Dragon’s Egg Trilogy

Posted by lucapozzilp on May 13, 2022 in News | No Comments

DRAGON’S EGG TRILOGY

by Luca Pozzi

curated by Manuela Valentini

On the occasion of the 45th edition of Arte Fiera, TAG Bologna - the General Aviation Terminal dedicated exclusively to the traffic of jets, helicopters and private aircraft - opens its doors to contemporary art. From 11 May to 12 June 2022, the Vip Lounge will host an intervention by the artist and cross-disciplinary mediator Luca Pozzi (1983, Milan), selected by the curator Manuela Valentini.

This is Dragon's Egg Trilogy, a project consisting of three elements that make up as many chapters of a fascinating science fiction tale fruit of the artist's imagination. The Trilogy is characterized by what can now be defined as Pozzi's stylistic code: interdisciplinarity. Here - as in all of his work in general - the history of art, quantum physics, multi-messenger cosmology and artificial intelligence meet in an attempt to explore the world with the eyes of the most advanced science and technology.

The first constituent element of the Trilogy is Dragon's Egg, a sculpture that "materializes" a tennis ball distorted by the speed coming from space and blocked just before its impact on the ground. In the artist's imagination, this shape is assimilated to that of a dragon's egg, hence the title of the work.

The sculptural device - born from a collaboration with the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) - is conceived as a time compression parenthesis, obtained by linking bronze casting (a 5,500-year-old technique) with an experimental physics technology contemporary called "muon scintillator". This technology is able to detect the passage, inside the sculpture, of otherwise invisible subatomic particles, converting their interaction into a flash of light.

In doing so, Pozzi approaches a very ancient technique with an extremely modern one, in order to show us something that we would normally be unable to see. In reality, the universe constantly sends messages in the form of particles, gravitational waves and dark matter which, however, we are unable to "read" and "perceive" without special scientific equipment.
 
These signs become much clearer in the second component of the Trilogy:

it is Arkanian Shenron, an example of technological animism that will appear on display in its most immaterial version. A video loop of the website www.arkanianshenron.com depicting an animated dragon, whose name is inspired by Shenron, literally "the Dragon God", or the magical figure that appears in the Dragon Ball manga when they are gathered in one place its legendary seven spheres.

The artist first created the digital model of the dragon, then produced a 3D print in PLA using it as "lost wax" for the casting of a bronze sculpture (also equipped with a muon scintillator) and finally animated it to generate an avatar that lives on Twitter today and that finally lands on the website on display.

Arkanian Shenron, in fact, is equipped with a rudimentary artificial intelligence and a software connected to Twitter, thanks to which every 16 inputs of subatomic particles are processed 16 words randomly drawn from a pool of philosophy texts. The result is the creation of a kind of Haiku (poetic / divinatory phrase), shared in real time on the social network through a simple post. Therefore, Arkanian Shenron can be defined as the first work with a social profile and therefore also usable remotely, as if it were a "quantum oracle" capable of communicating from space in the form of poetry.

Furthermore, the features of the dragon perfectly reflect Pozzi's tendency to interdisciplinarity: the wings and hands refer to the history of Renaissance and twentieth-century art (respectively, the Madonna del Parto by Piero della Francesca and the faces of some sculptures by Medardo Rosso ), the tail to information technology (component of an IBM quantum computer) and the body to mathematics (non-commutative geometry). At the head is a spin-network crown taken from a quantum gravity conjecture, while protecting the chest is a shield that reproduces the Standard Model of particles. Finally, instead of the eyes, there are light sensors connected to the INFN scintillator that light up every time a particle is detected.

The Trilogy - and therefore the installation exhibited in the Vip Lounge of TAG Bologna - is completed in This is my favorite moment in human history: a cosplay disguise kit of the character "Griffin" from the film Men in Black 3, consisting of a bizarre hat of wool and a 90s bomber jacket with a patch depicting the Swan Station from the TV series “LOST” on the back and a glass marble stored in the right sleeve pocket. Exhibited for the first time at the Palais De Tokyo in Paris in 2018 for the audience of the "Do Disturb Festival", also in this case, Pozzi offers visitors the opportunity to transform themselves into the last Arkanian, a pandimensional being able to live simultaneously in all possible past, present and future, came to earth to save the planet from an alien threat.