Onirica NFT milano

On the occasion of Milan Design Week, Montenapoleone District presents Onirica, the first public video installation created in Italy, created by Giuseppe Lo Schiavo (Glos).

The work is presented as a journey inside the mind of a cybernetic man of the future, taking inspiration from the latest developments in funcional neuroimaging and AI.

The artist, through AI, creates a neural connection between more than 1,000 design objects belonging to the Memphis group, the historic Italian design and architecture collective founded by Ettore Sottsass in the early 1980s.

The digital animation project is inspired by recent developments in a new scientific field called functional neuroimaging where scientists discovered new ways to recreate an image a person sees or dreams by looking at the person’s brain activity. These procedures are made by analyzing the brain waves from monitoring devices such as fMRI (Functional magnetic resonance imaging) and EEG (electroencephalogram). 

What if in the future we will be able to create art and visuals just by thinking about them?

Installation-01web

The animation can be sectioned into 4 main parts:

1 Experiment room, connection.

The cyber human starts the experiment connecting (wirelessly) his brain to the system.

This scene is visually inspired by The Lamentation of Christ, a painting from c. 1480 by the Italian Renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna.

2 Trip inside the brain-generated visuals.

Conceptual scenes produced by the brain. Each scene was designed to deliver a specific concept, from ecology to fetishism to robot slavery. All scenes are behavioural byproducts of socialization. 

3 Interference.

Towards the end of the experiment, the brain’s connection with the system is “losing signal”, producing distorted images.

4 Hallucination.

The interference is causing a hallucination generating a neural connection between “memories” of more than 1,000 design objects belonging to the Memphis group.

Deep image reconstruction from human brain activity. Guohua Shen, Tomoyasu Horikawa, Kei Majima, Yukiyasu Kamitani

Objects generated by a machine learning model trained by the artist on more than 1000 design objects from the Menphis Milano collective.

The artist was inspired by scientific papers published by:

Neuralink, founded by Elon Musk

Neurobotics, and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology

Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, Kyoto, Japan. 

Nikolaus Kriegeskorte from Columbia university.

More details on the research papers can be found here:

https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006633

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/01/mind-reading-algorithm-can-decode-pictures-your-head

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10309-7