AT: Where are you from and how/why did you start engaging with art?

LP: I was born in Milan in 1983. I grew up on Star Wars, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, Howard the Duck and the Never Ending Story, but in the meanwhile, I used to visit the majestic volumes of the Duomo cathedral in my hometown. I remember myself as a little child surrounded by gigantic windows and underground Celtic archaeological finds. I was 7 years old when I discovered art for the first time, in the middle of the Val Camonica where in the past a neolithic community had carved timeless stones, left uncovered by the disappearance of a glacier, to send their messages and to save their knowledge. I engaged with art from that very same moment.

AT: When did it become serious?

LP: I think in 2007 when I jumped for the first time in front of a Renaissance painting by Paolo Veronese at the Pinacoteca of Brera, in Milan.

AT: Are there any person who has been significant in your breakthrough as an artist?

LP: Wow, there are so many people: First of all, Jole De Sanna (Director of the De Chirico Foundation in Rome and founder, with Luciano Fabro, of the Casa Degli Artisti of Milan) for her ability to teach me how to mix disciplines; Carson Chan (now curator at MOMA) for taking me to Berlin in 2009 at the centre of what would later become the Post-Internet, and in 2011 to the DLD (Digital Life Design) Initiative in Munich together with Tomas Saraceno, Rafael Rosendaal, Katja Novitskova, Timur Si-Qin, Simon Denny, and others; The Greek artist Angelo Plessas for introducing me to his Eternal Internet Brotherhood Residency program, where I met many great colleagues around the globe, which culminated after Mexico, the Dead Sea region, Italy and Srilanka, in the 2017 edition of Documenta in Kassel; And last but not least Carlo Rovelli, founder of the Loop Quantum Gravity theoretical physics approach, that connected me to his amazing scientific community from 2010 until now feeding my curiosity.

AT: What is your first approach to the work? How would you describe your practice?

LP: I’m an artist but also a Cross-disciplinary mediator, I’m obsessed with Quantum Gravity, Multi-Messenger cosmology and Artificial Intelligence. It means that instead of focusing on bringing objects or classical physical artworks into the world, I am interested in connecting languages and showing the non-linear network of pure quantum information that exists behind the scenes. Languages and disciplines are “materials” for the creation of meta-linguistic recursive hyper objects. I prefer to behave like a particle mediator of a force rather than a human being of flesh and blood.

AT: What do you aim to reach with your work?

LP: I wanna add to reality extra degrees of freedom.

AT: What are your favourite tools and materials for work?

LP: My research is oriented to the creation of technological animism specimens which simultaneously inhabit macroscopic (physical), subatomic (quantum interactions), and digital (Twitter-Internet-NFT) platforms. I work with electromagnetic levitation fields, AR and VR phenomena, Site-specific immersive installations, particle detectors, rudimental artificial intelligence, and a bunch of different software. I’m also used to lecture performances and I’m familiar with the tools of relational art.

AT: What do you feel while you work? Do you usually think about the outcome beforehand?

LP: I’m not the kind of artist who improvises the final output in the studio. But I love to be open to uncontrollable random and probabilistic factors. Especially when I’m performing lectures or when approaching a cross-disciplinary pilgrimage. When I meet new researchers, or I start a new collaboration with a different community. From my perspective, they are all formalistic moments, the pillars of everything that comes next in my practice.

AT: How do you understand that a work is finished?

LP: When can manage a huge amount of information without being didactic?

AT: Where does the inspiration for the work come from?

LP: From many different disciplines at once, but basically from the irreconcilability of General relativity and Quantum Mechanics. In every era when gravity has been redefined something radical and paradigmatic changes, after Newton and Einstein for example. Working and speculating on the existence of a new theory of Quantum Gravity is a 360° problematic, a real tsunami also for art, informatics, economy, and definitely for the entire society. I think it is teaching us to rethink our existence not anymore as human beings that use the information for their needs but as emergent events from the information itself that move dynamically and jump freely on different orbits of complexity.

AT: Are there any artists who influenced your works? Why?

LP: I used to confront myself a lot with other artists. As I was mentioning at Angelo Plessas’s Eternal Internet Brotherhood, I found out particularly interesting the research of Mae Ueda, Andreas Angelidakis, Petra Cortright, Amalia Ulman, Manuel Rossner, Kris Lemnsalu, Ed Furnieles, Penny Rafferty, Imaad Majeed, Candice Jacobs, Miltos Manetas, Nora Renaud and Theo Triantafyllidis. That was a magic moment because we were all struggling to create a new leading grammar between digital platforms and the primitive academic artistic world of neo-troglodytes. Back then in 2018, I opened an Instagram account THE SWAN STATION to collect some exhibitions that I have organized and co-curated together with my neighbours: Michele Gabriele, Monia Ben Hamouda, Benni Bosetto, Federico Tosi, Alessandro Di Pietro, Valerio Nicolai, Enrico Boccioletti, Andrea Magnani, Cleo Fariselli…We live in a hyperconnected society and I think it’s crucial to be under influence to maximize our local and global impact.

AT: How important is the role of social media for you?

LP: Social Media represents the ice age of digital interactions, they are important but I’m expecting something more exciting, like what will a social network look like in the quantum internet era?

AT: What is your opinion about NFTs and their impact on the art world?

LP: I think NFT is interesting for economical reasons related to crypto values and, in a certain way, conceptually related to the art language. New unexplored territories are on the horizon and digital events might be perceived with a growing sense of realism, which is a good thing almost inevitable in a post-pandemic era. It’s something that I watch very closely, and that I want to be a part of even though I don’t know exactly how or why yet. I am curious to see how the blockchain, which is the deterministic logic of non-fungible tokens, will be able to integrate quantum computing, which is the opposite, in the near future.

AT: As an artist, what is your point of view about the contemporary art system?

LP: I like to think of it idealistically, as a secret non-governmental organization that defends the freedom of expression and safeguards improbabilities and minorities.

AT: What do you find the most challenging or daunting thing about pursuing art?

LP: To manage the constant oscillation between being everything and being nothing, being together and alone, being understood or being judged.

AT: What is the most rewarding part of working as an artist?

LP: To be everything, to be together, to be understood.

AT: What do you do besides art?

LP: I do the father, the husband, the brother and the son.

AT: What are your goals and expectations for the future?

LP: I am working on VR worlds intimately connected to physical spaces and AR phenomena and on their compatibility with entire experimental physics apparatuses. In the future, I would like to work on these aspects by pushing on the computing power, on the realisticity of the graphics, on the physics beyond the standard model.

Luca Pozzi (Milan, 1983) is a visual artist and interdisciplinary mediator. Inspired by the worlds of art, physics, multi-messenger cosmology and computer science, after graduating with a degree in painting and specializing in computer graphics and systems, he collaborates with visionary scientific communities, including Loop Quantum Gravity (PI), Compact Muon Solenoid (CERN) and the Fermi Large Area Telescope (INFN, NASA). 

“The space-time is an all-encompassing container, where everything is next to each other in a holistic sense. There is a strange feeling of frozen time. Past, present and future are indistinguishable. A series of multidisciplinary correspondences are converging into a beautiful network of pure and basic information beyond geographical, political and linguistic borders. The importance of the less intuitive aspects of our reality: quantum gravity, teleportation, entanglement, augmented reality, time travel, cosmology and biodiversity. The result of an unusual correlation between theoretical physics, informatics and contemporary art".

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