Metaverse Hypothesis at Palazzo Cipolla

It is undeniable that the concept of the metaverse creates curiosity and fascination in most people. A metaphysical universe that surpasses the concept of analogue reality with the use of the technological tools of virtual and augmented reality, cannot but stir something in us, cannot but make us jolt at the idea that we are living in the future, after all, the term itself was invented with a purely sci-fi meaning by the writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash.

Despite the bombastic declarations of the large multinationals on the metaverse (the company Facebook has even changed its name to Meta, revealing its immense plans for the years to come to create a real metaverse), it remains science fiction at present, or, if you like, something very similar to The Sims, a video game from 2000 that tries to simulate, with the means and technologies it possesses, the everyday life of avatars created and moved by users, sitting comfortably in front of their personal computers.

This is precisely why, if we want to get to the bottom of this concept of the future, which is germinating in our time, we have to rely on what McLuhan calls ‘people of integral consciousness’: artists. According to McLuhan, men should convince themselves that art is a precise advance knowledge of how to deal with the psychic and social consequences of the coming technology, and again, as we read in his Understanding Media (the Italian translation Gli strumenti del comunicare does not do it justice at all): ‘The artist is the man who in any field, scientific or humanistic, grasps the implications of his own actions and of the science of his time. He is the man of integral awareness. He can correct the relationships between the senses before the blows of a new technology have numbed conscious processes.”

In Ipotesi Metaverso, an exhibition curated by Gabriele Simongini and Serena Tabacchi at the Palazzo Cipolla in Rome, open to the public until 23 July 2023, we rely precisely on artists in the hypothesis of a hinted-at metaverse, awaiting the great technological breakthroughs that will be able to actually put it into practice, above all the semantic web. But the exhibition does not only look to the future: 16 contemporary artists reflecting on new technologies are flanked by 16 other historicised artists, who somehow create a connection with their future, which is our present, the integral awareness of two, three, generations ago.

This methodology, which may appear to be successful, and which gives meaning to the entire reflection on which the exhibition is based, is in reality also a double-edged sword that demonstrates how important it is to equate the artistic qualities of those present at the exhibition. Granted that this is not a criticism of the exhibition, but rather an ode to it, in recognition of its ability to open up new reasoning on perhaps the most changing concept of our contemporary times, the contemporary works in the exhibition do not hold a candle to the great masters, especially in its first part. Triangulating the series of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Prisons (1749-1761), Maurits Cornelis Escher’s tetrahedral Planetoid (1954) and Fabio Giampietro and Paolo Di Giacomo’s Aletide (2013), for example, corroborates the common thought of a contemporary art emptied of meaning, made to be enjoyed as in a playground, with that all-too-technological optical illusion that fascinates and makes the eyes glaze over. The work itself has sense and undoubted qualities, but these are debased when the same effect, devoid of any superficial gamification strategy, is created by two brilliant artists like Piranesi and Escher, without the need for any new technology, but only through their flat surface and the perception it creates in our brain, passing through our eye.

Gamification however functional to perception and aesthetics, unlike the two virtual reality ‘works’: Regenesis by Krista Kim and The Bacchanalian Ones by Federico Solmi. In both works, virtual reality technologies are neither functional to aesthetics nor indispensable to sense. In both cases, one has the feeling that one is playing a video game that is not even that interesting, and this is a pity, because both of the reflections underlying virtual reality – urbanism becoming an instrument of well-being in the first case, and the use of the grotesque, the outlandish and the ironic in a postmodern pastiche reflecting on the meaning of history in the second – are very fascinating focuses. Both works are much broader than the mere enjoyment of virtual reality with a VR helmet, but that very helmet is the nerve and weak point of both experiences.

Solmi’s sculptures, for example, ceramic sculptures made with an ancient technique, are the result of a triple translation and intrinsically have a complexity of meaning very close to the analogue-digital space in which we live. The grotesque historical characters, created in 3D through the computer and brought to life, in their existential dematerialisation, in the virtual reality we enter through the helmet, we find them in our analogue reality, concrete and immobile, statues that are transformed into idols of the other space in which we believe, like the statues of the divinities of Ancient Greece.

If this, that of the works described above, is the integral awareness of a subject as complex as analogue-digital space, and especially the metaverse, then there is still a long way to go. It seems that contemporary artists often only dwell on the tip of the iceberg, a mostly fun and carefree tip made for cultural amusement parks, without any real critical depth.