In classical culture, the epitaph was a commemorative speech performed by an orator in honour of war heroes. In modern poetry instead, it started to acquire the shape of a short text used as a sepulchral description.
Thus, it became an actual literary form used not only by the loved ones of the departed but also by artists, intellectuals and poets to glorify what was done during the life of the one that passed away. Starting for the peculiarities of this literary form and its uses in Western culture, Numero Cromatico designed Epitaphs for the human artist, namely an installation that generates epitaphs in honour of the human artist as we used to know and imagined him/her to be up until today but that, at the same time, states his/her death, his/her end. The viewer finds him/herself in front of an interactive grave that generates, in specific time frames, new texts through which the machine symbolically honours the human artist. The goal is that of putting the viewer in an alienating and ambiguous condition: at the time of reading, the author, the subject and the “non-human” nature of the texts are unknown and become comprehensible only by reading the title of the artwork and the synopsis. Specifically, one of the most advanced technologies in the field of AI, namely a text generator based on Artificial Neural Networks, was designed in collaboration with the Università di Verona.