2 March 2025

1 month between April and November 2025

The two scholarships are aimed at artists and creatives interested in exploring the potential of new technologies for the enhancement and enjoyment of digital cultural heritage, with experience or sensitivity towards the use of digital tools and techniques related to visual design, multimedia storytelling, or technological innovation.

This project fits within the multidisciplinary context of Fondazione Giorgio Cini and aims to creatively reuse digital data from the digitisation of the Foundation’s collections. The goal is to foster new dialogues between artists and the Digital Centre team, encouraging interaction between art, new technologies, and science, and promoting the cross-pollination of languages.

Applicants must present a research project focused on the use of data from completed or ongoing digitisation campaigns or on topics addressed within the ARCHiVe Online Academy training programme. The two scholarships dedicated to the D.A.I.R. Digital Artist in Residence project grant access to the digitisation laboratory and shared use, alongside Fondazione Giorgio Cini staff, of all technological equipment and IT resources (hardware and software) at the Digital Centre ARCHiVe during the residency period.

The Residence, located within the park of the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, can accommodate up to 90 scholars at once in single or double rooms. The Residence is equipped with reception services, security, cleaning, and self-service laundry facilities. Common areas such as the living room, music room, fitness area, and terrace are open to all guests to encourage social interaction and the exchange of ideas.

Selected scholarship holders may access the Fondazione Giorgio Cini’s Libraries and Photo Library upon request. These facilities specialise in art history, Venetian history, literature, music, dance, theatre, ancient books, and comparative civilisations and spirituality. All libraries offer Wi-Fi access. Scholars are welcome to attend the cultural initiatives (seminars, conferences, concerts, exhibitions) organised by Fondazione Giorgio Cini.

Commissioned by Vittorio Cini and inaugurated in 1954, the open-air amphitheatre designed by architect Luigi Vietti (1903-1998) has often been an important cultural venue in Venice and has hosted excellent productions of the performing arts. In 2021 the theatre was the subject of a major restoration project that, thanks to a partnership with Cartier,  brought its architecture back to life and made the most of all the qualities of the building materials, the surrounding greenery, the fascinating spaces and the stunning landscape views.

To enhance this beautiful theatre and relaunch its leading creative role, Fondazione Giorgio Cini invited Mattia Casalegno, one of Italy’s most successful digital artists based in New York, to create a work that would showcase the beauty of the theatre starting from the photogrammetric acquisition carried out with drones by Factum Foundation, an institutional partner of ARCHiVe. Curatorship is by Ennio Bianco.

In The Mask of Time, the architecture and history of the Teatro Verde have been brought back to life in a world inhabited by hyper-realistic avatars, made through the creative use of pioneering 3D animation and text processing software, combined with sound designed by Maurizio Martuscello aka Martux_m. The avatars will become actors performing the theatre’s great historical productions. Photorealistic digital human beings are immersed in real sets as well as dreamlike environments in a post-human sci-fi world, somewhere between fiction and representation, in which Nature and Art breathe and flourish. The narrative unfolds through intense imagery in four acts on the subject of the Teatro Verde: History, Performances, Present and Future. It thus explores themes such as teatri di verzura (garden theatres), the golden age of the amphitheatre, and its dialogue with Nature, both dominated and dominating and now a creative force cooperating in the theatre’s new lease of life.

Mattia Casalegno’s work starts from the idea of theatre as a place of fiction and representation. Situated at the intersection between Nature and Culture, it explores the relationships and tensions that unite the natural environment, the human world, and technologies.

The project starts from the notion that people interact with the world through multiple sensory streams: we see objects, hear sounds, read words, feel textures, taste flavours, combine information, and form associations between the senses. Similarly, real-world data is made up of various signals occurring simultaneously, such as video frames and audio tracks, web images, captions, and voice tracks. Casalegno adopts this common logic in the creation of the multimodal work The Mask of Time.

In The Mask of Time, thanks to a combination of in-depth archival research on material held by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini’s Institute of Theatre and Opera and the innovative application of Artificial Intelligence with the visual power of new kinds of software, the architecture and the history of the Teatro Verde have been brought back to life in a world inhabited by hyper-realistic avatars. Fundamental is also the creative use of pioneering 3D animation and text processing software, combined with sound designed by Martux_m and the costume designs of the 3D garments by Amin Farah. All of these competencies are perfectly blended into a single artistic meta-language.

In the future it will be possible to draw on all the materials used for this video, for example, to recreate paths inside the Teatro Verde enabling audiences to converse with characters generated in augmented reality, or to offer an interactive virtual tour experience of the Teatro Verde in a metaverse.