99 African Women

2023 

Over the past 10 years more than a million migrants have arrived from Africa on Italian shores and at least 30,000 people are believed to have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea on their way to Italy. 

Many of them are women and children. 

For us they are often just numbers communicated by the media, but what happens to them once they arrive ? They often disappear, like ghosts….who are they ? , Where they come from  ? , What did they do in their country ? ,  What are they looking for ? What are they running from?

99 African Women is a musical NFT that talks about migrant women: poor, rich, healthy, sick, Muslim, Catholic, animist, Orthodox, living in cities, in villages, in countryside, on the edge of rivers, on the sea, in the forest , sorceresses, witches, healers, nurses, doctors, graduates, computer scientists, workers, unemployed, prostitutes, drug addicts, homeless, models, photographers, girls, mothers, grandmothers, guerrillas, terrorists, soldiers, musicians, dancers, cooks, hungry, thirsty ,hunters, sporty, sad, happy, thoughtful, scared, raped, wounded….

Keith Tippett: piano , Roberto Musci: cello, vocals (sampler)

All profits from the sale will be donated to charity  to United Nation Refugee Agency ( NHCR) that  helps and save lives and build better futures for millions of people forced to flee their homes.

Five women in Dadaism

2023 

Clara Tice (22 May 1888 – 2 February 1973) was an American avant-garde illustrator and artist, who spent most of her life in New York City, United States. Because of her provocative art and public appearances, she was seen as representative of bohemian Greenwich Village and thus known as "The Queen of Greenwich Village.

Hannah Höch (German: 1 November 1889 – 31 May 1978) was a German Dada artist. She is best known for her work of the Weimar period, when she was one of the originators of photomontage

Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven ( 12 July 1874 – 14 December 1927) was a German-born avant-garde visual artist and poet, who was active in Greenwich Village, New York, from 1913 to 1923, where her radical self-displays came to embody a living Dada.

Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti (20 October 1889 – 11 September 1963) was a French Dadaist painter, collagist, sculptor, and draughtsman. Her work was significant to the development of Paris Dada and modernism and her drawings and collages explore fascinating gender dynamics.

Beatrice Wood (March 3, 1893 – March 12, 1998) was an American artist and studio potter involved in the Avant Garde movement in the United States; she founded and edited The Blind Man and Rongwrong magazines in New York City with French artist Marcel Duchamp and writer Henri-Pierre Roché in 1917.

The music was created using white noise modulations and singing bowls as the basis for original Dadaist poetry and music, recorded between 1916 and 1926 on 78 rpm records and remixed by an artificial intelligence music program .

Jellyfish

2023 

Jellyfish are very ancient animals. Jellyfish fossils have been found dating back more than 550 million years ago (Cambrian period), 250 million years before dinosaurs appeared on earth. 

Some of them are considered eternal animals, being able to transform themselves from jellyfish to polyps, in an eternal life cycle. When man and all other animals will be extinct on earth, jellyfish will be the only living beings that will populate our planet and, perhaps, will also learn to fly, living not only in the water but also in the air.  

And when jellyfish sleep, they often dream of music...

Jellyfish is a project in 3 parts :

- 3 music NFTs published on Makersplace : 

"Lion's mane jellyfish" : Duduk , Synth

"Portuguese man o' war"  : Bendir ,   El.Guitar , Synth

"Moon jelly" - music : Kalimba , Voice , Synth

- 1 musical NFT published on Catalog.work : 

"Deep Red Jellyfish"  : Synth , Stria , Buchla , Glide    Verb , Voice

6 E Q U J 5

2023

The S.E.T.I. (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) project was officially born on February 1, 1985. It is the culmination of various research and studies aimed at searching for life in the universe. 

In 1977, the media sensation aroused the reception of a 72-second signal that went down in history as the "WOW!" message ( 6EQUJ5 ). The values (from 1 to 9 and from A to Z) indicate an intensity probably linked to an intelligent transmission.

The signal came from the constellation of Sagittarius, from a star called 2MASS 19281982-2640123 which is 1800 light years away from the earth. 

I have imagined that , for each of the different signal  strengths, there was a music transmission. 

6 E Q U J 5 : 6 : 2'07" , E : 1'58" , Q : 2'08" , U : 2'46" , J : 2'10" , 5 : 2'16" 

Total time : 13' 25"

Cover and music : Roberto Musci - Granular Synthesis , Vcs3 , Buchla , Arp , Percussion 

Pangea Panthalassa

2023

“Pangea” is the name of the continent that contained all the land that emerged between 540 and 200 million years ago, in the Paleozoic and Mesozoic periods.

The name "Pangea" means "all the earth" from the ancient Greek "παυ" = "all" and "γεα" = "earth".

The vast ocean that surrounded Pangea is called "Panthalassa", from the ancient Greek “παυ” = “all” and “θάλασσα” = "sea".

Man appeared on earth about 300,000 years ago, by which time the lands and oceans had divided, forming  Laurasia and Gondwana and then the world we know.

In this project I imagined that Pangea was inhabited by man and that a global culture was born without divisions created by borders, wars, religions or ethnic groups.

The music and images of Pangea unite all the cultures of the world : Africa ( voices )

Middle East ( darbouka , ney , finger cymbals )

Far East (veena , sarong ,tabla , mridangam , pipa lute )

Europe ( piano , guitar , harp, marimba , clarinet , flute , orchestra ) , America ( banjo ) 

Oceania ( voice ).

Art does not respect borders, it escapes ethnic groups, it does not care about religions but mixes among peoples creating surprising masterpieces.

Ukiyo-e  A.I. 

2023

With " Ukiyo -e A.I. " I tried to recreate the spirit that pervades Ukiyo-e painting ,the sensations, the colours, the flavors that these paintings evokes me, integrating it with traditional Japanese music and Haiku poetry.

For the Ukiyo-e A.I. project I used a neural networks GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks ) integrating VQGAN (Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network) and CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training ) .

In the VQGAN and CLIP neural network for Ukiyo-e A.I. project I inserted:

- Images of Ukiyo-e paintings created by the great Japanese masters representing Samurai, Geishas, Kabuki Actors, Animals.

- Traditional Japanese musical for Shamisen, Shakuhachi, Koto and Kabuki orchestra music , transformed into Spectrogram, linked to images.

- Haiku: traditional Japanese short poetry compositions.

Ukiyo-e : "picture of the floating world" is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th ( Edo period ). Masters like Moronobu , Utamaro , Sharaku Hokusai, Hiroshige and Kuniyoshi  painting subjects as female beauties ,kabuki actors , sumo wrestlers , scenes from history and folk tales , travel scenes and landscapes, flora and fauna . 

Music : traditional music instruments like koto (plucked half-tube zither) , shakuhachi ( end-blown flute made of bamboo ) ,shamisen ( three-stringed instrument played with a plectrum ) and Kabuki orchestra ( with all these instruments and different percussion)

Haiku : is a type of short form poetry that consist of three phrases composed of 17 phonetic units . Famous poetries were :   Moritake, Bashō, Shiki and Kyoshi.

Strange Attractors

2022

Strange Attractors is a musical project linked to the theories of chaotic attractors in the Chaos theory. 

The term 'Strange Attractor' is used to describe an attractor that displays sensitive dependence on initial conditions which are initially close on the attractor but become exponentially separated with time, creating a chaotic system. 

A strange attractor is special in that it can predict certain characteristics of a chaotic pattern in great detail without being able to assign a specific spatial location to the pattern.

The most famous strange attractor is undoubtedly the Lorenz attractor : a three dimensional object whose body plan resembles a butterfly or a mask. 

The Lorenz attractor, named for its discoverer Edward N. Lorenz, arose from a mathematical model of the atmosphere.

The Lorenz attractor was the first strange attractor, but there are many systems of equations that give rise to strange attractors. 

Music linked to NFTs is a new and different way of distributing and listening to music, no longer linked to physical or digital media but the possibility of having images, videos and music to experience a musical project. 

The Strange Attractors project consists of 4 Music NFT with videos which illustrate the different attractors created by mathematical formulas  .

Music for : Guitar , Vcs3 , Buchla , Percussion , Voice , Synth , Granular Synthesis and electronics

Silicon-Carbon based life

2022

In 2016 a group of researchers from the California Institute of Technology Calthec  , coordinated by Frances H. Arnold (specializing in biocatalysis, protein engineering, evolutionary enzyme and synthetic biology), managed to create carbon-silicon bonds in living cells, demonstrating, for the first time, that nature can incorporate silicon into DNA molecules, creating silicon-based xeno DNA. 

Silicon is present in the shells of unicellular algae called diatoms, which use it to build a protective barrier.

It is also present in horsetails, considered the most ancient and widespread plants on almost all continents: they extract silicon from the earth and concentrate it in the stem, making it hard and difficult to chew to discourage herbivores.

Researchers began the creation of silicon and carbon-based organisms by isolating a protein that occurs naturally in the bacterium Rhodothermus Marinus, which thrives in Icelandic hot springs, and inserted it into a bacterium that commonly lives in our bodies (Escherichia coli ) to create a xenon bacterium.

This discovery opens up a real possibility of being able to create a life form with a genetic base of silicon-carbon Xeno Dna with extraordinary implications for astrobiology: a possibility of life on other planets. This discovery could also help doctors and researchers to develop new drugs and innovative industrial catalysts.

The Silicon-Carbon based life project consists of 4 NFT videos with music which illustrate the different stages of meiosis ( a process where a single cell divides twice to produce four cells containing half the original amount of genetic information ) for the birth of a new life .

Music for : Guitar , Vcs3 , Buchla , Percussion , Voice , Synth , Granular Synthesis and electronics

Xenomorphs cells 

2021

My “ Xenomorphs cell ” project consists of 4 NFTs of experimental graphic synthesis with video and music , correlated and inspired by the most recent and innovative scientific discoveries in xenobiology and advanced research in biotechnology, with the creation of xeno-DNA with structural chemical changes relative to its natural counterparts using Glycol , Hexose and Threose 

Music for : Guitar , Vcs3 , Buchla , Percussion , Voice , Synth , Granular Synthesis and electronics

 XNA ( Xeno-DNA)  is a synthetic polymer created in the laboratory , that can carry new and alien genetic information as human DNA, but with different molecular constituents. Because the XNAs are able to pass genetic information from one generation to the next,  XNAs could serve as the building blocks for completely new genetic systems and  create synthetic life ( xeno-organism ). 

Creating a genetic code of  XNAs with more bases yields endless opportunities for genetic modification and expansion of chemical functionality.

Using the chemical formulas of the components of the new Xeno-DNA , its three-dimensional structure and interfacing them ,with mathematical formulas of graphic synthesis and movement, I imagined the creation of xeno cells with three different bases :  Threose , Glycol , Hexose . 

I created 4 videos of 2 minutes each highlighting the evolution of the development of  three different xeno- cells  in  different stages of development ( mitosis , meiosis  ), with music composed for the each stage and scientific information and bibliography . 

Music for : Guitar , Vcs3 , Buchla , Percussion , Voice , Synth , Granular Synthesis and electronics