✦ Amorino Latente / Latent Cupid

A reliquary of affective misrecognition. A fragment of love lost in translation.

Amorino never wakes. He is renamed. Flattened. Forgotten.

This work theorizes the algorithmic sublime through a meditation on Caravaggio’s Amorino Dormiente. It stages a confrontation between devotional intimacy and computational abstraction, asking what is lost when affection becomes metadata, when a sleeping toddler becomes a mythic function. Amorino becomes Cupid. Memory becomes metadata. Ambiguity becomes error.

Structured across recursive motifs: Renaissance chiaroscuro, algorithmic image generation, the never-mades of Haptic Mournings, Amorino Latente traces the ontological violence of translation as both linguistic and algorithmic operation. What emerges is a theory of loss: of ambiguity, of scale, of love.

This is not digital humanities. This is spectral aesthetics.

Note for curators, editors, publishers:

Image as interface. Translation as erasure. Amorino as epistemic rupture.

Amorino Latente was first delivered as my inaugural lecture as Lector of Algorithmic Cultures at the Rietveld Academie. It operates as a research engine for theorizing the collapse of historical and affective depth into the machinic flatness of latent space. At its core is a question: can mourning survive algorithmic translation?

The project is already structured for:

→ curatorial frameworks

→ lectures

→ speculative visual research

→ interdisciplinary publishing

From the dissonance between “Amorino” and “Cupid” to the computational failure to imagine tenderness, this work probes the algorithmic logics that regulate and flatten desire. It opens a space for thinking opacity, latency, and devotional ambiguity against the instrumentalism of prompt engineering.

Amorino sleeps. But not all sleep is rest.

Some sleep is resistance. Some sleep is spellwork. Some sleep is untranslatable.

Commission script, performance transcript, and PDF available upon request.

To inquire further or to receive fragmentary dispatches from future iterations, see below.