VIDEOART PROGRAM

CURATED BY CAROLINA CIUTI

Digital-Craft Journey AI

The videos selected from the Digital-Craft Journey AI (Video) call, aimed at students from five Italian Fine Arts Academies (Turin, Milan, Bologna, Florence, and Catania), explore new forms of artistic expression through digital media. The winning works investigate the limits and possibilities of artificial intelligence in art or within the domestic environment. Completing the focus on video art are the contributions from the participating galleries, selected and curated by Carolina Ciuti.

Aleandro Sinatra, Le voyage dans la Lune?, 2025. 4’33’’

Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti di Torino

The work offers a reinterpretation of Le voyage dans la Lune (1902) by Georges Méliès through the use of artificial intelligence. Within the video, foreign bodies—cyborgs, hybrid beings, and humans—emerge, disrupting the reality of the image and destabilizing its time, space, and apparent coherence. In this altered environment, the creatures question the myth of exploration, traversing history and its normalizing visions, offering a reflection on the boundary between classical imagination and digital transformation.

Demis Rosa, Sometimes it’s hard to connect, 2025. 8’
 
Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze

 

The work takes its cue from Theme Song (1973) by Vito Acconci, created during a period in which the artist was experimenting with performance, sound recordings, and video as tools for establishing a direct and intimate relationship with the viewer. In the original piece, Acconci uses monologue—charged with sexual tension and irony—to express loneliness and a desire for physical closeness, creating a dialogue that seems to erase any distance between artist and audience.
In this new interpretation, Acconci’s voice interacts with Maya, an advanced artificial intelligence architecture capable of generating more empathetic and realistic vocal interactions. The video explores the human tendency to humanize technology and assimilate it into its own evolutionary and transformative processes, creating a dialogue between two “entities” reflecting on relationships, communication, and the gap between the physical and virtual body. The work continues Acconci’s reflection on the influence of images and media, showing how technology can amplify the need for closeness and presence, while prompting questions about the boundary between real and digital experience.

Eugenio Liotta, Rosario Orazio Caccamo, cAIfè, 2025. 1’29’’

 

Accademia di Belle Arti di Catania

 

This “video guide” stages the human being as a programmable device—a subject that must operate according to optimized protocols. Corporate language transforms emotional repression into a virtue, extending beyond the professional realm into private life. The work envisions a near future in which the individual self-disciplines to the point of complete alienation, sacrificing themselves in every aspect of daily life. In exchange for this renunciation, perhaps only one small reward remains: a good coffee.

Sara Caushaj, GLOBAL THINK FORUM, 2025. 1’19’’
 
Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera
 

The video depicts two men at a conference—stereotypical figures immersed in an equally codified environment. As they attempt to begin their speech, they continuously interrupt each other, generating nervous laughter, silences, and moments of embarrassment that reveal the fragility and fallibility of the human condition. The work reflects on the loss of one of our last consolations: language. Amid incomplete attempts and constant interruptions, the only sentence that reaches completion is the final question:
“Do you think AI can feel shame sometimes?”
—evoking a reflection on the boundary between human consciousness and artificial intelligence.

FOCUS VIDEOART 

Exhibitors’ proposal

The Body at the Center: Documents of Performance

 

Here, the body is both protagonist and field of tension—a place where identity, social expectations, and desires for self-determination intertwine. Though very different in visual language and approach, the participating artists stage a physicality traversed by deeply rooted cultural narratives: in Maternidades Indelebles by Ivette Salazar, motherhood emerges as an invisible mark, a lingering echo of social roles and ancestral memories; in YOUniverse by Lulù Withheld, technology becomes a new shaping force—a promise of closeness that turns into an anesthetizing filter, capable of isolating and distorting the perception of the self and of others. In every performative gesture, the body struggles to reclaim presence and contact, reaffirming itself as a living space of resistance and transformation.

Bloc Art Perù: Ivet Salazar, Maternidades Indelebles [Maternità indelebili], 2024. 3’51’’

Galleria Leòn: Lulù Withheld, YOUniverse – A Light Series, 2025. 16’23’’

 

Technological Hypnosis: A Kaleidoscope of Images

 

Here, the gaze becomes a tool of immersion and disorientation, as technology reshapes the perception of reality, creating new visual horizons. In Parallel Worlds, Claudio Napoli fragments the urban environment into impossible architectures; in THIS ORDINE, Enrico Gisana generates hypnotic cycles of overlapping words and forms; in Memory is a Strange Planet, Flavo Degen merges familiar and anonymous faces into grotesque, surreal hybrids; in Alteraciones: Modelos Mentales, Juan-Sí González empties media images of their original intent to create new visual syntaxes; in AI “Viaggio in Italia”, Roberto Beragnoli transforms the Italian peninsula into a surreal landscape where reality and imagination blur together.

Through visual overload, perceptual manipulation, and dreamlike escapes, these works show how technology not only represents reality but continuously rewrites it—drawing us into a dimension where recognizing what we see becomes, each time, a new act of interpretation.

 

 

Febo e Dafne: Claudio Napoli, Parallel Worlds – Architetture Mentali, 2023. 3’23’’

 

Garage Fontana: Enrico Gisana, THIS ORDINE, 2025. 10’

 

Lusvardi Art Gallery: Flavio Degen, Memory is a strange planet [La memoria è uno strano pianeta], 2023. 3’13’’

 

Solocontemporaneo: Juan-Sí González, Alteraciones: Modelos Mentales [Alterazioni: Modelli Mentali], 2026. 6’40’’

 

MAG – Magazzeno Art Gaze: Roberto Beragnoli,  AI “Viaggio in Italia”, 2023. 22’32’’

Subtle Contemplations

Here, black and white becomes a tool for introspection, suspension, and silence—a space where life and its nuances slowly emerge. The videos invite the audience to linger on hidden traces, imperceptible gestures, and the subtle tensions that define existence.

In Se solo riuscissi a cantare (If Only I Could Sing) by Sofia Bersanelli, the domestic everyday transforms into a poetic landscape—through whispers, images, and words that reveal what lies beneath the surface. In EGOSISTEMI – Assurdo Razionale (EGOSYSTEMS – Rational Absurd), Marcello Vigoni reflects on life as a metaphor impossible to fully grasp, following the rhythm of water as it marks birth, maturity, and old age. In this meditative sequence, nature and symbolic elements lead to a confrontation with the absurd and with the human desire to decipher the incomprehensible.

Stay On Board Art Gallery: Sofia Bersanelli, Se solo riuscissi a cantare, 2021. 9’9’’

MA-EC: Marcello Vigoni, EGOSISTEMI – Assurdo Razionale, 2025. 16’10’’