“My interests have been going towards exploring ideas through the use of technology – as in technology not as merely a tool, but as a fundamental part of the process,” he says. “The images, in that sense, are much more a side effect to that.”

This project, I Will, plays with the fact that everything in a computer, from images to text to audio, is made of code, and disparate elements can therefore be made to interfere with each other. In his project he used software to trawl Twitter for messages containing the phrase “I will” – then inserted what the user tweeted into the image they used to represent themselves online. It is of course a very crude way of manipulating images and ultimately damages files in fairly unpredictable ways, he says, which reminded him of the unpredictable nature of the future, and how often our plans go awry. “Our perception of time is rather linear when it comes to the past and the present,” he says. “We tend to believe that these and those events led to the moment we are living right now. But the future is this opening of possibilities that gets bigger and more unpredictable as it gets further away from the present. There’s this sort of infinitely expandable and uncontrollable multiverse of possibilities, most of which will never come to pass.”

Machiavelli created a website for the project, generating a new batch of 100 images every eight minutes that the site automatically flicks through. The project feeds into a wider movement of “glitch” or “databand” artists, and is based on software designed by one of the scene’s biggest names, Benjamin Gaulon (aka Recyclism). “I’m very interested in the particularities of digitally created images, it ties to technology being a fundamental part of something, of a way of thinking, instead of just a tool,” says Machiavelli. “I’m certainly not the only one interested in this, and the design studio I’m currently working for, Pinar & Viola, also explores digital as an integral part of its work, although from a different perspective; to make images that could only be made with techniques available today.”

For more details, visit www.pinar-viola.com or http://guimachiavelli.com

Image © Gui Machiavelli.