Brave New World
(An Online Art Project)

April 1997
Viafarini, Milan

As curator of Viafarini’s Artists’ Archive in Milan (September 1996 — June 1997), I curated a series of group exhibitions featuring emerging Italian artists selected from the archive. One of these shows was Brave New World, a pioneering online art project on the theme of “non-places”, the term coined by French anthropologist Marc Augé to indicate places in which individuals remain anonymous and lonely such as airports, motorways, hotel rooms, airports, and shopping malls. Brave New World included: a short essay by me illustrated by works of Andreas Gursky; the foreword of Marc Auge’s seminal book Non-lieux (Paris: Seuil 1992); a text by Greek architect Andreas Angelidakis (“Corporate Style”, also published in Purple Prose, no. 12, Summer 1997); excerpts from novels by Stanley Elkin, Thomas Pynchon, Richard Brautigan, and Donald Barthelme curated by Italian writer and play writer Luca Scarlini; a soundtrack (International Style) curated by Italian artist and designer Mario Milizia; a section dedicated to a series of exhibitions, performances and events hosted in six different laundrettes and curated by Italian designer Diego Grandi (Biodegradabile 78%); a gallery of art projects by Umberto Cavenago, Daniele Colombo, Paola Di Bello, Antonio De Pascale, Stefania Galegati, Premiata Ditta, Michele Morosinotto, Luca Pancrazzi, Fiamma Secchi, Alessandra Tesi, and Mario Milizia. The art gallery was the most challenging part of the project as most artists had never considered creating “digital art” before. After all, we are talking of the infancy of the digital era, when 56K modems used to produce odd scratching sounds, few creative hipsters were the only ones using Apple computers, and cell phones were as big as a clutch. Today, the project may seem naive. However, it remains one of the projects I am most proud of and fond of. Ps. Thanks to Premiata Ditta for keeping it still alive!