Play it again, LP

Year 2023 – containing the number 7 in its universal sum, with the number 2 repeated twice, holding itself in the ’empty’ vortex of the 0 and then rising, bending, curving, opening up to the sacred number 3 – triptych of delights, holy trinity (in the Franciscan vision) and also representing brain wave frequency (Theta). A continuous angelic stammer marking a transformational change, where hexagrams and trigrams combine in continuous and broken lines, in the duality of Yin and Yang.

Telling the story of Luigi Pagliarini is a complex undertaking, whether for those who knew him, met him, crossed paths or connected with him, or simply heard about him. The year opened with a love letter that was never delivered and continued with another equally loving letter, this time dedicated to you. I promise, it will come directly to Planet Mind with a one-way stamp. I will try to do this in the only way that is possible for me now, by writing to you (until I disappear into it).

Dear Luigi, I have known you since 2017 (the years of friendship, mutual trust and discovery). We met at the Academy of Fine Arts in Macerata – you a neuropsychologist by training and ‘choral’ artist, as well as a professor of Theory of Perception and Psychology of Form, Semiology of the Body, and Psychology of Cultural and Mass Consumption, while I was trying to figure out what I would do when I grew up. I presented the work of Bodyquake ^[1], by Salvatore Iaconesi to the Academy students, a work which Iaconesi was bringing to Macerata for the first time, together with Oriana Persico and Francesca Fini. All three of us met – you, me and Salvatore – a hybridised triptych of relationships.

There was reciprocal trust right from the start, an intellectual connection, glances where no words were needed but the right frequency with which to tune into the universe, and then your thunderous laughter to heal the winter that had just passed. I got to know your story, your secrets, and I realised how similar the lines of our hands are (not Simean), but just enough to understand that the lines of the heart and head were thin, tending towards us. We spoke about hell a lot, a little about purgatory and heaven; we were interested in the damned, rather than the saints. There I was, discovering you with slow but profound steps, marvelling at how much you already sensed about the world to come, but no one had noticed yet, all too preoccupied with chasing their tails without looking ahead, while you were already there, in front of everyone, with a knowing air.

Educational robotics, artificial intelligence, robotic art, software art – it was the 1990s and the roots had already been laid for what would later be STEAM practices involving (albeit with difficulty) schools, academies and universities.

With your sensory thinking you composed your modular symphony and created your code (Pagliarini Code, 2013-2018). When Moore’s Law already no longer worked, you dared to bury it in the graveyard of obsolescence (Communication Graveyard 2007).

You played pixels in real time (Cyber Infinity, 2003) in the ecological web of endless circular deep thought, created ‘eco-sustainable’ masks (Pixel Being, 2016-2019) and ‘sensitive’ suits (Fatherboard Superavatar, 2007). Luigi, archaeologist of the future, with a critical look at the present, laden with the past and inflated by the future.

Your way of provoking is nothing but a vocation to generate radical ‘changes’ in (climate) thinking, a ‘sensory’ crossroads on which the organic relationship of unlimited being around all living things is threaded, embracing them. You are a multifaceted artist, having been involved in numerous projects and consultancies, from LEGO Group to SONY and Real World Records (Digital Playground, Tangible Tiles, 2001), from CNR to MIT via Parc de La Villette: creativity and the aesthetic dimension, design and vision. You are the founder and director of the Pescara Electronic Artists Meeting (PEAM, 2003-2006), artistic director of Art Cafè Ecoteca (2002-2007) and curator of the Robo[art] section of the Robotsatplay Festival in Denmark (2006-2007), inventor and founder of RoboCup Junior and member of the editorial board of the Journal of Artificial Life and Robotics, editorial board of the Rivista di Psicologia dell’Arte, member of the Scientific Committee of the International Conference Psychology-Based Technologies and board member of APEXperience.

Your biography is much more than this chronological list, but is also a writing that generated a Parallel Relational Universe (URP^[1], 2013-2014) where analogue and digital learn to converge in Sergio Lombardo’s eventualist dimension. Your Alive Art^[3] gave us a pre-powerful reaction to life, where the dynamic aspect of the work drove a profound change and harvested its unpredictability and vulnerability with polymorphous intelligence. The Artificial Painter (1994) was the first software to make use of genetic algorithms and neural networks which even generated stereotypical images of facial expressions Face-it (1995). The list is very long and incomplete: Netglect (1995), Share-A-Life (1996), I.F.P (1997), Web Interactive Cellular Automata (1997), Pomeriggio (1997), ToyBot (1997), Full Room (1998), Nerone (1999), Resurrection (2000), LifeGrabber (2003), Energies Visualiser (2004), Legami (2009), Entertainment Robotics (2009), Magic Tiles (2011), Music Cubes (2013), AG (Andrea Gabriele / Algoritmi Genetici (2013) and Reperto Transtecnologico (2014)^[4].

Art and science, atoms and pixels, painting and algorithms – a perfect union that eliminates the anthropocentric vision that you have found too narrow, moving to the micro-biotic, zoocentric dimension, where quantum physics, botany, psychology and artificial intelligence generate what you have managed to later collect in your choral Art^[5] (#restacorale): an open, collective and still work in progress manifesto (Greetings from the world in captivity) (on which there is much to do and much to say). stayTranscendent, #stayHome, #staySecure, #stayCreative, #stayHuman, #stayYourself, #stayInAcoustic.

Your private and universal contemporary essence is choral, where collaborative intelligence informs all your work and efforts, and from where, during the Covid period, even Coronello (2020) was conceived – a small technological artefact created to explain social distancing to children.

In 2022 illness strikes and a fairy tale for everyone (both young and old) comes in response: il Pianeta Mente^[6]. A cerebral, ‘fifth-level’ operA(c)tion unleashing a supernova from your ‘head’, which holds subcodes and clues inside that consitute your thought and which continues to feed the flame that sustains the light (Candelabro^[7], 2022), a light that even now illuminates your soul as an artist, in a spiritual, transcendental, and choral dimension, even religious (all religions). A continuous meditation. Like a Buddha (one of the last works you have created) you generate the vortex of the living in all forms – to the end and beyond every degree of plural existence – from fungus to bacteria, from animals to plants, satellites connected by the peremptory demand of your fragile, raucous, but courageous voice.

This is a choral practice where the tactic involved in thought announces its revolution. In your being Leo (not only the zodiac sign), snake, samurai, but also brother-Mind and father-Skin, in life and death you have always gone beyond your thinking with original, superlative, authentic and integral energy. Now Planet-Pagliarini is ready to welcome us and transform everything with responsibility and the “backbone” in which the bone marrow of your imagination and pre-vision lies.

The ‘pilot’ who drove the conscious and unconscious (you and I know what we are talking about) has shifted gear, exceeding permitted speed limits in an extreme attempt at love, almost affecting, to deliver a different sense of living – one without expectations, but with the energy and courage necessary to develop this universal relationship by reducing the “elastic band” of distance, to simply be in the world in a healthier and, above all, choral way. With its ritual quality, the chorus is like a deafening wave crashing on the rocks where the sea (of your life) reacts to your constant making and unmaking, leaving traces of your infinite atmospheres and the expansion of your (atmospheric) energy on the sand.

Play it again, dear Luigi, that song by Thelius Monk, and all of us will play along and join you in imagining until we explode: the birth of a new life: BIG BANG. LP: Open and Choral Artwork.

immagini: (cover 1) LuigiPagliarini, «PercAction», 2005 (2) Luigi Pagliarini, «Pixel Being», 2016-19 (3) Luigi Pagliarini, «Codice Pagliarini», 2014 (4) Luigi Pagliarini, «Coronello», 2020 (5) Luigi Pagliarini, «Il Candelabro», 2022 (6) Luigi Pagliarini, «Il pianeta Mente», 2023 (7) Luigi Pagliarini e Giorgio Cipolletta (8) Luigi Pagliarini, «Ho risolto tutto», 2023