ROSETTA MISSION 2020

Casa Degli Artisti is glad to present Luca Pozzi’s project “Rosetta Mission 2020” (RM2020), produced by An-Icon (An-Iconology ERC: History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images) and conceived, by the Milanese artist, not only has his latest CROSS-REALITY artwork, but also as a new collaborative interdisciplinary meta-exhibition curated by The Swan Station. It’s been realized during his residency program started in February 2020, at the 12° Atelier, as a propositive reaction to the actual pandemic crisis, collecting and harmonizing contributions by opinion leaders of different disciplines like Carlo Rovelli (Physicist), Alain Connes (Mathematician), Michelangelo Pistoletto (artist) and Garrett Lisi (Physicist).

“RM2020” is inspired by the homonymous space mission of E.S.A., the European Spatial Agency between 2004 and 2016. It is the 3D reconstruction of the 67.P Churyumov Gerasimenko comet, transformed from a physical celestial body into a digital convergence point for different disciplines. A floating island hidden inside a digital sculpture called “Third Eye prophecy” originally generated, as an augmented reality application, between Andrea Mantegna’s (Madonna col bambino) and Giovanni Bellini’s (Madonna Greca) masterpieces at The Pinacoteca of Brera in Milan the Christmas night 2019. The “RM2020” is a temporary free Hub, without specific political, religious, and geographical coordinates, suitable for interdisciplinary contributions: a meeting point for artists, mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists. A place for a hybrid public, that overcomes the linguistic and physical boundaries in the pandemic era. A meta place suspended in time, able to teleport the travelers into an immersive space conceived as a new hyper-technological, collaborative environment.

The project aims to be a metaphorical digital Rosetta Stone accessible after 2,200 years since the archaeological find that annihilated the Babel Tower purposes. A relational tool that allows information to flow and connect the people of the world. The “RM2020” takes place as a Mozilla Hubs social community for multiple users and as a solo meditative journey developed in Unity downloadable from the artist website” (www.lucapozzi.com)

The contributions of the featured researchers divide the comet’s surface into 5 macro-areas, intended to be used for different purposes such as exhibitions, concerts, performances, and conferences. Through the intimate interconnection of the various personalities, the Rosetta Mission 2020 offers a single multi-disciplinary stage in continuous evolution that constantly processes incoming data from Instagram / Twitter / Youtube and the world of IoT, embedding digital and physical platforms in a single environment.

In a critical moment of global danger, the “Rosetta Mission 2020” follows the example of the ESA space mission, a historical collective European exploration of outer space that guaranteed the first rendezvous with a comet, ending up in the strengthening of an international community. As its artistic corresponding, RM2020 similarly gives the visitors the possibility to leave their own comfort zone and to network their knowledge, enhancing it as a collective identity. An example of Cross-Reality artwork, a living canvas to find new degrees of freedom.

Luca Pozzi / Artist

Luca Pozzi (Milan, 1983) is a visual artist and interdisciplinary mediator. Inspired by the worlds of art, physics, multi-messenger cosmology, and computer science, after graduating with a degree in painting and specializing in computer graphics and systems, he collaborates with visionary scientific communities, including Loop Quantum Gravity (PI), Compact Muon Solenoid (CERN) and the Fermi Large Area Telescope (INFN, NASA).

Zone 1: {Main Canyon}

SWAN STATION: Installed in the comet’s main canyon, the Swan Station is a curatorial platform for interdisciplinary collaborations originally inaugurated by the artist in 2018 as an Instagram

account:https://www.instagram.com/swan_station_legacy/

The platform in the unity version hosts a meta-temporary show that includes the “Supersymmetric Partner“ photographic series (2007-20014) and the Detectors series (2017-2019) by Luca Pozzi.

ARKANIANS: Located on the comet’s two peaks surrounding the main canyon, the Arkanian Shenron and the Arkanian Leonardo are two digital sculptures. They are connected to two physical sculptures equipped with muon detectors realized by the National Institute of Nuclear Physics. Thanks to artificial intelligence, the incoming data regarding the interactions between the metallic surfaces and the subatomic particles, are processed and transformed into meaningful sentences that are then shared on Twitter and on dedicated websites: www.arkanianshenron.com & www. arkanianleonardo.com.

Michelangelo Pistoletto / Artist

Michelangelo Pistoletto (Biella, 1933). Italian artist, known for being one of the leading exponents of the Arte Povera movement. His work mainly deals with the theme of reflection and unification between art and everyday life in terms of Gesamtkunstwerk. It has been influenced by the social implications of experimental trends in the performance and theatrical fields, he has promoted the centrality of art in society and politics through innovative projects that have reshaped contemporary culture. Pistoletto is a rare figure in artistic practice for his commitment to doing things differently, and connecting disciplines and languages.

Zone 2: {West Crater}

TERZO PARADISO: This iconic symbol of Pistoletto’s language represents the fusion between the first and the second paradise, being the former the paradise in which humans were fully integrated into nature and the latter the artificial one developed by human intelligence. This paradise is made of artificial needs, artificial products, artificial comforts, artificial pleasures, and every other form of artifice. Humankind has created a truly artificial world that has triggered, in an exponential manner and in parallel with beneficial effects, irreversible processes of decline and consumption of the natural world. The Third Paradise is the third phase of humanity, realized as a balanced connection between artifice and nature.

Alain Connes / Mathematician

Alain Connes, (Draguignan, 1947). After pioneering contributions on operator algebras, Alain Connes developed an ambitious program aimed at founding a “noncommutative geometry”. Step by step, he identified the elements of this new geometry, introducing new concepts such as cyclic cohomology, K-cycles theory, and a spectral approach to Riemannian geometry. The theory is now a well-established branch of mathematics involving hundreds of researchers. It provides very interesting models for physics such as a synthetic and geometric view on the standard model of elementary particles, a conceptual framework for the quantum Hall effect. Alain Connes’ research activity in 2019 focused on algebraic geometry and Segal’s Γ-rings, as well as the role of spectral realization and Hilbertian interpretation of local contributions to the Riemann-Weil formula.

Zone 3: {Core}

THE MUSIC OF PRIMES: Intended as a “choreography of the Eratosthenes sieve” Alain Connes’s contribution is situated inside the comet, at its core, representing the most intangible, ephemeral, and mimetic intervention of RM2020. It is a soundtrack automatically generated by an algorithm that converts PRIME NUMBERS from 7 to 67 in a seventeenth-century style melody, proving the existence of a solid mathematical structure behind phenomena.

Carlo Rovelli / Physicist

Carlo Rovelli, (Verona, 1956), is a US citizen but lives between France and Canada. His main activity is in theoretical physics, where he is known as one of the founders of loop quantum gravity. He has also an interest in the history and philosophy of science. He has written “Quantum Gravity”, a treatise on loop quantum gravity, and, for the large public, “The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy”, “Seven brief Lessons of physics” and more recently “Helgoland” about quantum mechanics. Rovelli has worked in various Universities in Italy, and abroad. He is currently head of the quantum gravity group at the Center For Theoretical Physics of the Aix-Marseille University. He is an Honorary Professor of the Normal University of Beijing and a member of the International Academy for the Philosophy of Science.

Zone 4: {South East Plateau}

AMPLITUDE: “When a big star dies it sinks into itself and becomes a black hole. The material it is made of slips into a long tube until it compresses so much that an immense pressure makes it bounce, and splash outwards again. As all of this happens inside, the surface – the mouth – of the black hole slowly gets smaller, until it becomes microscopic. Although very small, this surface still traps the entire star at the bottom of its long tube. But having reached very small dimensions, this mouth is transmuted by a quantum effect, in a surface from which everything can now escape. We can think of this phase transition as a tiny network of very short spacetime quanta linked together.”(Carlo Rovelli)

“The covariant formulation (spinfoam) of loop quantum gravity allows us to study this transition. Specifically, the theory is able to provide a mathematical object, the transition amplitude, which is closely related to the probability that the gravitational field makes a transition from a black hole geometry to a white hole geometry. The work consists of a graphic representation of the amplitude of transition of the phenomenon.(Farshid Soltani).

Garrett Lisi/ Physicist

Antony Garrett Lisi, (Los Angeles, 1968) is an American theoretical physicist and adventure sports enthusiast. Lisi works as an independent researcher without an academic position. He is a strong proponent of balance in life, in his case between scientific research and enjoyment of the outdoors. Lisi received two BS degrees with the highest honors in physics and mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles. He earned a PhD in physics from the University of California, San Diego. After getting his PhD, Lisi left academia and moved to Maui, where he volunteered as a staff member at a local Sudbury school, and split his time between working on his own physics research and surfing. Lisi taught physics classes at the University of Hawaii – Maui College. After two years on Maui, Lisi submitted a grant application to the newly formed Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) and was awarded an FQXi grant to develop his research in quantum mechanics and unification.

Zone 5: {Surroundings}

E8: Garrett Lisi’s contribution orbits around and inside the comet filling the surrounding space with unpredictable dynamics. His intervention, which resembles a majestic mandala, is composed of a multicolored luminous tessellation. Its beauty relies on the ability to describe, with great elegance and simplicity, all known fundamental interactions in physics. An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything is often referred to as “E8 Theory” based on the legendary paper Lisi published in 2007. The paper’s goal was to describe how the combined structure and dynamics of all gravitational and Standard Model particle fields, including fermions, are part of the E8 multi-dimensional Lie algebra, represented here in a flat two-dimensional version composed by puzzle pieces. Each piece corresponds to a different particle property such as electric charge or spin.

LEVEL: 1) Site-specific installation at Casa Degli Artisti

LEVEL: 2) Unity Game Engine for the solitary journey

LEVEL: 3) Mozilla Hubs for multiple interactive users