On October 10th, on the NABA campus, the fifth AI Creative Hackathon took place, an enthusiastic event where creatives and professionals engaged with the theme “Mapping the work we desire”. Collaborating with AIDP, and with the support of Lenovo, NABA, Futura AI Academy, Mediaplus Italia and Plan.Net Italia, the Hackathon saw the emergence of works that explore the combination of technology and creativity, as well as a profound connection between AI and the future of work.
We tell you about the 3 winning works and try to provide a useful reinterpretation to imagine how AI can impact the working world of the future.
1st Place
“Mind Labor”
by Pietro Vincenti
Pietro Vincenti creates a cartography of human imagination at work, a cartography that speaks of effort, intuition, freedom and slavery. The work guides us through an evolution where matter becomes thought and gesture transforms into desire. If the future of work no longer had tools or physical boundaries, what would remain? This work suggests an answer: the ability to build collective meaning.
What does it mean for an organization to “map” its inner territory? And what if the real work, tomorrow, were to design these maps?
To deepen
- Refik Anadol: Turkish-American artist known for his data sculptures and immersive installations. Similar to the winning work, Anadol uses artificial intelligence to transform vast archives of data (images, texts, sounds) into abstract and poetic visualizations. His research explores collective memory and the possibility of “dreaming” for machines, offering a fascinating parallel with the idea of work that becomes pure mental and visual processing.
- Sougwen Chung: Sino-Canadian artist and researcher, she is considered a pioneer in human-machine interaction. Her works, often performances, see her drawing together with a robotic arm that has learned to imitate her style. This dialogue between human gesture and its robotic extension directly recalls the theme of the evolution of work “tools”, raising questions about the boundary between authorship, collaboration and the very nature of the creative act in the age of AI.
2nd Place
“The Map of My Thoughts”
by Alessio Hong
We witness the birth of a self-portrait made of data. Years of professional thoughts, once invisible, aggregate into a constellation that reveals the intimate geography of a mind at work. The work is an invitation to consider our professional archives not as passive repositories, but as the source code of our identity and our unexpressed potential. What would we see if we pointed a telescope at ourselves?
Contemporary Artists to Deepen
- Nicholas Felton: American designer and artist, he is a pioneer of personal quantification. For over a decade he has published the “Feltron Annual Reports”, meticulous visualizations of data on his daily life. His work is the most direct and celebrated example of how a personal archive can be transformed into a visual narrative, offering a methodological and conceptual parallel to Hong’s work.
- Julie Mehretu: Ethiopian-American artist whose large-format canvases are complex stratifications of maps, architectural diagrams and abstract signs. Her “cartographic” approach to representing social, historical and personal systems in a dynamic and multi-level way offers an aesthetic and conceptual affinity. Just as Hong maps an inner territory, Mehretu maps the invisible forces that shape our collective geographies.
Audience Award
“Labyrinth of Possibilities”
by Francesco Tagliabue
This interactive experience transforms career into a philosophical labyrinth. It doesn’t offer answers, but crossroads; not a map, but the freedom to get lost in order to find oneself again. It is an invitation to explore professional paths not as linear trails to be optimized, but as inner spaces to inhabit.
What if the role of organizations were no longer to trace careers, but to provide compasses to navigate complexity? What would we discover if we allowed our people to explore their own labyrinth?
To deepen
- Ian Cheng: Ian Cheng creates “live simulations”: autonomous virtual worlds that evolve without an end or predetermined control, like video games that play themselves. His research uses technology to create works that behave like living organisms, exploring themes such as consciousness, adaptation and the unpredictability of complex systems.
- Lynn Hershman Leeson: She is a pioneering figure in interactive art, whose work has investigated the relationship between human identity and technology for decades. Her contribution is fundamental because, since the 1980s, she has created works in which the viewer is no longer passive, but is called upon to make choices that modify the course of the narrative. Her research explores how identity can be fluid, multiple and constantly negotiated through interaction.
- Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: Artist who uses video game technology and digital archives to build immersive and narrative experiences. Her work is extremely interesting because it positions the viewer as an active participant, whose decisions and movements within the work determine its access and understanding. Her creations are powerful journeys that require awareness and responsibility from those who traverse them.