Cybernetic Futures
Online Art Exhibitions
Participating Artists
The following is a list of participating and confirmed artists. These artists have provided bios and artist statements, and most of them have sent me their artworks, which are stored on Google Drive.
Romina Rahnamoun
BIO
Romina Rahnamoun is a visual artist exploring the intersection of technology and artistic inquiry. By integrating machine learning and large language models into her creative process, her work investigates artificial gaze, reimagining lens-based art and critiquing traditional visual paradigms.
She is the co-founder of Artemaan, a startup connecting Iranian universities with the professional art world. Artemaan bridges emerging artists with leading experts while enhancing accessibility to the Iranian art scene through digital archiving. She also co-founded L-Atur, the first bespoke design startup leveraging L-systems for creative coding, offering HCI-driven solutions for non-professional coders.
Romina's research focuses on human-machine interaction, creative machines, and machine aesthetics, with her work published in the International Journal of Web Research (IJWR) and presented at events such as the International Conference on Web Research (ICWR) | IEEE and Tehran University of Arts Research Week. Her art has been exhibited in various galleries, including at Plaxall Gallery (New York, US), Shokooh Art Gallery (Tehran, Iran), and The Association of Iranian Sculptors.
Currently pursuing a fine arts degree at Tehran University of Arts, Romina continues to push the boundaries of art and technology, fostering dialogue between human creativity and machine intelligence.
Artist statement
My practice as a visual artist unfolds at the intersection of technology and artistic exploration, where machine learning and large language models become extensions of creative thought. I am drawn to the concept of the artificial gaze, using it as a lens to deconstruct and reimagine the familiar boundaries of lens-based art, challenging the visual and conceptual frameworks that define our ways of seeing.
In this interplay between human intuition and machine logic, I find a rich dialogue—one that reflects the tensions and harmonies of innovation. I approach algorithms not as passive tools but as active collaborators, co-creating works that blur the lines between control and spontaneity, tradition and disruption. By embracing the speculative and transformative potential of these methodologies, my work seeks to question entrenched epistemologies of image-making while imagining new, fluid ways of understanding art in a world increasingly mediated by technology.
The Series Machine-Faced will be exhibited in the Infinite Self Pavilion.
ANNA UTOPIA GIORDANO
BIO
Anna Utopia Giordano is an Italian creative director, poet, artist, and performer.
She graduated with honors in Philosophy from the Università Statale di Milano, with a thesis on Network Science. Her primary philosophical interests include epistemology, logic, and gnoseology. Her artistic activities span multiple fields, utilizing diverse media tailored to each project. Her portfolio encompasses digital art, poetry, performance, artificial intelligence, and video production. She explores linguistic and sound research as well as visual philosophy.
She currently curates Poiesis, a column on artificial intelligence for the Italian street art magazine Wails Papers, where she publishes AI-assisted artworks in each issue.
Her AI-generated digital illustration ZER0, conceived for the homonymous musical composition by Leonardo Barilaro, was launched towards the International Space Station on March 15, 2023 with Maleth III, a biomedical research coordinated by Prof. Joseph Borg at University of Malta (in collaboration with MCAST and MG2i - MCAST Gateway to Industry), aboard the SpaceX CRS-27 mission (NASA and SpaceX), part of the NASA's Commercial Resupply Service program. The illustration and the musical composition were presented during a live stream from the ISS on April 11. Subsequently, the SpaceX CRS-27 mission safely completed its journey, returning to Earth on April 16, 2023.
Utopia conceived the series ἐκγραφῆς (2022), blending her poetry with artificial intelligence and digital post-production. The first cycle of this collection was showcased during the seventh edition of Fuori Visioni Contemporary Art Festival (Piacenza).
In March 2021, she released her first spoken word poetry album titled Fogli d'ombra, followed by the music video Entelechia (o sul senso del dovere) at the end of July 2021. Entelechia earned a place in the official selections of numerous national and international festivals.
Prior to this, Utopia conceived a series of digital art collections, including My Social Generation, Venus, PopBottles and #BornToBeVirtual. These art series have garnered global recognition, having been featured in prominent newspapers, school textbooks, and across hundreds of websites and blogs. Additionally, these collections have been exhibited in both solo and group shows worldwide.
Utopia's poetic style finds expression in the Rhapsodies, a collection of hermetic and cryptic poems distinguished by their use of technical, scientific, and philosophical language. The Rhapsodies have earned their place in anthologies, magazines, e-zines, and cultural blogs. In 2011, she published her poetry collection WYSIWIG (What You See Is What I Got), and then the 2012 e-book Fotogrammi - Ideas Depiction (Ed. Siska). Utopia curates various performances, merging the realms of theater, literature, and rhapsodomancy.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My AI practise in the arts is born from the interplay of language, image, philosophy and artificial intelligence—a continuous dialogue between word and vision, thought and form.
ἐκγραφῆς is a journey into this liminal space, where poetry transforms into images through a process I have named "ekgraphic." This term I coined, rooted in the ancient ékphrasis, subverts the traditional flow by reversing it—from word to image, rather than the other way around. The first cycle of ἐκγραφῆς, derived from one of my poetic texts, premiered at the Fuori Visioni Festival in 2022. Since then, I have continued to actively evolve and expand the project, shaping its growth in new directions with each iteration.
ZER0 emerges from the same tension between concept and representation. It is a digital illustration I created using AI text-to-image tools, refined through post-production. But above all, it is an image that encapsulates a profound idea: nothingness, paradox, infinity. In 2023, ZER0 left Earth for a month, alongside Leonardo Barilaro’s musical composition, and reached the International Space Station aboard the SpaceX CRS-27 mission, carrying with it a meditation on emptiness and presence—the visible and the invisible.
Both projects are fragments of a broader exploration—an inquiry into the boundary between the human and the artificial, between language and image, between what exists and what may exist only as a potential.
Anna Utopia Giordano will exhibit Zero and the series ἐκγραφῆς
Zero is made in collaboration with Leonardo Barilaro
LEONARDO BARILARO
Bio
Dr Leonardo Barilaro, The Space Pianist, is a visionary pianist, composer, and researcher who bridges the worlds of music and space exploration.
As a Cultural Ambassador of the Space Art Movement, The Space Pianist is promoting the idea that 'Art can help us better understand the Universe and our place in it.'
Leonardo uses the emotive power of music to inspire people to view Space not just merely as a scientific or technological frontier but as a source of creativity, expression, and imagination, as well as the power of human connection to the cosmos, embodying the ethos: “In Space, there is space for Everyone.”
Leonardo, The Space Pianist, plans to perform the first-ever piano concert on Mars, playing a Steinway, setting a new milestone in art and space history.