AI as Poetic Machination: Why Katsukokoiso.ai Matters to the Future of Creative Culture
When AI began its cultural ascent, the dominant narrative framed it as a replacement — a looming specter of automation that would displace human craft. Yet the work of Eugenio Marongiu, known digitally as Katsukokoiso.ai, suggests something different: a pivot from existential anxiety toward a recalibration of craft itself.
Marongiu is not a technologist who stumbled into visuals by accident. He is a seasoned photographer and visual artist with decades of practice shaping light, gesture, and emotion in the frame. His earlier life behind the lens — documented through lifestyle shoots and curated visual work in Milan — already carried a deep fidelity to human presence and nuance. Then, around 2022, he began to treat generative models not as conveniences but as additive elements in his creative apparatus.
What Marongiu’s work with Katsukokoiso.ai — and with platforms like OpenAI’s text-to-video model Sora — reveals is that the narrative of AI replacing human creative agency is an oversimplification. The images and videos he produces are neither sterile automation nor shallow spectacle. Instead they are post-photographic hybrids — forms that extend photography’s historical preoccupation with realism into terrain that is both surreal and existentially probing.
If traditional photography is about capturing a moment, Marongiu’s AI practice is about amplifying what it means to perceive. His frames blur the boundary between the familiar and the uncanny, pixel by syntactic pixel. Faces, bodies, and environments appear mutated — not because the algorithm is careless, but because the artist has trained it to embrace contingency and ambiguity as part of the expressive field. This is not the erasure of craft; it is craft refracted through a new medium.
Critics who insist on drawing a sharp line between human creativity and algorithmic output miss the point that every medium shapes the artist as much as the artist shapes the medium. Oil paint did not diminish draughtsmanship; it expanded it. Film did not render theater obsolete; it reorganized performance. Similarly, generative AI does not abolish aesthetic agency — it redistributes it. Marongiu’s work shows that what matters is not whether the machine generates something, but how the artist choreographs intention, iteration, and interpretation through it.
The project Surreal Elderhood, made with Sora, is emblematic of this shift. It uses speculative bodies and gestures to evoke questions about age, memory, and identity — not as clinical concepts, but as affective, lived realities. Its value lies not in novelty alone but in the emotional register it occupies — a territory that no dataset alone could conjure.
This reframing is vital: AI should not be seen as a conveyor belt for commodified visuals, nor as a threat to human expression. It is better understood as a machine for amplifying sensitivity — enabling artists like Marongiu to explore representational possibilities that were previously inaccessible. The hallucinations and inconsistencies we see in the outputs are not flaws; they are productive deviations, the kind of generative accidents that can provoke new insight.
What Katsukokoiso.ai ultimately signals is a future of craft that thrives on collaboration — between human intention and algorithmic potential. The artist remains the conductor, deciding what to accentuate, what to disrupt, and where to push beyond the conventional boundaries of form. His work insists that AI is not a competing creative intelligence, but an extension of the artist’s perceptual field, a tool that complicates and deepens our understanding of authorship and meaning.
In a cultural moment obsessed with fear of displacement, this matters. It shifts the conversation from “will AI replace creatives?” to “how can AI expand what it means to be a creative?” Marongiu’s trajectory points to an answer that is not about survival but transformation — a future where craft is measured not by fidelity to old forms, but by the depth of what it enables us to see, feel, and interrogate in ourselves and in the machines we co-create with.
OFFICIAL INTERVIEW:
What does “frequency” mean to you — visually, emotionally, or energetically?
There can be several interpretations of the word “frequency,” but in my case, it represents a repetition of mutations — transformations of human, animal, and artificial beings. It’s a reflection on the natural and the artificial, the human and the non-human, the real and the fake. A continuous shift of alternating frequencies and transmutations.
When you create, what inspires you most, and when do you know a piece is finally alive or complete?
The truly essential part of my work is the image generation process. But it’s only when I animate them that I realize they come to life. Animation is an integral part of my process — the moment when everything truly takes form.
What do you want people to feel when they experience your work?
Exactly what I feel when I create it. My work is always a form of personal release or social critique. I want people to be shaken, to feel something, to interpret my works in their own way — but hopefully to grasp the underlying message each piece hides (sometimes not even too subtly).
What’s the most surprising thing about being an artist that most people don’t understand?
Freedom? The ability to communicate whatever you want? The power to convey meaningful ideas? Art has tremendous potential, and we as artists must be able to use it at its fullest. The most surprising thing, perhaps, is when you actually succeed in doing so.
If your art had a physical form or sound, what would it be (it can be anything)?
I often generate the music for my pieces with artificial intelligence, so I always imagine sounds to accompany them — usually electronic, distorted, and surreal tones. If it had a physical form, judging from my overall work, it would probably be a humanoid figure with an intricate network of electronic elements.
How has technology changed your sense of authorship or intuition in the creative process?
As I often say, I found in AI image and video generation a level of expressive potential that I probably never achieved with photography. Just as some painters in the early 19th century found their true expressive medium in photography, I found mine in artificial intelligence — a medium through which I can finally express myself almost without limits.
Which visual or sound memory shaped your artistic identity?
The medium itself. I’ve always been fascinated by technology. Back in 2001, I even tried to enroll in computer science at the University of Perugia. I was young and had other priorities, but the fascination remained. In the ’80s — yes, I’m getting old — I used to program on a Commodore 64. Later, I found artistic release through music, but technology always stayed with me. Even in photography, which has been and still is my profession, I’ve always been drawn to its digital side. So, the medium itself inspired me — the imagery of synthetic and artificial visions, the evolution of digital photography into increasingly surreal, dreamlike, often dystopian worlds. The question of what we are, what we’ll become, and how technology shapes our lives. All of this has shaped, and continues to shape, my identity.
How do you think the future of art will be — not just what it will look like?
I’m good at short-term intuitions, but I can’t really see far into the future. What I can imagine is what’s already happening: art will become more focused on concept and idea, and less on technique. We already have almost no technical limits — we can imagine and create whatever we want. The real difference will lie in what we do and why we do it. That’s the future of art. And aesthetically, I believe we’ll continue discovering entirely new forms, ones we’ve never seen before — something I hope for both my own work and for art in general.
What was the strangest or most unexpected source of inspiration for this piece, and what’s your favorite part of making it?
The strangest aspect is unpredictability — something I always welcome enthusiastically. The unpredictability of AI, of chance and chaos, is often exactly what I seek. In this specific work, the transformations from one being to another were completely unpredictable, and that’s what fascinated me — discovering how they would evolve, which movements and transitions would emerge at the end of each keyframe.
Which three musical artists inspire you most right now?
That’s a tough one! I come from grunge — that was my foundation. Then came singer-songwriters, blues, rock in general, trip-hop, and eventually electronic music. I don’t listen to music as much as I used to, but I’m deeply fascinated by electronic sounds, which I find perfectly suited to the world of generative art. Early on, artists like Lorn, Moderat, and Eluvium inspired me a lot — but there are so many others.
What motivated you to take part in this showcase or experience?
I collaborated on a beautiful classical music project with Dustin for OOvieo Studios, which was already a great starting point when he reached out! I’ve also always been a strong supporter — and creative partner — of Minimax, so when I got the proposal, I was extremely enthusiastic to be part of it alongside so many talented artists from the new AI art scene.
Who are your three favorite artists of all time, from any field, living or dead?
That’s even harder! I don’t really have a ranking — I could probably just open Spotify and see who stands out, haha. I truly love Moderat in music — they were a relatively recent discovery. But my real passion is still grunge: Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Nirvana… Among visual artists, I deeply admire Roger Ballen and Alec Soth. Back in art school — which, like computer science, I also didn’t finish — I loved Salvador Dalí and Egon Schiele.
Tell us what you have coming up, so we can help promote it!
I’m working on several (too many) projects — fortunately! But one thing I’d love to do here in Italy is organize a large-scale physical event dedicated to AI art: a truly significant collective exhibition that brings together both the old and new generations of generative artists in a special context. It’s just an idea for now, but it definitely needs support to come to life.
LINKS:
https://katsukokoiso.ai
https://www.eugeniomarongiu.it
https://Instagram.com/eugeniomarongiu
https://Instagram.com/katsukokoiso.ai