(Finance) – With 1507 exhibiting companies Verona Marble Fair 2023of which almost 70% came from abroad, 51 thousand operators from 138 countries, with a + 10% compared to the 2022 edition and a large turnout from Canada, the United States and Brazil, lat the 58th edition of Marmomac carries the weight of great expectations.
Among the exhibitors at the largest international fair dedicated to marble and natural stones, also Marcondiroat the registry office Marco Marchese Borrelliwith the presentation of the sculptural work of art and design with the oxymoronic title Primitive Robot, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the “Giants of Mont’e Prama“.
It will be possible to discover up close Primitive Robot – together with the artist’s entire project at the Palaexpo in Verona from 24th to 27th September 2024in the space dedicated to Silvestri Art&Design founded by Davide Silvestria company that creates, alongside international artists, works of art and unique design pieces in collaboration with Primigen Srl cross-media and film production company, dedicated to the digitalization and innovation in the field of cross-transmedia entertainment and edutainment of Media Art.
Marcondiro’s Primitive Robot is made of high quality Carrara marble And worked entirely by‘artificial intelligence in 3D graphics with avatar movement. It contains three major messages that the artist wants to spread: a non-dystopian future, social equity and environmental awareness for a better humanity. Concepts also taken up and explored in the album DATA, Love in the Time of Technology where Marcondiro reflects on contemporary society grappling with prohibitive challenges such as – precisely – experiencing feelings in the age of artificial intelligence.
The visual stimulus to create the character that combines art, robotics and artificial intelligence, comes from Giants of Mont’e Pramalarge sculptures up to 2.5 meters high dating back to the Nuragic civilization and found in 1974 in the Sinis di Cabras, in north-western Sardinia. Sculpted in calcarenite, the “Giants” slept for about 3000 years before being discovered, by pure chance, during agricultural work in a field.
These statues are considered one of the most important and mysterious archaeological finds from the island and the entire Mediterraneanand their function is still debated among scholars. Some believe that they were votive statues, intended to represent heroes, warriors or divinities; others suggest that they were guardians of a monumental necropolis, given that well tombs have also been found in the same area. Their importance, regardless of the reason why they were sculpted, is notable: just think that they represent the oldest monumental sculptural testimony of the Mediterranean Westerneven preceding archaic Greek sculptures.
“I chose to create the work of the Primitive Robot using only robots for cutting marble to respect the original idea of the project: making ‘Art without Art-making’” explains the artist. “I was fascinated by the thought that a machine could create the Robot’s head. This concept ties into the contemporary narrative about Artificial Intelligence and the widespread fear that, one day, a AGI – an artificial intelligence capable of generating consciousness – becomes not only sentient, but also much more powerful than the human brain. The choice to sculpt the head of a robot was born from my desire to create an uchronistic link between the Nuragic sculptures of the Giants of Monte Prama and an android being that probably comes from a non-dystopian future. In this imaginary future, a enlightened population would have represented this mysterious being in sculptures and other art forms, to celebrate its enigmatic allure. The head of the Primitive Robot contains a sacred memory that preserves what happened and foreshadows what is yet to come.”
Marcondiro has been exploring the universal iconographies of the human being and tells the contemporary story through research and experimentation with different languages – Video Art, Graphic Art, Video Game Art, 3D, sculpture And Interactive Art – carrying out a multi-layered artistic reflection on human evolution, starting from the most ancient representations and arriving at the most advanced technological frontiers.
The artist showed his Primitive Robot for the first time in 2018 for the music video Beloved directed by Daniele Ciprì and with a story and screenplay by Marco Borrelli himself, who thus focused attention on the so-called music video arta sector for which he has obtained several awards such as the First prize at the International Film Festival “Vertical Movie” with musical video art Captcha Cha in 2021.
His ultra-modern vision of art, characterized by cross-mediality and the breaking of barriers, mixing means and languages, artistic areas and referencesled him to exhibit his works in the form of Video Art And PosterArt during 2021 and 2022, as well as in CryptoArt in digital marketplaces and virtual galleries, thanks to a pioneering record: Marcondiro, in fact, has created the first Italian video clip in NFT format (in March 2021). Even his academic education could only be hybrid, fluid, iridescent: trained in the ethnomusicological field, since 2012 Marcondiro has been exploring traditional popular music, singer-songwriter music and classical electronic music, turning to sculpture in a natural way since for him it represents the “sound materialization” of this artistic researchbased on an optimistic vision of a future where technology and humanity coexist harmoniously.