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Behind Products™ is an Art Studio based in Paris that host creative collective including architects, engineers, industrial designer, fashion designer, graphic designers and filmmaker spanning multiple domains, including urban planning, design of retail environments, fashion design including apparel, footwear, and accessories, film and video production, as well as the creation of visual art for interactive media and creation of works. Behind Products™ is the research, branding, publication projects and services of the artificial intelligence (AI) practice.
In 2021 we approached into the exploration of latent diffusion models (LDMs) and image synthesis as artists and designers for a new work prototype that would introduce innovation in the field of Art and Design and a new approach to Art-making and Design-making. We are focus on testing elasticity of the LDMs for Design disciplines and Arts bringing to public awareness elements of a innovative work prototypes that have not yet entered the collective consciousness.
New Impressionism
The emergence of latent diffusion models (LDMs) can be understood as a form of New Impressionism, in which the perceptual field is no longer constructed through direct observation of physical reality but through the probabilistic reconstruction of latent space.
In the late nineteenth century artists abandoned the rigid academic conventions of representation in favor of capturing the ephemeral qualities of light and atmosphere, diffusion-based AI generate images by iteratively “diffusing” and re-synthesizing fragments of visual information drawn from distributed datasets. This process, which several MIT research papers have described as a “stochastic reconstruction of latent manifolds,” replaces the singular viewpoint of the artist with a distributed computational gaze. The digital image is no longer the direct transcription of an external reality, but the outcome of a probabilistic and synthetic interpretation of it — a latent impression.
Critically, this does not imply a withdrawal of the human from the creative act, on the contrary, AI becomes a tool through which the artist and designer attempts to capture the underlying principles of reality — that which remains consistent beneath its surface variations.
A substantial part of the work thus lies in understanding how the real expresses itself once it has been compressed into a latent representation and subsequently re-synthesised as an image. The human task is to recognise how reality transforms when filtered through a digital manifold, and to guide the generative process so that the resulting image does not simply reproduce visual data, but reveals the structure of reality in a new form.In this sense, the move from physical observation to latent reconstruction requires a new form of authorship — one that is less concerned with depiction and more with the curation and activation of latent information.Latent diffusion therefore constitutes a new aesthetic paradigm in which form emerges through the accumulation of micro-variations and the gradual clarification of noise, much like the optical vibration of Impressionist brushwork — with the crucial difference that the vibration is no longer produced by the eye–hand coordination of the painter, but by a dialogue between human intentionality and computational inference.
Behind Products understands artificial intelligence not as a surrogate for human creativity, but as its active extension: a framework that enables artists and designers to expand the reach of their intellectual and emotional agency; From this perspective, the work is less about technical experimentation and more about investigating the conditions under which creativity can continue to exist and evolve in a computational world.Looking ahead to the next decade — and even more decisively to the following twenty years — we anticipate a gradual dissolution of disciplinary boundaries. What will ultimately be evaluated will not be the mastery of a predefined set of tools, but the capacity of individuals to think and act across multiple domains, articulating a distinctly human form of expression.
Creativity will increasingly become an expanded form of life, and the decisive question will no longer concern what an individual produces, but who that individual becomes through the act of production.At the age of technique, in which human agency risks being subordinated to the imperatives of efficiency and operational logic.
Against this background, we envision a future — for ourselves and for the next generation — in which technique is no longer a limiting condition tied to the specificity of individual disciplines, but instead becomes a shared and permeable environment.A future in which no creative mind is constrained by technical contingencies, and in which each person is free to move within universal and ideal spaces — digital or otherwise — without being burdened by the constraints of particular material realities.Our commitment to this practice rests on the conviction that AI — when engaged critically and responsibly — provides a concrete opportunity to recenter the human dimension within creative processes.
Rather than reducing the designer to the role of executor, it allows for the emergence of character, sensitivity, and intuition, precisely because the traditional boundaries of expertise become more fluid.Ultimately, the value of innovation is measured not by technological performance alone, but by its ability to expand the space of human expression and cultivate new forms of sensibility.
