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Tu Sei Qui ( You Are Here), 2023 from Francesca Fini on Vimeo.

"YOU ARE HERE" is an artistic installation that explores the convergence of technology, art, and architecture. Using the advanced technology of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), the installation seeks to capture and reinterpret my daily experience within the architecture studio where I spend my long days, a place where creativity and structure blend into a continuous flow.

The installation is based on the capture of Radiance Fields through neural networks, a process that paradoxically brings real-world scanning closer to the practices of impressionist painting. Just as the impressionists sought to capture light and color rather than the physical form of objects, "YOU ARE HERE" seeks to capture the very light that informs the space of everyday life, transforming it into an artistic experience.

The result is not a simple mesh or geometry, as in the traditional photogrammetry process I have long experimented with, but rather a point cloud of light and color. This cloud of points is then reprocessed and altered by me in 3D, transforming the precise and impeccable digital recording of the volumes of the physical world offered by NeRF technology into a dreamlike journey.

In "YOU ARE HERE," objects and walls dissolve, becoming an intangible, luminous, and evanescent material. It reminds me of the landscape observed from the window of an airplane crossing the clouds, where physical form is replaced by a play of light and color, of emptiness and fullness. A world suspended, quite literally, in void, where we experience that strange and dual sensation of the viewer who scrutinizes, unnoticed, the shipwreck of the physical world, from their protected and private cocoon.

A Dream In Stone (2022) from Francesca Fini on Vimeo.

A DREAM IN STONE from Francesca Fini on Vimeo.

I am pleased to announce a very special event: the launch of A dream In Stone, a new digital art collection for Sedition Art, a pioneering curated platform for collecting exclusive digital art.

The collection was produced during a long residency at the medieval castle of Rocca Sinibalda (Rieti), and consists of eight short 3D films inspired by the precious frescoes by the Renaissance painter Girolamo Muziano.

The drop will go live on 22 September, while on 21 September those interested will have access to a pre-sale room with a private preview of the collection. Anyone wishing to be included in this whitelist can book by sending an email to: [email protected].

** Press Release **

A DREAM IN STONE Digital Castle Project Collection By Francesca Fini Produced during art residency at Rocca Sinibalda Castle Curated by Cristina Cenci and Enrico Pozzi

OFFICIAL RELEASE 21 SEPTEMBER 2022 Sedition Art Platform digitalartcastle.com/

A THOUSAND YEAR OLD ITALIAN CASTLE. ITS RENAISSANCE FRESCOES. OVID’S METAMORPHOSES. A TOP INTERNATIONAL VIDEO ARTIST. A DIGITAL PHILANTROPIC PROJECT.

An avant-garde yet Renaissance architectural achievement in its own right, the Rocca Sinibalda Castle has always hosted over the centuries highly innovative artists, architects, saints, writers, poets, performers, film makers, utopians, and patrons of the arts.

Some name dropping. The Renaissance and Mannerism painters of its frescoes: Perin del Vaca, Polidoro da Caravaggio, Giovanni da Udine, Girolamo Muziano. More recently: Caresse Crosby, Peggy Guggenheim, Ezra Pound, Salvador Dalì, the Living Theater, Allen Ginzberg and Gregory Corso, Gregory Markopoulos, Lilian Lijn, Tachis, Marcos Cei, Claudio Silvestrin, Martin Amis, Francesco Dimitri.

Spearheading modernity, the Castle has now turned digital. The four editions of its art residency and festival Endecameron have been steering towards digital art.

This is when Francesca Fini gets into it. An internationally known video artist, Francesca has become a protagonist and the curator of both Endecameron and the Castle’s current artistic identity: digital humanism through digital video art.

Francesca is the driving force behind the 2022 project. Focus on Girolamo Muziano’s depiction of some episodes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the overall visual theme of this zoomorphic castle. Morphing as the digital path to metamorphosis.

THE DIGITAL ART COLLECTION - A DREAM IN STONE 2022 8 video works inspired by a key SciFi theme, Earth after the vanishing of humanity. The Rocca Sinibalda Castle stands out as an intact and silent survivor to the catastrophic reversals of History. Still there to testify what we were and open a chasm into a maybe future. The frescoes become a relic, carefully preserved inside the womb of futuristic, self-sustainable and self-powered devices, which keep functioning unaware of their surrounding void and of the disappearance of their makers. A collection of premium short high-definition 3D films. Due to be published on the Sedition digital arts platform. The Castle as an Ark, a densely written stele that merges with the rock and crosses time, transforming it and self-transforming.

ART PHILANTROPY AND PATRONAGE The sale proceeds from the collections will concur to the long-awaited restoration of the Girolamo Muziano’s 1553 frescoes. A fraction of the proceeds is due to remunerate the artist for her July 2022 residence at the Castle while creating the collections.

THE CASTLE A powerful standing monolith. The only full-bodied form surviving in a formless time/space blue hole. Only fragments of past forms are left fluctuating in its vacuum. Relics. Chaotic testimonials of a disjointed by-gone reality. Bizarre entities. Splitters. Parts. Disembodies limbs. Formless, but living. Unendingly absorbed in their quest for new forms. Always unsuccessful, and always trying. They haphazardly assemble and disaggregate, producing nameless transitional entities and meaningless signs. Due to quickly fall apart through space and time. Striving to last and somehow live. Pursuing former identities nested in confused and unreliable memories. Morphing new identities in search of would-be definitions in dictionaries to come.

The Castle is there. A reminder that forms can still exist if a new gaze can reinvent or conjure them up. A fertile nostalgia breeding desire, fragile ghosts of reality, amd dreams eager to become maybe true.

The Castle as a repository of wonder, a Metamorphoses agent, an Arch of forms waiting for an Artist’s eye and ear to pull them out of their dystopian dissolution into the boundless liquidity of a pre-birth amniotic deep blue ether.

PARADISE LOST (2022) from Francesca Fini on Vimeo.

Francesca Fini, 2022

An alien creature wanders in a dreamlike and mysterious landscape that seems on the verge of collapsing at the first breath of wind.

SCONFINAMENTO (trespassing) | full performance (2020) from Francesca Fini on Vimeo.

During the COVID-19 LockDown, the Italian squares, always so full of life and rowdy, were suddenly silent and deserted, while life was hidden invisibly inside the houses, inside the silent buildings that harmoniously surround them. Daily life, once feverish, has become a fleeting and ephemeral circumstance: the squares were controlled by police vans, enlivened by the flight of a seagull, by a flag in the wind, by a runner's bicycle, by a couple wearing masks while walking the dog.

And so the loners adventuring in the confined city were narrative elements of a dystopian and cinematic story, which I started spying on avidly, through the dense system of tourist and surveillance webcams, accessible via the web, which I have discovered oversee almost every city in Italy. While I was locked in my studio, it gave me relief to look 'outside', to spy those beautiful airy and sunny squares - the places where I would have had an aperitif and a nice dinner, under normal conditions, through this virtual window on my computer screen. I also came to project these images, on the wall of my room, as in a new panopticon urged by the discomfort of the quarantine. At that point, being an artist working with live media and interaction design, I decided to take the next step.

Through motion tracking technology, I grabbed the webcam feed and passed it to a software, specially compiled for this project, which records and visually tracks the movement of people, vehicles, and animals, processing all the data flow and turning it into a concert for synth: movements generate sounds, modulations, graphic visualizations, digital effects. Finally, I returned everything back to the network, through a series of live streaming on Facebook, in a creative ring of real-time manipulations and interpretations.

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