Starting in 2019, Pistoletto is producing a series of new works, for which he coined the term “meta-work,” characterized by the use of new technologies such as QR code and Artificial Intelligence.
The QR code is first used by Pistoletto in 2019 in the installations Visible and The Art of Demopraxy, presented at Bienalsur in Buenos Aires. Subsequently, the QR code is used in some Mirror Paintings, in which it inserts, within the dialectic between the fixed image of photographic nature and the changing reflected images produced on its surface, an additional mnemonic element, consisting of archival materials on Pistoletto's artistic production that QR codes provide access to.
In QR code Possession - Selfportrait, for example, twelve QR codes are imprinted on the image of the artist's body like tattoos, which link to films or texts related to certain milestones in his research.
QR Code Possession - The Formula of Creation Meetings, first exhibited at Beijing's Continua Gallery in November 2023, consists of twenty colorful QR codes painted on as many large canvases, resembling a series of abstract paintings, which link to video recordings of meetings during which Pistoletto discussed his book The Formula of Creation (2022) along with leading exponents from the worlds of art, politics, science and religion during 2023. A similar work is QR Code Possession – L’espace et le temps, four colorful QR codes printed on large canvases, displayed on the occasion of his solo exhibition at the Continua Gallery in Paris in 2024, each of which links to one of the four meetings between Pistoletto and four curators and art historians held on the first four days of the exhibition.
In 2019 Pistoletto also begins to engage with artificial intelligence in his work. In this year he creates two works, both entitled I am the Robot- The Robot is Me. The first is a pencil drawing in which the title of the work is inscribed on the features of his face, and the second is a video installation placed in Cittadellarte's exhibition hall dedicated to Pistoletto's research on self-portraiture in the second half of the 1950s. The installation presents the blurred figure of the artist's body, seen as if through a screen, on which he seems to rest and move his hands, while reflecting on artificial intelligence, seen as a potential technological extension of the Mirror Painting. In the same year Pistoletto made an interactive installation, Selfie Robot, also exhibited at Cittadellarte, in which the viewer is invited to undergo a interview with a robot.
In the work QR Code Possession - Generative AI, shown for the first time in one of his solo exhibitions at the Castello di Rivoli in 2023, Pistoletto explores the potential of artificial intelligence, considered as a large mirror reflecting the collective knowledge accumulated and made available by Internet. Six large colored QR codes printed on canvas link in this case to answers formulated by an artificial intelligence program to six questions posed by the artist about as many works or aspects of his work. A dialogue between the artist and artificial intelligence that will continue in a group of five other similar works presented in his exhibition at the Tanit Gallery in Munich in 2025.