There is a small rebellion – or perhaps a form of resistance – that feels worth practicing lately, and I invite you to try it: not talking about artificial intelligence for a while.
Not because it doesn’t exist, not because we don’t use it, and not because it won’t transform many things, but because not every article written in 2026 needs to place it at the centre of the conversation.
Sometimes it is worth looking in other directions or, perhaps, simply looking differently.
This Observatory comes precisely from that idea: a way of looking deeply rooted in attention.
In my case, that attention has always moved between two extremes: the enormous and the tiny. Like a telescope pointing into the distance, trying to understand what lies beyond, and a microscope revealing something that was always there but too small for us to see.
Audiovisual language has its own version of this movement. I like to imagine an infinite zoom in, travelling through objects, surfaces and spaces until, suddenly, it turns into a zoom out capable of revealing what was really happening.
And then back again, in a loop. Nothing too ambitious.
Thinking about it, life works a little like that too. Sometimes we need to step back to understand what is happening, and sometimes we need to move incredibly close to discover that what mattered was hidden in a detail we had almost overlooked.
I propose moving between those two positions: looking from far enough away to understand what is happening to the way we develop concepts, build narratives and create images; and then moving close enough to feel – and make others feel – the surface of a planet made of mozzarella, or the crack of a bread crust as if the ground had just split open beneath our feet.
Tabletop has always had something of an observatory about it.
There is probably not an entire cosmos inside a drop of coffee or on the surface of a strawberry, although after spending enough time filming both, you begin to suspect there might be.
We look at things that happen too quickly, so we film them at thousands of frames per second, stopping time. We move in with almost voyeuristic macro lenses, turning apparently insignificant surfaces and gestures into events.
Perhaps that is why this profession teaches you quite a lot about looking.
Because we do not simply film food, drinks or products. We create interactions, accidents, behaviors and stories. Sometimes a story can fit inside a fall, a transformation or the way two elements meet within a frame.
It does not necessarily need characters or dialogue. An expectation, an action and a consequence can be enough. In just a few seconds there can be tension, surprise, humor or reward.
And above all, we film what we project onto things: desire, pleasure, memory, freshness, excess, celebration, childhood, sophistication or, simply, the urge to bite something that exists on the other side of a screen.
The protagonists change, but something remains: the way we look changes everything.
A bottle is never just a bottle. It can be summer, winter or almost a magical object. A tomato can be humble, sensual, graphic or sculptural.
As so often happens in life, the difference lies not only in what is in front of us, but in how we choose to see it and how we decide to show it.
We can use cameras, lenses, sets, sound, food styling, practical effects, CGI, animation, generative tools or whatever has not yet been invented by the time this is published.
All of that matters.
But no tool knows where we want to go.
That is why I am less interested in talking about tools – contemporary or otherwise – than about decisions.
That is where things remain interesting.
Buuut…There is always a buuut.
With all the new possibilities for visualisation and production, we can now arrive very quickly at something that works.
And it works is a wonderful phrase, but also a slightly dangerous one.
A convincing solution can appear relatively quickly. But perhaps it is worth staying with it a little longer and asking what is still missing.
What makes something go from correct to memorable, from beautiful to strange, from good to surprising?
Sometimes it is a major decision. Other times, it is an accident someone was paying enough attention not to correct.
In tabletop, as in life, an important part of the process is knowing when to insist and when to stop trying to control everything. There are moments when repeating a shot twenty times makes perfect sense, and others when the best take is precisely the one in which something happened that nobody had planned.
I don’t think this search is necessarily about perfection, which can be fairly boring. I am much more interested in intention: knowing why something should be clean or messy, elegant or uncomfortable, precise or apparently accidental.
Beauty not as a finish, but as the consequence of a point of view.
And perhaps that is one of the most interesting shifts happening now: when what once seemed impossible starts becoming possible, the difficulty no longer lies only in achieving the solution.
The question moves somewhere else. If we can create more possibilities than ever, what do we do with them?
If a tool allows us to solve a problem faster, do we use that time to finish earlier or to go further?
Where is surprise hiding now?
Having more options does not necessarily make choosing easier. Sometimes it does exactly the opposite.
And that brings another essential instrument into this observatory: judgement.
Not as authority, but as accumulated knowledge.
Judgement is educated by looking, making, failing, comparing and working alongside other professionals. An expert is not someone who is always right, but someone who has learned to distinguish between apparently similar options and recognise where there is intention, character or simply something worth keeping.
We can generate, sort or compare countless possibilities, but someone still has to really look at them.
With attention, intention and judgement.
And then choose.
An observatory should probably be less about providing answers than about looking from far enough away – or close enough – to discover better questions.
And also about practicing something that seems increasingly scarce: patience.
Some actions last a tenth of a second and require hours of preparation. We spend a long time creating the conditions for something to happen for an instant.
And when it does, we need to be watching.
Because in the end, tools are means of transport.
We can travel by train, car, plane, on foot or by something that does not even exist yet. Some options will be faster, some cheaper, and some will take us to places that were previously inaccessible.
Perfect.
But the vehicle should not become the journey.
Before that comes the curiosity to know where we want to go, who we want to go with, why we want to go there and what we want the person travelling with us to feel.
Images and ideas work in much the same way.
Tools will change. Aesthetics will change too.
What surprises us today will probably feel normal tomorrow – or even bore us.
Perhaps that is why it is worth continuing to train something less spectacular and considerably harder to automate:
attention.
And asking ourselves, every now and then:
Is there still something left to discover — or something left to invent?
Perhaps we should all have our own observatory.
A place – real or imagined – from which to look with more attention, intention and patience; to move closer and further away, to doubt, to be surprised and to look again.
If you already have one, take care of it.
Cultivate it.
Feed it with images, ideas, conversations, mistakes, obsessions and things you still have no idea what to do with.
Because, in tabletop as in life, those apparently useless things are often the ones that eventually take us somewhere interesting.
And if you do not have your own observatory yet, perhaps this is a good time to start building one.
In the meantime, you are always welcome to visit this one.
