I am a data scientist and a generative artist. I use data to mine information and create artworks. My work is always a collaboration between me and the machine. The best part is when the machine surprises me.

My artistic nickname is hex6c If you’re wondering, 6c is the hexadecimal code for 108, which is the number of grains of the mala — a strand of grains that many Buddhists use when reciting mantras. It digests my dual nature: rational and spiritual.

I mainly create using Processing, a modern Prometheus for coding within the context of the visual arts. Sometimes I also use R.

You can find me on Twitter and Instagram

Galleries

All my digital artworks tokenized as nonfungible tokens. You can find them on:

I am collaborating with Hackatao under the collective name HackHex, Chiara Braidotti, and Cristiana Vettor.

Projects

A project is a bit more then an artwork: it starts from an idea, develops with coding and writing, and typically ends with an artwork series. A selection of my artistic project follows - I am proud of all of them:

  1. Scenery with cow and mosque in Varanasi
  2. Primenuum
  3. Aetheria Block Museum
  4. 9-9-9
  5. Glitch poetry
  6. Orologio a tre cuori
  7. EtherCoil
  8. Game of Pixel
  9. 7 Variations on the Pixel Attraction Theme
  10. Andy Warhol {stringed;}
  11. Crypto Self: digital ink on canvas
  12. NFT (my very first tokenized artwork!)

Exhibitions

  1. CADAF, Miami, 2019
  2. EthBerlin, Berlin, 2019
  3. IDAF, Manchester, 2019
  4. Fight Fear, Tolmezzo, 2018
  5. devcon iv, Prague, 2018
  6. NIFTY conference, Hong Kong, 2018

Research

I am investigating the crypto art market from a data science perspective.

  1. Crypto art: A decentralized view [Medium, arXiv]

This is a decentralized position paper on crypto art, which includes viewpoints from different actors of the system: artists, collectors, galleries, art scholars, data scientists. The writing process went as follows: a general definition of the topic was put forward by two of the authors (Franceschet and Colavizza), and used as reference to ask to a set of diverse authors to contribute with their viewpoints asynchronously and independently. No guidelines were offered before the first draft, if not to reach a minimum of words to justify a separate section/contribution. Afterwards, all authors read and commented on each other’s work and minimal editing was done. Every author was asked to suggest open questions and future perspectives on the topic of crypto art from their vantage point, while keeping full control of their own sections at all times. While this process does not necessarily guarantee the uniformity expected from, say, a research article, it allows for multiple voices to emerge and provide for a contribution on a common topic. The ending section offers an attempt to pull all these threads together into a perspective on the future of crypto art.

  1. Art Metrics [Medium, arXiv]

Success in art markets is difficult to quantify objectively, as it also relies on complex social networks and exchanges of reputation among different actors of the system. We discuss the general task of developing art metrics that are able to capture the different roles actors play in art markets, in particular artists and collectors, are time-aware and efficient to account for the dynamic nature of such markets, and are predictive of future success. As a first contribution in this direction, we propose a method to capture the mutually reinforcing role of artists and collectors via a time-aware extension of Kleinberg’s HITS method, originally developed for the Web. We apply the method to a dataset comprising all the events of the crypto art gallery SuperRare during its first year of existence. Crypto art is limited-edition, collectible, and tradable digital art cryptographically registered on a blockchain. This very recent artistic movement, sharing several approaches and motivations with conceptual art, is producing data at an unprecedented level of detail when compared to the traditional art market. The proposed method is predictive of future success and accurately captures the roles of artists and collectors.

Teaching

I taught a 14-hours course on blockchain and crypto art at the School for Advanced Studies of the University of Udine, Italy.

I talked about blockchain and digital art at the University of Udine, University of Trieste, and University of Bologna.