Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici

Federica Patti is an independent curator and lecturer whose research focuses on transmedia practices, with a particular interest in digital performance, posthuman issues and the Metaverse. Winner of the 9th Italian Council in 2020, she is currently a PhD student at the University of Turin with research around liveness and extended experience in virtual environments. She collaborates with various realities (among all: CUBO - Centro Unipol Bologna and Romaeuropa Festival) curating exhibitions and educational activities related to art, science and digital humanities. She is an active member of LaRete Art Projects collective and of IKT - International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art. Since 2020 she is a tutor of the project "Residenze Digitali" and juror of several international Media Art awards (the most recent: STARTS Piemonte award, RE: Humanism 2021). Since 2013 she has been a frequent contributor for Creativeapplication.net. Every full moon, she composes LUNARIO - segnali dal  Metaverso.

The Fifth Wall. Posthuman Performativity, Extended Experience and the Metaverse

Digital performance is a specific field of production and research that sees the technological gesture as the protagonist. In this context, an emerging and uncanny ecosystem stands out, experimenting with immersive social XR platforms and allowing for deeply interactive experiences. Some recent hypermedia proposals require a re-evaluation of the nature of performance, combined with a recontextualisation of the concepts of reality, presence and simulation. Digital performance is now augmented and hyper-connected, decentralised, and collaborative: an ongoing aesthetic revolution makes a critical redefinition urgent, as does identify qualitative standards for these languages.
Technological acceleration continues to revolutionise liveness, allowing a high gradient of performativity to emerge: the technosphere becomes a co-protagonist of multimedia performative production and experimentation, interpenetrating different levels of reality, IRL and URL. Notably, the emergence of the metaverse technosphere represents a fundamental shift in today's digital presence towards massive interconnectedness, universal interoperability and persistent synchronicity.
This research proposes to describe a new techno-aesthetic horizon according to a dialogical, queer and posthuman methodological approach that responds to the urgency of redefining codes, as well as to identify specific qualitative standards for the ongoing aesthetic revolution that imposes an updated historical and critical reading of digital performance under the banner of transdisciplinarity, DIWO (Do It With Others) and post-anthropocentrism. By creating and populating advanced and decentralised immersive virtual environments, the User Experience of Art (UXA) places the emergence of 'metaverse-native' art in fields adjacent to traditional disciplines: perfect virtual 'stages'.

The aim is to articulate a critical and analytical system that is suitable for changing scenarios: a method of interpretation that, starting from heterogeneous case studies, sources and experiences, organises the reading according to 1) the media and carriers used, 2) the qualities of the released gesture and UXA, 3) the related themes. The macro areas of research can be summed up as follows:
- The decentralised experience in the metaverse, interoperability and the liberation of the ego from socio-economic dynamics in social interaction platforms, sandbox games, 3D online collaboration platforms (Unity, Mozilla Hubs, Unreal Engine), open-world games, CGI.
- From Live Forms to Perception Neuron: performance capture, mocap, 3D scanning, 3D sculpting, photogrammetry, biosensors to dematerialise the original real and the 'futuristic (neo)reconstruction of the universe'.

Great attention will be paid to the quality of the action and the experience activated, to the relationship woven by the technological system and to the location of the work, rather than to the extended authorship and DIWO, underlining the type of interaction established with the user. The mapping of institutions, events, production and research centres, academies, art studios and collectives, and archives related to the theme will be activated. Throughout the study period, dialogues will be established with artists, creators, scholars and international operators to learn and deepen the current state of the art.