That digital technologies are reconfiguring the field of contemporary art is now an established fact. Less obvious is understanding in which direction this transformation is moving and what are the critical junctures that deserve attention. It is to this need for orientation that Transforming Arts responds, the event organized by the Academy of Fine Arts of Catania for January 15 and 16, 2026, within the broader project ART.IT – Art in Transition, funded by the PNRR and coordinated by the Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna in collaboration with other academic institutions. This is not simply a showcase of technological innovations applied to art, but a more ambitious attempt: to build a shared vocabulary that allows rigorous discussion of the ongoing mutations, from design practices to curatorial models, up to the forms of authorship that are emerging in this hybrid scenario.
Workshop with artist Jorge Orta at Studio Orta Les Moulins by Lucy+Jorge Orta (France) © ABA Catania
The title of the event – Transforming Arts – suggests attention directed toward the dynamics of change that traverse the art system rather than the uncritical celebration of technological innovation. The first day, entrusted to the curation of Ambra Stazzone, coordinator of the ART.IT project and professor at the Academy of Catania, focuses on the relationship between artistic practices and digital tools, questioning how the latter are modifying not only the modes of production of works, but also the devices of fruition and the types of public approaching the art world. The title Arts and digital. New tools, new types of fruition, new audiences identifies the areas of investigation: ranging from the technical and processual dimension of digital creation to the institutional and pedagogical implications of these transformations.
International talks on art and sustainability at the Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna. Meeting with Tomás Saraceno. Ph. Claudia Gentile
Among the scheduled presentations we highlight: that of Ernesto Voltaggio of Studio Arduino, who addresses a crucial aspect often neglected in discussions on digital art: the problem of maintenance. Developing an interactive installation based on microcontrollers, sensors and artificial intelligence is one thing; guaranteeing its stability over exhibition time, subjecting it to daily use stress, ensuring that it continues to function correctly is quite another matter. Voltaggio promises to unveil the technical backstage of this passage from prototype to public space, touching an exposed nerve in the relationship between art and technology: the material fragility of electronic devices and the necessity of thinking from the origin about the technical sustainability of the work. The presentation by Federica Mandelli of the studio dotdotdot instead introduces the concept of Narrative Environments to rethink the contemporary museum experience by radically redesigning the flows, interfaces and rhythms through which the public enters into relation with the works to hybridize physical and digital dimensions in an experience that aspires to continuity rather than juxtaposition. On the side of historical memory is then the presentation by Gino Gianuizzi, founder of the independent space Neon in Bologna, who reconstructs the origins of digital in Italian art, recalling that many of the questions now at the center of debate had already been anticipated by experimental practices and self-managed spaces active in past years, thus offering a necessary genealogy to avoid falling into the amnesia of technological perpetual present.
In Ravenna, the opening of the event “Sensitive matter. Dialogues on art and sustainability” © ABA Catania
The second day, curated by Marco Lo Curzio – scientific director of ART.IT for the Academy of Catania – takes a more speculative approach and pushes toward less consolidated territories. The title The Coming Wave of Art takes up the expression used in technological debate to indicate the imminent arrival of radical transformations, applying it to the artistic field. Lo Curzio has chosen to concentrate on three phenomena that are emerging with growing force: generative art based on algorithms and artificial intelligence, phygital practices that seek to overcome the dichotomy between physical and digital, and decentralized artistic communities organized according to DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) logics. This last aspect is particularly intriguing because it raises profound questions about the very notion of authorship. When a work of art is produced by a DAO, who is its author? How are creative responsibilities, aesthetic decisions, intellectual property rights distributed?
An interior view of the exhibition space of Galleria Continua at Moulin Saint Marie (France) © ABA Catania
In this regard, the presentation by Mario Klingemann, a German artist active in the field of artificial intelligence, is emblematic, as he will present the case of Botto, a project of which he is co-creator and spokesperson. Botto is a decentralized entity that operates within a DAO: it produces works using generative AI systems, but the decisions about which works to realize, how to orient production, how to manage sales are made collectively by the community that governs the project. The radical experiment puts in crisis the traditional parameters through which we evaluate and legitimize artistic creation, opening scenarios in which authorship becomes distributed, processual, negotiated. Equally stimulating is the presentation by Francesco D’Isa, philosopher, writer and digital artist, who reflects on the role of the artist in the age of generative models, proposing a redefinition of the author as «curator of processes». It is no longer about producing a finished work through technical mastery of a medium, but about orchestrating systems, defining parameters, selecting outputs, governing a chain of operations in which the machine has an active role. This shift from production to curation raises questions that invest taste, aesthetic responsibility, the relationship between intentionality and chance. We mention, finally, the presentation by Francesco Spampinato, professor at the University of Bologna and art historian, who introduces the concept of Seamless Condition to describe the growing continuity between screens, exhibition spaces and artistic practices in the post-pandemic era. The pandemic has accelerated processes already underway, making increasingly porous the membrane that separates the physical experience of art from that digitally mediated. Spampinato proposes to read this condition as a new configuration of the perceptual and cognitive field in which we move, which requires updated interpretative categories.
Research and training activities at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark)
Also interesting is the choice to open both days with video contributions conceived as expanded cinema experiments, a gesture that from the beginning positions the event as a hybrid device, in which the distinction between formative moment, aesthetic experience and critical reflection tends to blur. Transforming Arts thus configures itself as a laboratory of thought, an attempt to collectively elaborate the conceptual tools necessary to orient oneself in a rapidly mutating artistic landscape.
Info:
www.abacatania.it/art-it-art-in-transition
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