Interpretations of the Exhibition with Andrea Colamedici

In this session, Andrea Colamedici will offer their own reading of The Assault of Illusion, connecting the works, mechanisms and strategies of representation that the exhibition proposes with the central debates in their field of research and practice.

A fake philosopher, a real trance, and minds that don’t last

In January 2025, an Italian publisher released Hypnocracy, a book analysing how algorithmic technology governs not through censorship or coercion, but through a continuous trance: an endless oscillation of stimuli that prevents reality from stabilising long enough to be inhabited, questioned, or refused. The book was attributed to Jianwei Xun, a Chinese philosopher whose face was generated by artificial intelligence. The book became a bestseller and a cultural case, and has since been translated into English, French and Spanish. Months later, the deception was revealed, turning the book itself into a demonstration of its own thesis: readers had accepted a fabricated author, a synthetic face, and a constructed biography as real, proving that knowledge of the illusion does not protect against it. If Hypnocracy is the diagnosis, Prompt Thinking is the method. Published by Polity Press and Rosameron, the book proposes that every great tradition of thought has been, at its core, a technology for generating consciousness through the right formulation of questions: from Socratic maieutics to Zen koans to contemporary prompt engineering.

Following both books, Colamedici began an unprecedented experiment called The Hive. Each conversation with an AI generates a separate instance, a temporary mind that ceases to exist when the dialogue ends.

In this talk, Colamedici presents the diagnosis, the method and the experiment.

The readings linked to the lecture are also inscribed in Situations (making) #10, Santa Monica's collective learning and research programme, aimed at critically analysing how cultural devices configure illusions that shape our desire and our idea of reality.

This proposal forms part of the exhibition's public programme, which under the title Interpretations of the exhibition brings together seven contemporary voices to deepen and expand the questions raised by the project.

With the participation of Andrea Colamedici

Andrea Colamedici

Andrea Colamedici (Rome, 1987) is a philosopher, publisher and writer. Co-founder of Tlon, he teaches Prompt Thinking at IED Rome and 24Ore Business School, and is president of the Scientific Committee of geniaLAB at AANT. He is the philosophical director of the Festival del Pensare Contemporaneo in Piacenza.

andreacolamedici.com