Book your seat for September 29, 2022 6:00 p.m., at Fondazione Giorgio Cini to the link.

 

Digitisation practices are peerless and now irreplaceable tools for the preservation and enhancement of cultural heritage, but they can also be used to produce new works. This is the case with The Mask of Time, an audio-visual creation made for the Fondazione Giorgio Cini by Mattia Casalegno and the sound artist Maurizio Martusciello aka Martux_M, announced with a trailer launched for the reopening of the Teatro Verde on the Island of San Giorgio on 10 April 2022.

 

Inaugurated in 1954 by Vittorio Cini, the theatre is the focus of a major campaign to restore the island’s monumental architecture and a fascinating subject of study for the artists who have chosen to feature it in the four-part film. In The Mask of Time, the theatre is seen through its history of constructions and glorious past productions but also through the future in a distant, utopian post-anthropocentric age, in which nature has regained its spaces, now inhabited by high-definition digital humans. Experimental technologies were used to create the film, such as Midjourney, a text-based image generator derived from Open AI DALL-E, and Unreal Engine 5, the major platform for gaming and for the future development of a metaverse with increasingly realistic avatars.

 

The overall project will bring one of Venice’s most suggestive theatres back to life, also virtually, and connect contemporary creativity with innovations involved in producing sophisticated narratives for audiences both near and far. By starting from considering the theatre as a place of fiction and representation, its potential will be explored further. To do so, Mattia Casalegno has adopted digitisation tools and processed the images taken by scanner drones. Moreover, by exploring the archive documents in the Institute of Theatre and Opera, he became familiar with historical Teatro Verde performances: the classics of Greek tragedy, Ariadne, Pasiphae and the Minotaur, but also the mythologies of religious symbols closest to his Neapolitan culture; all of this would then be accompanied by original music from sound artist Maurizio Martusciello aka Martux_M.

 

Together they have created a work of great artistic and communicative significance, which will be presented to the public on 29 September as a symbol of the regeneration of the Teatro Verde and of a culture increasingly interested in the latest, fast-evolving technological-scientific developments.