I Created A Real Virtual Exhibition Where Users Can Play Games, Touch The Artworks And Chat With The Artist.

I was bored of the all 3D exhibitions of art galleries trying to mirror real-life on the virtual screen during lockdown, often unnecessarily complicated and cold to navigate.

So during my lockdown I conceived a website as an interactive and virtual exhibition, and a piece of art itself. I named it Error project; it is an innovative web content hub, that invites the user on a journey in search of error, by playing on the ambiguity between computer, artistic, and conceptual error.

More info: mathiapagani.com

The involvement of the user is experienced through an active and digital journey in which we are able to directly interact with images and videos. The content is unveiled progressively, which must be ‘erased’ by our finger to be seen.

Retro games take us back to the dawn of the videogame and a surreal chatbot prompts a meeting with me (the artist). The technology here is not used just as a means to show and convey the artwork, but simultaneously uses technology to impose the same language of the web and errors as an object of artistic investigation in itself.

The work first started as painted pieces, which were then merged and fused with photographic fragments of empty squares where minimal interference in the image reveals an error. A disturbance, a movement – sometimes almost invisible- contrasts with the unusual lack of human presence in these places, transfigured and metaphysical.

The photos are mainly screenshots of webcam videos scattered around the world in the lockdown period, with all most important squares of the entire globe completely empty. The video time-lapse “404 NOT FOUND” shows life unfolding in 16 places around the world at the same time during the 24 hours of April 25, 2020, Liberation Day in Italy.