Luca Pozzi. HYPERINASCIMENTO

With such a title the artist launches the idea of a new humanism located at the intersection of art history, quantum gravity, multi-messenger cosmology, and artificial intelligence, and relying on an interdisciplinary perspective which plunges its roots in the Renaissance and whose focus is to explore the world through the eyes of contemporary science and technologies. 

As Luca Pozzi explains, “In an era marked by a desire for a new start, a ‘hyper’ approach to the Renaissance transforms the artworks from the past into true technological devices, with churches, temples, and museums becoming avant-garde scientific apparatuses while the substance of our bodies is being transmuted into quantum bits of pure information. The Hyperrenaissance does not put the Human being at its centre: instead, what becomes central is the most impalpable and sophisticated language of nature – experiences of polylocalisation, temporal nonlinearity, and dimensional augmentation.” Passages, leaps in scale, and actions never represent a break in or an interruption of the cycle, for in the Hyperrenaissance every ring is linked to the other in holistic terms. This makes the hyperconnectivity of the whole with its parts even more real and symbiotic, as though the whole were a huge living organism. 

Precisely in virtue of its innovative and digital nature, the exhibition also represents a contribution, on the part of FMAV, to the candidacy of the city of Modena to the UNESCO “Creative Cities Network” in the Media Arts cluster. 

The exhibition itinerary begins with two large immersive environments. The first is an analogue environment entitled The Grandmother Platform, a silk-screen printed carpet with a digital collage of iconic Renaissance artworks and advanced-technology artefacts. The second immersive environment is a virtual one, entitled Rosetta Mission 2020 (Oculus VR station) and produced by the ERC project AN-ICON in collaboration with Casa degliArtisti; this work configures the project Hyperinascimento / Hyperrenaissance as a five-dimensional Zen garden. Beginning with invisible physical events (magnetic fields and subatomic particle detectors) and moving on to internet websites and various social-media platforms (Twitter, Instagram), as well as hybrid sculptures – the Arkanians series –, it finally reaches properly digital spaces, in which the laws of physics are revolutionised and subverted, opening up surreal parallel universes. 

The virtual journey into the Hyperrenaissance ends with the work Third Eye Prophecy Markers (Dark Collection – Sistine Chapel), consisting in analogue markers activating digital augmented-reality contents. These are thought of as a means to conjure up, at will, a series of sculptures in the upstairs rooms; during the first lockdown, at Easter 2020, these digital site-specific sculptures were geopositioned by Luca Pozzi in the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican museums, between the scenes of the New and Old Testaments and those of the Last Judgement.