The Scoletta dell’Arte: Digital Reform exhibition in Venice

Every time a new technology begins to make its way into man’s life, there is always a gestation period in which one begins to become familiar with that mysterious language through experiments of all kinds: a delicate time in which one must also learn to let what one is learning settle. . This transitory phase of practice, study and reflection is in fact necessary to understand the actual uses and possible future directions that specific innovation will take. During such a cognitive stage, however, it may happen that – either due to strong interest, or sensationalism, or FOMO – the urgency is felt to play in advance, creating a historical precedent through the presentation of projects, works or texts, exclusively dedicated to that a discovery that is in fact still in progress.

The Decentral Art Pavilion and NFTs

There is nothing wrong in fact, we are still talking about inevitable creative processes to later normalize the use of that new tool, nevertheless the terrain on which we walk still remains very slippery. And so, a bit like what happened two years ago with the experience Decentral Art Pavilion (entirely focused on the “future” of NFTs), even during this last Venice Biennale we were faced with an exhibition totally focused on the latest trend of the moment in the artistic/technological field which, in this case, coincides with the use of Artificial Intelligences.

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The exhibition “Scoletta dell’arte: digital reform”

What are we talking about? From Scoletta dell’Arte: Digital Reform, an interactive exhibition which, until 15 September, uses a very particular location to reflect on the concept of teaching in an era of great social and technological changes like ours. Curated by Antonio Geusa, and presented by the interdisciplinary platform TAEX, the exhibition unfolds through the floors of the Scoletta dell’Arte dei Tiraoro and Battioro (historical headquarters of the 18th century artisans’ guild who produced gold thread and leaf there) to invite the public to observe digital art with the eyes of a careful scholar. Geusa’s aim is noble and punctual, but it materializes in an exposition made up of a few interesting flashes and some doubts.
As often happens with those educational projects that are aimed above all at beginners and the curious, the curatorial line adopted chooses a playful approach to the topic by proposing various participatory works in which the game acts as a common thread.

The artists of the exhibition on artificial intelligences

This is the case of You Are Making Art by Andrea Meregalli who welcomes the viewer into a sort of photographic set in which he can take a selfie which, thanks to software like Stable Diffusion, is then mixed together with the many images present in the artist’s database and displayed on a monitor for a few seconds before vanishing. A work that questions us about our position in the world, about the ephemeral and about being part of a work of art but which at the same time uses a not too original expedient that risks flattening everything. The involvement of the public is also at the center of the interventions of Francesco D’Isa and MAOTIK: and if in the installation of the former the presence of the observer determines the times of contemplation of deliberately incorrect images generated with Text To Image programs, in that of the according to its physicality it influences in real time the composition of the work itself. The playful nature of the exhibition is also manifested in two projects produced by TAEX: a card game on the history of art which highlights the critical issues of a system like Chat GPT, and True, a TTI application that can be used on site by anyone. Fortunately, not all the selected projects require interaction with the visitor and thus there is also a way to enjoy them in a more “traditional” way. This is what happens with the respective contributions of the Chinese artist Funa Ye, of the local collective Accurat and of the Net Art pioneer Shu Lea Cheang who, in this setting, participates with Virus Becominga dystopian 3D animation video made in 2022.

Scoletta: an exhibition within the exhibition

What gives a truly unexpected boost to the overall display is the choice to also exhibit drawings and paintings by masters of the past which in some way refer to the practice of the studio. Figures that in Geusa’s vision act as precursors of the revolutionary nature inherent in digital art: a thought that creates a subtle parallelism between the study of visual perception and machine learning. As in a sort of “exhibition within the exhibition”, it is thus possible to admire notable works by artists of the caliber of Salvator Rosa, Jean Géricault, John Constable And Malevich(just to name a few).
Perplexities aside, it must be admitted that within the context of the Biennale Scoletta dell’Arte: Digital Reformrepresents the only opportunity to learn a little more about such an important and current issue as that of the use of AI in the artistic field. A topic particularly absent from the Venetian event which, in one way or another, still deserved to be addressed.

Valerio Veneruso

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