THE VIDEO GAME. How the digital revolution changes art. And vice versa» is a collective research project, characterized by a long period of gestation, but also by numerous indecisions, second thoughts, confrontations, discussions and reformulations.

The greatest difficulty, that Michele Citro had to face as the organizer and curator of this virtual symposium, was to try to make it clear to those he has invited, selected and who have madly but seriously decided to accompany him in this demanding feat of thought, art and culture, the anthropo-sociological sense of the word «video game»; that, in this case, doesn’t only define the video game interactive system (common video games to be clear), but rather the most recent — after painting, photography and cinema/television — means of communication, information and mass visual training, based on digital technologies. The “video” – “game”, therefore, is a synecdoche of all those “devices” (electronic devices) that create, materialize and disseminate the concept of «HMI» — “Human-Machine Interface”, a direct and immediate interactivity, such as the latest generation of computers, smartphones, tablets, fixed and portable video game consoles of different types and with different degrees of immersion, VR viewers, augmented reality application software, but also research engines, social and metaverse.

The diffusion of these technologies has determined and continues to determine, with an increasingly accelerated gradualness, a real revolution in the way of perceiving the image or, lato sensu, the images and, consequently, the ways in which we re-elaborate, prefigure, render, arrange in space and time, give a meaning to/justify, interact with them or make them interactive.

Starting from this observation, Michele Citro stimulated a group of “interesting” people — intellectuals, academics, curators, art counsellors, lawyers, artists and designers — first of all to reflect on themselves, as they are champions of excellence of a perceiving and sentient humanity that is changing; and to reflect on this very important phenomenon of our being “in” the world, “with” the world and “for” the world, with significant results.

The curator and his creative team hope that this experiment, to the right theoretical extent (literary contributions) and practical (pictorial, plastic, installations and topic specific design), can be useful and pleasing to the visitors, who will still find in these artworks the beauty and audacity to question themselves and try to develop solutions or visions which, even if they are not true, are at least more than reasonable and intriguing.

The art exhibition could be visited at Cavalieri Art Hotel in St. Julian’s till June 2023.