For the online exhibition The Byzantine Generals Problem, which is still available online at Distant.Gallery, Aksioma produced an exhibition booklet which still sums up very well what I believe art on the blockchain is and shoud be. Check it out at the link below!
Domenico Quaranta, The Byzantine Generals Problem, exhibition booklet, Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana 2022
Back in December 2021, I curated an online exhibition aiming “to stimulate a conversation with contemporary artists about the future of human visual culture, and to investigate how they are working, in different ways, on the development of a visual language capable to resist the machine gaze and its implications, and to improve human visual communication—a post-AI, posthuman human vision.” It was fun, and 15 months later it’s nice to see that some works produced in response to the show are still blossoming and spawning new shoots (some of them are also still available for relatively cheap collecting on Feral File).
Apart from this, I just realized that two texts produced for this show were never properly posted on this blog. I do it now, in a moment in which some concerns raised at the time might resonate in a very different way. The first is my exhibition essay, the second is a long interview with scholar Antonio Somaini, focused on “The Meaning of “Vision” and “Image” in the Age of AI”.
I wrote a short history of the Italian presence in the metaverse, from Active Worlds to Roblox, for the fourth issue of the magazine Quaderni della Quadriennale. The magazine is available in print, but the featured articles are also made available online, in Italian and English. Enjoy!
Domenico Quaranta, “Identità come performance. L’arte nel metaverso”, in Quaderni d’arte italiana, Issue 4 (Identity), Treccani – La Quadriennale di Roma, 2023 (English version)
Domenico Quaranta, “History in your hands”, in Outland, January 12, 2023
A while ago, I wrote an essay on Theo Triantafyllidis‘ live simulation works, commissioned by Zabludowicz Collection and Fabbula for the catalogue of the amazing exhibition Among the Machines, curated by Paul Luckraft and Julia Greenway. The book – featuring a great array of artists and essays – is now available in print, but my text can be also freely accessed in digital form on Fabbula’s website. Check it out!
Domenico Quaranta, “Theo Triantafyllidis: Live Simulation”, in Paul Luckraft (Ed.), Among the Machines, exhibition catalogue, Zabludowicz Collection, London 2023, ISBN 978-1-907921-40-7.
Along the last year, I have been working hard along with Lorenzo Giusti, curator and Director of GAMeC, Bergamo, and his wonderful team on a monumental museum exhibition, the third chapter in a trilogy on matter conceived by Lorenzo for the museum. I’m happy and proud to start sharing some information about the artists and works that will take over the museum from February 3 to May 28, 2023.
After the break you can find the full press release. Click on this link to download the press kit.
The Non-Standard Head is a curatorial project for A Slice of the Pie, a work by artists Silvio Lorusso and Sebastian Schmieg open to remote collaboration. Conceived by Domenico Quaranta in collaboration with the Net Art class at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan, The Non-Standard Head sees participants working collaboratively and performatively to design a non-binary, multi-gender, multi-racial, multi-species, post-human, post-anthropocentric human subject. The action will unfold over the course of the day on Dec. 22, 2022 (2-7 p.m.), and can be followed online at a-slice-of-the-pie.live.
More info after the break. Italiano giù giù (°Д°) ლ(° ◡ુ° )ლ︵‿
A short reportage written in 2009 for the Performa 09 printed catalogue, where Eva and Franco Mattes premiered their in-game performances. Just added to the Performa online archive.
On October 22, 2022 I took part in a round table hosted by the Uzbekistan National Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia, organized and moderated by Silvia Dal Dosso and Giacomo Scandolara, with Andrea Baronchelli, María Paula Fernández and Ryder Ripps. The complete recording is available online, kindly provided by the Art and Culture Development Foundation under the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Uzbekistan and the Giga Design Studio. Additionally, an edited transcript of the conversation has been recently made available by Silvia Dal Dosso on Nero Magazine. Check it out!
On November 12, 2022, I had the pleasure to introduce and moderate a conversation between María Paula Fernández, Michelle Kasprzak, Vuk Ćosić and Cornelia Sollfrank in the framework of the conference “From Commons to NFTs”, organized by Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art in Ljubljana. A video recording of the conversation is now available on Youtube. A transcript of my intro speech with references and links has been minted on my Mirror blog for those of my readers who’d like to collect and support.