Updated: 4 days ago
Stardust, a door for optimists, one finger too many, and the question of what it means to imagine the future.
Intersections. Allianz MiCo, Milan. Third edition. Born in 2024 from the meeting of IAB Italia, the Art Directors Club Italiano, UNA and UPA, joined this year by Assirm. Two days, four hundred voices, one title: The Power of Influence.
A fair is an agora. It is the place where an entire industry gathers to understand where it is going, and it does so in the oldest way there is: by putting people in the same room. But inside every agora there are moments when the noise drops and something opens. We went looking for them. We found three.
Amalia, or on persistence
Some lives are already an exhibition. Amalia Ercoli Finzi's begins in Gallarate, in 1937, with a little girl who loves numbers. In 1962 she graduates in Aeronautical Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano. Five women out of six hundred and fifty students, and she becomes the first woman in Italy to do it. No role models. No precedents. Only a direction.
Then, a comet. 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, more than five hundred million kilometres away. The European Space Agency's Rosetta mission launches in 2004 and travels for ten years. In November 2014 the Philae lander touches the surface of the comet, and on board is SD2, the drill for which she is principal investigator. A piece of Italy inside the oldest matter of the solar system. Ever since, they have called her the lady of the comets.
On stage, with her daughter Elvina and Andrea Moccia, the conversation is titled From Stardust to Tomorrow. She does not talk about achievements. She talks about what is still missing. She turns to the young people in the room and says simple things that, in her voice, become a manifesto.
"Do what you believe in, and do it with passion, do it with commitment."
"We will not be judged for the mistakes we have made; we will be judged for the good things we have not done."
"You must have a dream and be prepared […] so that you can recognise the opportunity when it comes and, when it comes, know how to take it, how to welcome it."
"Do this and you will be happy."
Instructions, more than advice. Like the ones an artist leaves so that a work can be remade by anyone, anywhere.
As close as a star
Every era has its comet. For Amalia Ercoli Finzi's generation it was space: a place that could only be imagined, until someone began to calculate it. For ours, perhaps, it is artificial intelligence. Once again, a tool that asks us to imagine before we understand.
We look at a star and it seems right there, a step away. Its light, instead, has crossed distances the mind cannot hold. The future works the same way: we see it shining so close that we believe it is already here, and it is still entirely to be reached. In between there is time. There are ten years of travel. There is the preparation she speaks of. Imagination is not the opposite of science: it is its first equation.
Stefan, or on beauty
Bregenz, Austria. Then New York, where he opens his studio. Stefan Sagmeister has designed album covers for the Rolling Stones, Lou Reed and Talking Heads. He has won two Grammys, given five TED talks, worked for HBO and the Guggenheim. Every seven years he closes his studio for a whole year, to go back to experimenting. This habit also gave birth to The Happy Show, an exhibition on happiness seen by more than half a million people around the world.
At Intersections he closed the morning with Finally, Something Good, the same title as his most recent project. The idea is simple and radical. The news tells us about the world one day at a time, and one day at a time the world always seems to be getting worse. Seen from a distance, though, it often tells another story. "The news never lacks the stick; I try to offer the carrot too," he says. Design and art, for him, can give us back exactly that distance: "a long-term perspective, which is also the more accurate one." As with the light of the stars, it is a question of distance.
In the Paris exhibition, at the Gaîté Lyrique, you enter through one of two doors: optimist or pessimist. On the way out you choose again. The comparison between the two choices is how the work measures itself.
On beauty, which design has often treated as a superfluous luxury, Sagmeister has no doubts: "Beauty is an integral part of function, not something added afterwards." On artificial intelligence he is just as clear. By default it makes everything "more uniform", and the machine "cannot care about which request truly deserves an answer". That choice remains ours. This is why "commitment is the rarest resource".
Paolo, or on error
Then, among the pavilions, a hand three metres tall. Six fingers.
Anyone who works with generated images knows it: it is the classic error, the point where the machine gives itself away. Paolo Troilo took it and brought it to monumental scale. It is called A.I. Like.
His, too, is a story of fertile mistakes. For years he was one of the most awarded creatives in Italian advertising: Saatchi & Saatchi, creative director at Arnold Worldwide Italy, Cannes, the Grand Prix of the Art Directors Club. In 2004 he decides to paint and forgets to buy brushes. He uses his fingers. He never stops. From that gesture comes an almost hyperrealist painting made with the hands alone, which in 2011 reaches the Italian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale.
"Error is a gift, an unmasking," he says. The sixth finger, for him, is not to be corrected: it is to be kept, like a signature. It is the machine's imprint, the sign that reminds us who we are talking to. The sculpture begins as a small clay model made by hand, barely twenty centimetres, then scanned and grown through 3D printing, and finally finished and painted by him. The machine, in his words, is "a tool, not an author". Beside it, a manifesto, mA.nI.fest, answering across a century the Futurist one by Marinetti.
"Flaw is the perfection of creativity."
"Art should play the role of the question mark, never assertive."
In two days devoted to the power to influence, a work that does not want to convince anyone. It only wants to leave us with a question.
A conversation just begun
A scientist who imagined the stars before touching them. A designer who asks us to look at the world from further away. An artist who turned a mistake into a method. Three distant trajectories crossing at the same point: the future is made with the hands, with a long gaze, and with time.
We would like to ask all three of them more. Which project they have not yet realised. What they see, today, when they look up.
This is the story of the first day. Of the second, and of tonight's ADCI Awards closing Intersections, with a special award for Stefan Sagmeister, we will write in the coming days, here in the Journal.
Vertigini Journal is published by Vertigini Studio, a Milan studio creating AI imagery for fashion, beauty and jewellery brands. Discover our work.
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