PAINT ON PIXEL
NFT / DIGITAL ART
PUBLIC INSTALL
OTHER WORKS
EXHIBITIONS
Public Install is a series of urban interventions that uses short, minimalist phrases to disrupt the city’s visual landscape and provoke reflection on the contemporary technological condition. White surfaces and essential slogans replace imagery and branding, turning language into a critical device.
Works such as LIFE IN BETA, AI WILL SAVE THE WORLD, and NFTs ARE DEAD address themes including the myth of progress, the outsourcing of human agency to technology, and the volatility of value in digital culture. These statements, only seemingly straightforward, introduce ambiguity and contradiction, inviting deeper interpretation.
The series expands through the project BLACKOUT, presented between Milan and La Spezia, where large-scale urban billboards amplify this research, transforming public space into a site of collective inquiry into the relationships between technology, identity, and the future.
BLACKOUT
Disseminating enigmatic slogans across oversized billboards in the city of Milan, BLACKOUT positions itself within the broader trajectory of public install, a series of works centered on the interplay between art, artificial intelligence, and philosophy.
The choice of Milan as the project’s first stop holds strong symbolic weight: the city is historically regarded as Italy’s capital of visual communication and advertising. From here, the initiative will gradually expand to other Italian and international cities.
Phrases such as SWALLOW PROGRESS, MACHINES ARE LOYAL, and THE FUTURE IS GENERATED cut through the urban landscape, inscribing an ambiguous and unsettling lexicon that lays bare the deep contradictions between technology and contemporary identity.
At the heart of BLACKOUT lies the philosophical practice of maieutics, once again central to Skygolpe’s approach. The work continues his effort to weave this ancient method into the fabric of today’s reality. Whereas in the Socratic tradition, questioning was the vehicle of doubt, here it is the affirmation that plays this role, declarative enigmas carved into public space that act as silent detonators, cracking open the structures of thought and inducing a state of inner reflection.
For this project, the artist chose to collaborate with an autonomous artificial intelligence in generating the visuals that accompany the text, creating a co-creative apparatus. The result is a hybrid territory where the boundary between human and machine production is intentionally blurred, raising questions about creativity, authorship, and authenticity.
This tension is epitomized by the phrase ART WITHOUT ARTISTS. It moves beyond the topic of accessibility in image-making to address the fading presence of the creative subject in the age of automation. In a world where images are generated by systems capable of assimilating and reprocessing the entirety of humanity’s artistic legacy, the foundations of modern art, authorship, originality, the singular voice—begin to fracture. Yet rather than signaling a final crisis, this condition represents a critical threshold: a moment that demands a rethinking of the artist’s role, the nature of creative action, and the meaning of aesthetic production itself. BLACKOUT situates itself precisely within this fracture, not to resolve it, but to intensify it and transform it into a space of active inquiry.
Beyond its reference to Socratic maieutics, BLACKOUT is embedded in a broader theoretical framework, engaging deeply with fundamental reflections on language and technology. Notably, Skygolpe’s work resonates with Martin Heidegger’s thought, particularly his 1954 essay The Question Concerning Technology, in which he describes technology as a “mode of revealing”, one that simultaneously unveils and conceals reality. The work echoes this insight, suggesting that what technology reveals is never fully transparent, but marked by a persistent interpretative opacity.
In parallel, the project enters into dialogue with the philosophy of Emanuele Severino, whose radical meditation on technology as an inescapable structure of destiny is central to Technique and Destiny (1998). Severino identifies a fundamental contradiction at the heart of technological supremacy: it promises salvation while simultaneously threatening disorientation, an overwhelming horizon that absorbs the human even as it amplifies its potential.
In continuity with some of the most radical artistic experiments of the late 20th century, BLACKOUT also follows the path paved by figures such as Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and Lawrence Weiner, artists who transformed language into both a critical instrument and a visual form. As in Holzer’s Truisms or Weiner’s Statements, the text here doesn’t convey a single, definitive message but instead becomes an event: a linguistic apparition that invites the viewer into an open, unresolved confrontation. The messages dispersed throughout the work are intentionally contradictory, destabilizing any linear communicative logic and undermining the certainties on which many dominant cultural narratives are built.
This rich web of philosophical and cultural references is not a nostalgic homage, nor is it mere provocation. Rather, it forms the theoretical backbone of a deliberately open and complex work, one that seeks to provoke questions about our current condition, the ambivalence of progress, and the inescapable entwinement with technology.
An invitation to conscious reflection, not to synthesis, but to the acceptance of instability.
An aesthetic and intellectual experience that embraces contradiction as the original condition of our time.
CONTACT
This video work investigates the representation of contact between human and machine. Presented at WUF Studio during the press preview of BLACKOUT, the film acts as the conceptual counterpoint to the public urban installation. While the BLACKOUT billboards operate through synthesis and impact, CONTACT offers a more layered, introspective reflection on the state of the visual in a post-digital age, retaining the same photographic references printed as the backdrop for the outdoor posters.
The work begins with an explicit visual citation: Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. Yet the reference is not approached with nostalgia or reverence, but rather as a conceptual prompt, used to question the current status of the gesture, of identity, and of authorship within a framework governed by automated processes.
The video was generated entirely through artificial intelligence. This decision is not technical, but conceptual. It removes manual intervention from the production process, shifting focus toward delegation, toward the algorithm as active executor, and toward the critical value of the output itself. In CONTACT, the gesture of touch is never fully realized. Even when hands appear to clasp, a sense of estrangement or detachment lingers. Human, robotic, and hybrid hands approach without ever fully converging, or do so only momentarily, producing a sustained tension that generates a condition of ambivalence in the viewer.
The film challenges the classical binary between subject and tool: the robot is no longer a mere prosthesis, but an actor within a posthuman aesthetic in which the boundaries between the artificial and the organic are increasingly unstable.
NFTS ARE DEAD
“NFTs are dead”, is a provocation intended to stimulate reflection on the speed with which trends in the digital art world are perceived by the public. This statement, imbued with provocative immediacy, echoes the dialectic tension inherent in contradiction.
This work, exploring the future of digital art in a world that is constantly changing and whose future is decidedly impactful. The phrase ‘NFTs are dead’ emerges not as a denial but as an incitement, a provocative stimulus pushing us towards the liminal spaces of thought. In this provocation lies a strong principle of contradiction.
© Skygolpe 2026