Promptitude

In Milan’s MEET – Digital Culture Center, Jean-Michel Jarre stakes a daring claim: what if the whisper of a prompt could stand alongside melody, as poetry becomes the seed of vision? Promptitude is his first formal foray into the visual arts, open through 28 September 2025, inviting us into a domain where human intention and machine generation entwine.

Jarre, already known globally for Oxygène (1976) and his pioneering electronic soundscapes, brings to Promptitude something new: a precise sensibility towards the minimal, the liminal. Here, the “prompt” is no longer simply a tool — it is rendered into a haiku, an instruction ritual, a compact invocation. These whispered textual sparks are set loose upon artificial intelligence, which responds not with mere replication but with hybrid portraits: beings suspended between organic skin and algorithmic geometry, oscillating between what is human and what is mechanical.

But Jarre does not settle for a one-way gesture. The show reveals itself as a creative loop: first, Jarre composes and refines his prompts until the visual creatures he envisions emerge. Then, intriguingly, he reverses the process — the image becomes prompt anew, as if the machine, gazing back at its own generation, asks: “Who are you that commands me?” The titles accompanying each work, sometimes poetic, sometimes absurd, are born at this threshold — the product of machine interpretation, human intention, and everything in between.

In the gallery space, these figures live in a realm of suspended time — neither fixed narrative nor pure abstraction. Walls, light, scale, and shadow all conspire to heighten their presence. And always there is EŌN: Jarre’s generative soundscape that fills the room, evolving endlessly, never repeating itself. As one experiences Promptitude, sound becomes texture, image becomes frame, and the sum is a living organism of senses

On this stage, Jarre romanticizes the technology: not in glowing nostalgia, but in the way the word “romance” suggests mystery, longing, and surprise. He sketches a portrait of AI not as a threat or master, but as collaborator — one shaped by the discipline of our prompts and our patience. The speed of the machine, the precision of computation, the unpredictability of generative emergence — these are counterpoints to the slower cadence of the human mind, the sculpting of language, the aspiration to beauty.

Promptitude is more than exhibition: it is proposition. What is creativity when algorithms perform tasks once reserved for human hands? What is meaning when intention is partly encoded, partly surrendered? Jarre does not offer answers so much as expansions — space to dwell, to wonder, to confront our own role in the shaping of digital being. And as long as the human voice—brief, lyrical, exact—is present at the inception, then perhaps art remains ours after all.

© Charlotte Madeleine Castelli | All rights reserved