Ipotesi Metaverso

Immersive swings, digital zen philosophy, techno-nature, virtual reality glasses, artificial intelligence, blockchain sculptures, generative poetry and sounds: from April 5 through July 23, 2023, the 19th century Palazzo Cipolla in Rome’s Via del Corso will be transformed into Ipotesi Metaverso. Offering a full immersion in the minds of creators of worlds, since the Baroque era, it will be one of the first international exhibitions to raise questions and formulate hypotheses about the technological/existential concept of the Metaverse.

This exhibition is the fruit of the intuition and vision of Prof. Avv. Emmanuele F. M. Emanuele, President of the Fondazione Terzo Pilastro – Internazionale. In 1999, he created the exhibition space of Palazzo Cipolla, where no less than 59 exhibitions have been hosted in 24 years. He has personally planned all these events, featuring a wide range of national and international, from ancient to contemporary art forms. 

The exhibition, curated by Gabriele Simongini and Serena Tabacchi, is held by the Fondazione Terzo Pilastro – Internazionale and set up by Poema SpA. 

Great artists of the past meet contemporary creators on the domain of imagination and bringing to life new spatial/existential dimensions in this exhibition that will bring together historical works by Carlo Maratti, Andrea Pozzo, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Fortunato Depero, De Pistoris, Giorgio de Chirico, Maurits Cornelis Escher, Victor Vasarely, Ugo Nespolo, Giulio Paolini, Giuseppe Fiducia, Pier Augusto Breccia, Alfredo Zelli, Cesar Santos, and site-specific works by some of the most innovative and sensational digital artists on the Italian and international contemporary scene: Robert Alice, Refik Anadol, Alex Braga, Joshua Chaplin, Sofia Crespo and Feileacan McCormick, Damjanski, Primavera De Filippi, fuse*, Fabio Giampietro with Paolo Di Giacomo, Krista Kim, Mario Klingemann, Pak, Joe Pease, Federico Solmi, Sasha Stiles, Pinar Yoldas. 

Every single room in the Palazzo Cipolla will become a world of its own, where different rules and spaces apply. A special swing will make visitors feel as if they were diving into a parallel world; digital images will suddenly take shape in physical reality; an immersive work will display ‘digital Zen philosophy’; a sound performance will let visitors experience multisensory multiplication. Spectators will get fully immersed in generative poems, encounter sculptures built on blockchain technology, as well as interactive works that combine biological sciences with digital technologies, to create a ‘second nature’. 

“By bringing the future into the present, digital technology is changing the way we see reality as well as strongly impacting on our daily lives. Art too has conformed to this coexistence between past, present and future, as confirmed by one of the latest exhibitions – the one on Quayola – I held at Palazzo Cipolla”, says Prof. Emanuele, President of the Fondazione Terzo Pilastro, who adds: “In this new exhibition we are presenting today, entitled Ipotesi Metaverso (Metaverse Hypothesis), 32 historical and contemporary artists from all over the world will be dialoguing with each other. Tradition – still an essential reference point – will be combined with new advancing art and the digital world, through breakthrough contributions from new technology, also in the way they manifest feelings, which has always been at the core of every work of art, in every era”.

“In our view, the hypothetical Metaverse – this new hyper-technological dimension – should be an addition to rather than a replacement for real life. Hence, paintings and sculptures by artists who have created alternative ‘worlds’ coexist with immersive artworks. In this way, visitors are often called upon to act as protagonists. They are offered a balanced – if sometimes disorienting – relationship between ‘physical’ and ‘digital’ worlds. This sort of ‘laboratory for the future’ is designed to make visitors go through an experience which, to some extent, is similar to what we expected see in the years to come, with the coexistence of contemplation and immersion, through an almost simultaneous perception of the material and the immaterial, between stability and fluctuation”, stated the two curators Simongini and Tabacchi.