Code and Trope: The Challenge of Artificial Intelligence in the Arts. 30 Years of Intermedial Aesthetics: From the Rules of Semiotics to the Generative Algorithm

This article establishes a structural parallel between the 19th-century transition from painting to photography and the 21st-century transition from human creativity to Algorithmic Synthesis. Drawing on a semiotic framework first developed in 1995 at the University of Florence under the supervision of Professor Sandro Bernardi, it identifies the fundamental conflict between the Code – the statistical, predictable rule – and the Trope – the intentional human anomaly that generates new, unforeseen meaning. The article revisits the structure of film as a dialectic between grammatical regularity and poetic deviation, tracing the intermedial relationships between cinema, painting, the novel, and theatre. In each historical transition – photography challenging painting, film challenging theatre and the novel – the pattern was identical: reproductive technology assumed the Code; art deepened the Trope. Generative AI represents the Total Instance of this pattern, mastering the Code of all media simultaneously, leaving no comparable domain of retreat. The theoretical core argues that while AI masters the statistical probability of the Syntagm, it remains ontologically incapable of performing the Paradigmatic act – the sovereign selection of the improbable over the probable. Drawing on biosemiotic theory (Barbieri, 2015; Major, 2025), Umberto Eco's diagnosis of semiotic noise (2017), and Mathias Binswanger's analysis of algorithmic capitalism (2024), the article identifies the Trope as the last act of sovereign resistance against what Simone Weil termed Machinism. The final section applies this thirty-year framework to the contemporary landscape of generative AI, streaming platforms, and the 2026 AI Omnibus negotiations, arguing that the capacity for intentional, semantically irreducible deviation constitutes both the analytical key to three decades of intermedial transformation and the strategic foundation for a human-centred political economy of creative labour in Europe. The article concludes that safeguarding the Trope is not merely an aesthetic preference but a political and economic necessity – particularly for European creative industries navigating the pressures of algorithmic capitalism. Full Article: Code and Trope: The Challenge of Artificial Intelligence in the Arts