of a simulacrum, the human worker engages in ‘Agentic Traversal’: a search for identity and meaning that requires the shamanic deviation to navigate the unknown. In this context, the spiritual dimension of labour is not intended as religious but as sinnstiftend – meaning-constituting: the capacity for Attention to transform a mechanical task into a human Trope.

For Weil, Attention is not mere concentration but a form of receptivity – the willingness to be genuinely changed by what one encounters in the process of making. It is precisely this capacity that generates the Trope. The machine cannot have it because it cannot be present. It processes. It does not attend. And without Attention, there is no sovereign deviation – only the statistical average. This constitutes the biosemiotic boundary: not a romantic defence of human creativity, but an ontological distinction between the mechanical signals of the algorithm and the natural conventions of the human Trope. The Trope is the natural convention that creates a bounded, intentional space of meaning – whether within the physical Arizona desert or the “Digital Desert” of AI.

 6.3 The Quest and the Digital Arcology: The Human Response

It is precisely here that the final, decisive challenge for human art unfolds.

If the machine’s defining limitation is its inability to attend, the human worker’s defining resource is precisely the opposite: the capacity for the Quest – the non-linear, intentional, embodied journey through unknown territory that cannot be pre-calculated. This concept was established in the author’s research at the University of Florence (Travels Throughout the American Continent in Search of Identity, Carlucci, 1999) and refined in subsequent work (Carlucci, 2014; 2025a; 2025b). The dignity of human labour resides in the enactment of the Quest: a search for meaning that requires the shamanic deviation to navigate the unknown. Whether analysing the mythic structures of Beowulf as an archetype of the Quest (Carlucci, 2025a) or applying that framework to the strategic demands of the AI age (Carlucci, 2025b), true labour is not the soulless processing of a pre-defined sequence, but the intentional act of synthesising the “Road” of lived experience into a meaningful pattern.

The physical manifestation of this logic was already present in the author’s 1996 field research at Arcosanti, Paolo Soleri’s experimental community in the Arizona desert – an experience later synthesised in A Step Inside This City of the Future (Carlucci, 2024). Conceived as a living laboratory for Soleri’s concept of Arcology – the fusion of architecture and ecology to resist the entropic sprawl of industrial expansion – Arcosanti was built on a precise principle: that human meaning requires a self-sufficient oasis, a bounded space of intentional order constructed deliberately against the surrounding desert of standardisation. Just as Soleri used compact city design to rethink urbanisation according to the laws of nature – creating an oasis of human meaning within the Arizona desert – the agentic infractions of the contemporary creative worker serve as a form of ‘digital arcology’.

In 2026, this creative worker faces an equivalent desert – the Digital Desert of AI-generated content, algorithmically optimised and infinitely reproducible at negligible marginal cost, sustained by the conformist economic machinery that Binswanger identifies as the structural condition of algorithmic capitalism. In a semiotic transposition of Soleri’s principle, the response is ‘digital arcology’: the deliberate construction of a self-sufficient space of meaning grounded in lived origin rather than algorithmic validation. By refusing the metrics of engagement and SEO rankings, by insisting that the narrative be driven by the Trope rather than the statistical average, the worker achieves Semiotic Autarky – a state in which human labour sustains its own signs without requiring external algorithmic recognition. By constructing this ‘Fortress of the Trope’, the worker reclaims the means of semiotic production, grounding meaning in a lived origin that Algorithmic Capital can calculate but never experience.

While Algorithmic Capital seeks to strip meaning into measurable data points, the ‘Fortress’ preserves the thick signs of human experience – those elements of the irrational and the particular that an algorithm can approximate but never fully appropriate. By ensuring their narrative is driven by the Trope – an agentic deviation that refuses the machine’s pattern – the worker maintains their Sovereignty. This is not a failure of communication but a success of insulation: the Trope acts as a biosemiotic barrier that makes the human lived origin invisible to the extractive eye of Algorithmic Capital, protecting the Quest as a non-linear, idiosyncratic journey irreducible to statistical prediction.

If the narrative is the journey – the Quest – then the Trope is the steering wheel.

6.4 The Political Economy of the Trope: Agentic Sovereignty and the Dignity of Labour

The challenge now encompasses not only cognitive and creative labour but also manual and operational forms of work, as AI increasingly substitutes and reshapes all aspects of production. The challenge for the future of the arts no longer lies in the technical ability to reproduce reality – a problem now solved by digital synthesis – but in the ability to generate new human Tropes in a sea of machine-generated content.

The history of art is a continuous negotiation between the Rule – the Code – and the Anomaly – the Trope. Each era of standardisation has produced its acts of sovereign deviation. The Impressionist refusal of the photographic line – those fragmented, vibrating brushstrokes that created light where the reproductive apparatus only saw stillness – was a Trope against the Code of photographic mimesis. The birth of Jazz – Thelonious Monk’s unexpected syncopations breaking the regular metronome – was a Trope against the standardisation of industrial rhythm. In both cases, the deviation was not a mere error but a fundamental ontological necessity: the assertion that human meaning cannot be reduced to its “statistical average.” What has changed in 2026 is not the nature of this negotiation but the power of the Rule, which has assumed its most structurally invasive form yet: the Algorithm.

This is the ‘Resistance of the Trope’: the point where statistically optimised code encounters the irreducible singularity of intentional meaning. The Trope is the result of unique cognitive and embodied labour – an out-of-system mode of thinking and acting that a machine, bound by the statistical average of its training data, can never replicate. AI does not replace consciousness; it elevates the challenge. The Algorithm, working solely on statistical probability, dominates the Syntagm and can replicate the Tropes of the past. But it lacks the Intention and Subjectivity necessary to create the new Trope: the anomaly that generates meaning. Safeguarding the anomaly is therefore not merely a romantic defence of creativity but a necessary strategy for the survival of a human-centric economy of work, encompassing both artistic and manual spheres.

This has direct policy consequences. The European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act (EU, 2024) constitutes, in part, an institutional recognition that human intentionality in creative production requires active protection from technocratic displacement. However, the practical enforcement of this recognition remains a site of intense friction, particularly for European creative industries navigating the regulatory and competitive pressures of the EU AI Act as it reaches its full implementation phase between 2026 and 2027. Following the impasse in the AI Omnibus trilogues in April 2026 – with negotiations over sectoral exemptions set to resume in May – the tension between regulatory simplification and human agentic capacity remains unresolved.

The proposed prohibition of ‘nudifier’ applications in these negotiations represents a crucial legal demarcation: it is the recognition that the Code must not be permitted to synthesize a false reality over the Trope of the human body. It is the protection of the ‘Indexical Trace’ against total algorithmic erasure. Yet, while this marks a clear victory for bodily integrity, the broader Omnibus covers a vast array of sectoral alignments – spanning medical devices and industrial machinery – where the risk of shrouding remains. By routing AI governance through these traditional sectoral rules rather than the AI Act’s horizontal safeguards, the law risks a deregulatory shift disguised as simplification. This effectively moves high-risk AI into a transparency-free Black Box, allowing the Code to act autonomously. In doing so, it strips away essential Human-in-the-Loop protections – specifically human interpretability and mandatory oversight – thereby bypassing the human’s capacity for agentic intervention.

This legal shrouding represents the institutionalization of the Silence of Erasure: the blindness of systems that do not register what they cannot measure. As established in Carlucci, von Forstner, and Pittella (2026), this results in a dangerous Institutional Silence – a deliberate regulatory withdrawal that allows algorithmic autonomy to operate beyond the reach of political responsibility. Such a transition from democracy to technocracy is, as Pittella warns, a shift towards autocracy that neutralizes freedom by eliminating the shadow zones required for the maturation of consensus. The Code remains by its ontological nature incapable of deciphering the semiotic density of silence. For Carlucci, it hears frequencies but is deaf to the history behind the pause, remaining unable to decode the Trope as a culturally encoded exception to the rule. It attempts to manage situations containing meanings that exceed the capacity of any computational system to capture – such as the diagnostic silences analyzed by von Forstner – replacing the human’s contextual synthesis with a purely probabilistic performance. Against this erasure stands the Silence of Meaning: the irreducible meta-level that gives language and labour its weight. With the August 2026 deadline fast-approaching, the Trope stands as the essential foundation for agentic dignity – the final territory of our freedom – preserving the power to remain unquantifiable under the world’s strictest AI governance framework.

European creative sovereignty is not nostalgia for a pre-digital past: it is a strategic economic necessity in a global market where Algorithmic Capital seeks to reduce meaning to measurable data points, and where the dignity of human labour depends on the preserved capacity for agentic and sovereign deviation – what Weil’s concept of Attention identifies as the irreducible condition of meaningful work (Weil, 1949). The sovereign act – the intentional infraction of the Rule, anchoring meaning in a verifiable human reality that the machine can calculate but never experience – serves as the demarcation line between the simulation and the real. This transition constitutes a fundamental political, economic, and societal necessity: to preserve and protect human artistic expression and the dignity of human labour from devaluation by technocratic governance.

Just as photography forced painting to reinvent itself in abstraction – liberating it from mimesis by compelling it toward the Trope – Artificial Intelligence will force all code-based arts, from image to writing to music, to seek an indefinable essence that pure data synthesis cannot replicate. This essence is the Trope: not reproduction, but significant infraction. Not the Path, but the Quest.

The Trope is that error, that imprecision, that illogical illumination manifested in Thelonious Monk’s unexpected syncopations – the rhythmic infraction in jazz – and in Renoir’s emotional brushstrokes – the infraction of pictorial mimesis. The future of art and of dignified human labour lies in that incalculable singularity that, from the early 20th century to the digital age, remains the only thing the machine cannot fully simulate.

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