Presentism, Digital Kitsch, NFTs,
things that come to an end and fresh starts 🍀💚💪
⋆꙳•❅‧*₊⋆☃︎‧*❆₊⋆ With “Bloodchild. Scenes from a Symbiosis”, my collaboration with Fondazione Spazio Vitale has come to an end. It’s been an amazing journey that produced three exhibitions in a row and generated a lot of feedback from the local audience. I’m extremely grateful to the Foundation and their sponsors for the opportunity; to my close collaborators Piera Cristiani and Pietro Gatto, who made everything so sweet and peaceful; to Lorenzo Fantetti for the visual design; to Michela Pedranti and Nicola Morittu for the installation views; to the galleries who were involved in the process and to all the artists who believed in the project, starting with Theo Triantafyllidis, whose solo show actually helped setting up the display; Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion, Silvia Dal Dosso, Caroline Delieutraz, Daniel Felstead & Jenn Leung, Sanela Jahić, Kamilia Kard, Lorem, Jonas Lund, Jon Rafman, Anna Ridler, who helped me to look through the looking glass of artificial intelligence; Ivana Bašić, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Oliver Laric and Sahej Rahal, whose works offered a kaleidoscopic picture of how the human-technology relationship developed so far, and a glimpse on how it could be optimized in the future. Check out the pink links for more info and documentation!
⋆❅*𖢔𐂂꙳ Looking ahead, I’ve been appointed Director of the School of Art and New Technologies at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera for the next three years, which will probably make me very slow at doing anything else.
⋆꙳•̩̩͙❅*̩̩͙‧͙ ‧͙*̩̩͙❆ ͙͛ ˚₊⋆ Luckily for this newsletter, things that took a long time are coming out all together, so here are a few things that you can read along your winter holidays, or not ;-) All of them, for some weird reason, share some level of inactuality…
❆ Inactual is an online, experimental research space on visual studies, new technologies, and contemporary art. MEDIAL DISORDERS. Interpretive and non-statistical compendium of technological disorders (vol I) is the first book they produce, with texts in Italian and English. I contributed with a short text on “Presentism” - little more that a bitter smoothie of Dick, Agamben, Rushkoff, Toeffler, Crary and Preciado, but tasty. The link above is for buyers, but you can head to my Instagram for a free read.
𐂂 A Time Panorama. Unpacking ‘Calculating Empires’ is an unusually long exhibition review I wrote for NECSUS, on Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500-2025 at Osservatorio Prada in Milan. Sometimes writing about something helps you to see it better - this is what happened to me with this text.
𖢔 Some of you may remember Surfing with Satoshi, my almost-instant book about tokenized art. First published in Italian by Postmedia Books (2021), it came out in English in a limited pink edition with bizantine generals on the cover, published by Aksioma and designed by Superness (2022). The pink edition went out of stock in a few months, and the English version is now available in a limitless supply via Postmedia Books. Yet, book collectors might be happy to know that a lost box was recently found at the end of the rainbow, and capitalism brought it back to the market. Check it out on Metalabel!
₊°｡❆ 🇮🇹 Parlando di non-fungible token, qualche tempo fa l’Enciclopedia Treccani mi ha chiesto di scrivere la voce “NFT” per l’Undicesima appendice dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, un’opera monumentale in due volumi con copertina in pelle che potrete presto trovare nelle migliori biblioteche del Belpaese. L’opera è economicamente impegnativa e difficilmente potrete leggere la voce, a meno che qualche pirata non la condivida da qualche parte per scopi didattici, o perché ha fatto un casino con i privilegi d’accesso 🤌
⛄🎄🎁🎉⛄🥂 🇮🇹 Digital Kitsch è un testo che ho pubblicato nel 2023 per questa bella antologia curata da Max Ryynänen e Paco Barragán ed edita da Palgrave Macmillan, in cui sostanzialmente dico che il digitale è kitsch per impostazione di fabbrica - sta agli artisti farci l’arte. Grazie a Pagine Inattuali (Università degli Studi di Napoli) e alla preziosa opera di traduzione di Roberto Colonna, ora lo potete leggere anche in italiano (e in Open Access).
☃︎ 🇮🇹 Ultimamente ho risposto alle domande molto specifiche di Luciano Marucci sull’intelligenza artificiale (per Juliet, n. 219, ottobre 2024, pp. 38-45) e alle domande molto generiche di Gabriele Landi su quello che faccio nella vita (per Parola d’artista, also available in English 🇬🇧). Spero che entrambi siano riusciti a tirarmi fuori qualcosa di sensato.
────୨ৎ──── 🇮🇹 Se siete arrivati alla fine, probabilmente siamo già nel 2025. Buon anno! 🎉🥳🎊🎁