Luca Pozzi. The Rosetta Mission 2020

The 12° Atelier is a virtual atelier born in 2020 from the collaboration between Casa degli Artisti and the ERC Advanced Grant project “AN-ICON. An-Iconology: History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images” (funded by the European Research Council (ERC) within the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme of the European Union) coordinated by Prof. Andrea Pinotti, at the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” of the State University of Milan. From 2021, the 12° Atelier, in addition to the eleven ateliers physically present in Casa degli Artisti, will host a programme of artistic residencies produced by AN-ICON and curated by Elisabetta Modena and Sofia Pirandello. The AN-ICON residencies are aimed at Italian and international artists who want to create new works of art in virtual, augmented and mixed reality. The artists selected through a public call for applications are invited to reflect on the relationship between concrete physical space and virtual space, exploring the perceptive and agentive possibilities generated by new technologies. The artists’ work is also documented in a series of scientific publications and presented in a series of seminars and conferences open to the public. Luca Pozzi is the first artist in residence in the 12° Atelier. ROSETTA MISSION 2020 (RM2020) https://hubs.mozilla.com/beXNo3a/rosetta-mission-2020-by-luca-pozzi-level-1-120Inspired by the ESA (European Space Agency) space mission of the same name, which took place from 2004 to 2016, the work is presented as a virtual reality environment in which comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has been reconstructed, transformed from a physical celestial body into a digital place of convergence for different disciplines. The title of the space mission, and consequently that of the art project, alludes to the Rosetta Stone, an archaeological find which, by presenting the same text in the demotic, hieroglyphic and ancient Greek alphabets, has become a fundamental document for the comparison and interpretation of languages and, consequently, of history itself. The allusion to the ancient artefact here, 2200 years after its engraving, is metaphorical: a digital object that can be visited allows information to flow and people to connect from all over the world. The RM2020 is a place free from specific geographical, political and religious coordinates, a meeting point for artists, mathematicians, philosophers and scientists, from which interdisciplinary contributions can emerge. Conceived for a hybrid audience, the comet is a meta-place suspended in time, capable of teleporting visitors into an immersive hyper-technological and collaborative space, bypassing linguistic and physical boundaries, which have shown their limits in the era of the pandemic we are experiencing.