Virtural Museum Competition

Arseremos is OPERA’s Grand Prize winning entry for New Italian Blood’s Virtual Museum Competition

"the American group OPERA wins the Grand Prize in Rome"

By Achille Bonito Oliva & Luigi Centola

"Born with the development of the most advanced web technologies, OPERA experiments with the exclusive possibilities offered by cyberspace. Artistic interfaces combine real and virtual with ways of movement and navigation brought on only by instruments, graphics, sensations and mental associations. The effective body no longer counts. The speed of the minds reaction multiplies to go further than the image of the built space and communicates the space of thought."

OPERA’s project statement:

"The world is all around and I have gone, vanished. All that is left are my tools, the only part of me that is real. My tools make sense of the inhumanity in life and provide a comforting nothingness to my being. I tap, tap, tap and my hammer builds. I squeeze, squeeze, squeeze and my riveter connects. I click, click, click and my computer creates. Breathing is unnecessary. I am unnecessary. My tools are more of me than I could ever be for myself. Space is no longer something I build in. it is space I build with. Brave and bold, the me-tool is cradled in an embryonic fluid of synthesis. I am born unto a new frontier of space, tool, and interface. Thought is action. I console the tools and interface fragments of past worlds into oblivion."

Project Team: Nathan Lee Colkitt, AIA, Gregory Marx De Peña, Michael Rocco Sablone, and David Marc Schafer