We live in strange times when it comes to social reactions. Once upon a time, adverse political events spurred protests and public demonstrations, but today, dissent and political disillusionment often find expression through other means.
Exiting the pandemic was like waking up in another era. Suddenly each of us had at our disposal artificial intelligences capable of solving complex problems, generating all kinds of images or even writing and interpreting songs.
An artificial intelligence model has displayed the first glimpses of “human-like emotional responses.” But hold on, there’s no need to panic. We’re not talking about a situation that leads to dystopias, global extinctions, or tech-savvy slave dictatorships: the first emotional reaction exhibited by a machine learning prototype is boredom.
Imagine being able to move back in time and visit the ancient Buddhist Mogao caves in Dunhuang at the peak of their splendour, travelling along the Silk Road with merchants and pilgrims, as described in The Travels of Marco Polo. For some time now, this idea has no longer belonged to the world of science fiction. A visit to the Mogao caves, one of the most important Buddhist sites in China, begins with an immersive video experience that takes visitors back to the times of the great trade routes along the Silk Road, in the centuries when the Dunhuang oasis in the Gansu province was the crossroads of culture and merchandise coming from Central Asia.
Numerical art, often called digital art, includes all forms of art created or presented using digital technology. This term comprises a vast range of artistic methods, that use computer instruments and technologies for their creation, transformation and fruition.
In the professional career of any museum educator, perhaps during a guided tour, sooner or later they will need to contend with digital works, crypto, or the results of an algorithmic process. Whether this refers to TTI (text-to-image) linked to artificial intelligence, or “plain” NFT, the question they must ask themselves is always the same: how do we present it to the museum consumer?
Max Magaldi was born in 1982; he began as a musician and drummer and today is a prominent artist in the field of digital arts and other forms of expression. In 2018, he started to experiment with digital device performances, combining music, contemporary art, and hacking on social networks, and began developing the concept of the sound mural. He has created sound and installation performances, and has exhibited both in Italy and abroad, in France, Greece, and Saudi Arabia. He has collaborated with renowned artists like Edoardo Tresoldi, Gonzalo Borondo, Studio Azzurro and Andrea Villa.
Can urban space and virtual space coexist? And how can digital art redesign the streets, structures and the façades of the buildings? There is a surprising and underrated meeting point between immersive technologies and urban art: in the hands of street artists, we see that virtual and augmented reality become tools capable of amplifying an artist’s creative range exponentially, liberating the art from every law of physics (and from the bureaucratic laws as well). Thus, street artists, who were the first to reappropriate urban space for themselves, also became the first to “colonize” and navigate virtual space, the new frontier of the public world.
magine finding yourself in Italy in the Sixties. The country was growing at record rates, the economy was booming, industry performing more brilliantly than ever. Italian brands had conquered the world, and everyone raved over the beauty of goods “Made in Italy”. Those were the years of the “La Dolce Vita” as depicted by Federico Fellini with Marcello Mastroianni, the years when the Vespa became a symbol of freedom, when Olivetti effectively invented the first domestic adding machines, long before the arrival of the personal computers.
Contemporary artists are unlikely to tackle the subject of women’s rights and gender equality, although the subject is one that is by now very much in the forefront of public awareness, being widely debated, though not always in appropriate ways and sometimes using questionable language.Their reluctance may be due to a fear of sliding into rhetoric or not knowing how to approach the subject effectively, as there are still many questions surrounding the issue.
Art, however, has a duty to objectify and interpret reality using individual expressive codes, at times even accepting the risk of offending a certain public opinion.Contemporary artists are unlikely to tackle the subject of women’s rights and gender equality, although the subject is one that is by now very much in the forefront of public awareness, being widely debated, though not always in appropriate ways and sometimes using questionable language.Their reluctance may be due to a fear of sliding into rhetoric or not knowing how to approach the subject effectively, as there are still many questions surrounding the issue. Art, however, has a duty to objectify and interpret reality using individual expressive codes, at times even accepting the risk of offending a certain public opinion.