Two steps in the artistic metaverses to better understand natural intelligence

In the beginning it was simpler, the perception of art, I say. Whatever it was, art felt, unlike science which must first be understood in order to be able to enjoy it later. Then we all have the feeling that art is useful for life, it concerns our sentimental abc, let’s say in fact: that book, that painting, that film, in short, that artistic expression, changed my life. Of course, it’s most likely not true, in short, guess what if in the incompressible sequence of events, that book has changed our lives or we are the ones rewriting our history, focusing on a triggering element. The certain fact is that these are ancestral stuff: the stories, as we know them and hear them and still tell them, were born in front of the fire. Many studies on pre-selected populations insist on the different form that the story assumes if it is diurnal or nocturnal. In the first case it is about gossip and management of daily events, in the second case, you want the night that arrives, you want the shaky light of the flame that transfigures the faces, the stories take on the mythological form. Stories then served to learn something (through transfigured elements) and not forget it, also because unlike modernity, learning or not learning was not a whim, but a necessity to keep alive. For this reason, until the day before yesterday, stories and art were felt, and in fact, for example, to facilitate fruition in pictorial art we fixed ourselves on perspective, geometry, focalization and religious mysticism. This until the day before yesterday. Then something changed and is still changing, but modern stories are still struggling against that ancestral feeling, which is the great strength and the great limitation of stories. You can gain experience of the strength and limits of the past, of the difficulty of making new artistic forms perceived by visiting the Metaverse hypothesis exhibition, in Rome, hosted in Palazzo Cipolla.

I know that one thinks of the Metaverse and starts laughing, and says: but you want to put with Bernini, yet this exhibition is a valuable attempt to take the baton from the past, free it from the ties of artistic rules, known, known, repeated up to the strain, and make the viewer less passive, less exposed to emotional blackmail and religious publicity, often grandiloquent and counter-reformist, more Brechtian active, collaborative and artist in his own way. The attempt is interesting, also because willy-nilly it signals the art that will soon come from here, the new spaces for reflection that we should do to better inhabit the world and incidentally, reflections that hopefully dethrone us from the burden of will and freedom and better identify the fallacies we encounter, the weaknesses inherent in human nature, the vagueness of certain illusions. Hypothesis Metaverse concretely speaking is based on the virtual, of course. The installations are interactive and suggestive, they bring with them a suggestion: don’t be afraid of technology, use it to your advantage, make it the new torch, or to quote that great reactionary Ivan Illich, the new flame on which blow to keep the fire of knowledge alive. I really appreciated the Metaverse hypothesis: it is the new fire, the flame that transfigures our bodies. And in fact with a lot of fun I tried Decentraland: a flight between the skyscrapers of the Bronx. I wore the Meta mask, grabbed the controllers and once I opened my arms I flew among the skyscrapers, when I closed them instead I braked the fall. A new artistic experience, combined with the possibility of opening yourself up to visions that are different from the usual, changing your observation point in an instant, freeing your body from the alleys of gravity and perspective rules. It was so exciting that flying between buildings, moving suddenly I fell off the stool I was sitting on. I closed my arms by atavistic instinct and incredibly I slowed down the fall in the metaverse but not in the real world, in fact I took a knee. All this led me to a reflection: if you fall into the metaverse you have the sensation of freeing yourself from the fatigues but if you fall in reality you hurt yourself, art has so far tried to tell the danger of falling and often the effort of getting up again, for this reason we feel it close, even if we don’t understand it tout court. For now, the metaverse hypothesis opens up new perspectives, makes us appreciate certain reflexive suggestions and frees man from fatigue and falls, and therefore from pain. A big step for humanity but a weak point for artist creation, because humanity is falling and will continue to fall. Therefore, the next groups of artists will have to face this dilemma: if and how once dematerialized, if and how in the company of everything, we will still be fragile, in short, if they will hold our knees or, as often happens, we will still feel the desire from time to time, you want for the accidents of life, you want for the proverbial heaviness on the shoulders of kneeling in front of the vastness.