onlineMAXXIVERSOValentina Vetturi, Michela de Mattei, Miltos Manetas, Jon Rafman, Riccardo Benassi and Danilo Correale

An immersive and interactive experience in the Museum’s virtual venue: the MAXXIVERSO, with Valentina Vetturi, Michela de Mattei, Miltos Manetas, Jon Rafman, Riccardo Benassi and Danilo Correale.

Valentina Vetturi presents the new “performative landscape” I Never Think of the Future. It Comes Soon Enough #2 (2021) which lets the public face the historic Cypherpunk Mailing List, one of the most significant online debate and meeting places of the Internet at its onset, where scientists, activists and intellectuals discussed how the world would change through the use of new technologies, delving deeper into questions that are still highly relevant today: Internet, privacy, criptography, pseudonyms, anonymity and digital money.
In the Metaverse, you can surf a range of texts in an interactive digital sound and performative space. They are fragments of dialogues on the Cypherpunk Mailing List randomly chosen by a generative programme based on five words: better, chance, to gain, enough and entropy.
Curated by Chiara Bertini and Serena Tabacchi

Miltos Manetas engages the public in his Floating Studio (2022). The project is made of a painting that the artist defines as a “portal”, made in the physical space of the Museum through an “impermanent” painting technique. In the Metaverse space, visitors navigate a reflective surface, on the horizon of which is a 3D representation of the artist’s name. When they approach the representation, they notice images of the artist’s work on the surface of the letters. This ‘floating’ study changes over time, becoming enriched by the portals that the artist paints in different places in L’Aquila and around the world. Each portal on the letters thus becomes an access to a further space of quests and investigation, in a game of cross-references and interferences between past and future visions.
curated by Chiara Bertini and Serena Tabacchi

Michela De Mattei Estée Lauder, Expanded/Extended (2022) presents an ambiguous and alienating environment, halfway between a Garden of Eden made of meadows, mountains, animals and a virtual community dedicated to mental wellbeing and psychological support. The metaverse was designed to be accessible to Estée Lauder, an Indian blackbird with whom the artist has been conversing online since 2015, reflecting on captivity conditions, inter-species communication and animal agency. The metaverse hosts all five films in the Estée Lauder series – How to speak like president (2015), Adapting (2016), The fear of mistakes (2016), Hypnosis session (2018), thus becoming a complete archive of the production.
curated by Chiara Bertini and Serena Tabacchi

Jon Rafman presents Shadowbanned 360° (2022): the user is greeted by the face and gaping mouth of the monster of Bomarzo in a hellish dystopia that serves as a poetic metaphor for our entrapment in a world dominated by images and algorithms. Modelled on the 15th-century illustrations of Botticelli’s Dante’s Inferno, Jon Rafman’s work follows an infinite spiral architecture in which users are ideally invited to enter the frightening meanderings of the monster with no escape.
curated by Chiara Bertini

Riccardo Benassi is a Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist who combines sound, visual and performance element. His work Dancefloorensick (2021) consists of a series of six video essays to be viewed one after the other and enjoyed as a single stream of sound, language and movement. A visual, linguistic and sound journey made up of basses and hums of various kinds, night images, footage of ravers filmed during the prolonged pandemic shutdown in Berlin, and pop culture, poetic and theoretical texts that converge to create a work with different levels of reading, listening and participation.
curated by Chiara Bertini

Danilo Correale is an Italian artist and researcher living and working in New York. Speculating on the idea of Museum as a Factory, Danilo Correale creates for the MAXXIVERSO space, Eternal Flame (2023), a virtual ready-made torch that burns endlessly representing a metaphor of industrial work and, given the context of the museum, also of artistic and cultural work. The high flame burns off the unwanted gases of chemical processes making evident the continuity of consumption and factory work that like immaterial labor remains active and always ‘available’, in a dimension of expanded and unlimited temporality.
curated by Chiara Bertini

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Numero Cromatico is an interdisciplinary art collective composed of researchers from various fields of knowledge, from the art world to neuroscience. Using the tool of artificial intelligence to generate texts about the future, The future is here, somewhere (2023) evokes a plurality of trajectories and voices about the future of humanity and living beings. The direction is that of a possible coexistence between human beings, nature and technology with a careful look at the impact that digital technologies may have on the future of the planet. The project is part of the collective’s research on the stimulation of conscious and unconscious cognitive and sensory processes of the audience, on the integration of artificial intelligence as a tool for artistic creation and of text as a tool to enhance the physical and synaesthetic power of the word.
curated by Chiara Bertini