Art journey at the dawn of the Metaverse

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Hypothesis Metaverse is one of the first international exhibitions to ask questions about the technological/existential concept of Metaverse, through a series of multisensory and multimedia experiences created by the genius of contemporary artists who work in dialogue with the material works of historic or still working artists who have created other worlds, from the Baroque to today, with unlimited mental spaces.

The visitor is immersed in a phygital dimension, which is what awaits us in the daily life of the immediate future. At present the Metaverse belongs to the world of social media and virtual spaces in VR, in AR and built on blockchain technology, a non-centralized and encrypted data storage system. In these worlds each of us can incarnate in our digital twin (avatar) and transform into what he has always wanted. Artificial intelligence also plays a fundamental role in the development of these realities in which man, nature and technology can find a new, hybrid and harmonic synergy towards a digital humanism.

Giambattista Piranesi

The journey towards the future begins in one of the most famous “Prisons of Invention” by, illusionistic and disorienting architectures that immediately invite the public to get on the immersive seesaw by Fabio Giampietro and Paolo Di Giacomo: the pendulum motion between physical and digital already it materialised.

Maurits Cornelis Escher

Meanwhile Maurits Cornelis Escher, the artist who most inspired the architects of the Metaverse, converses with Andrea Pozzo, whose sketch for the fake dome of the Church of S. Ignazio in Rome is exhibited.

“Onda lunga” by Pier Augusto Breccia, on the other hand, proposes a hypnotic vortex that seems to anticipate the one in which to dive to enter “Decentraland”, a totally decentralized Metaverse, where virtual and material reality merge into a single experience. Continuing along the path, one comes across a comparison between a native digital work of art by Krista Kim and a masterpiece by Victor Vasarely, between optical vertigo and Zen utopias for a world that has never existed and yet already exists. In the next two rooms, Federico Solmi brings paintings and sculptures into dialogue with virtuality, through a process of return and reconfiguration of images, from one world to another, between tradition and innovation. Reality slowly dissolves around us as if liquefying into a sort of multicolored smoothie. The mind begins to wander and get lost in the succession of shapes and images. The body begins to melt, to no longer be a thing separate from the surrounding reality, but rather an integral and indistinguishable part of it.