Sneak Preview: Citta' Futurista

Fortunato Depero:  The New Babel, 1930

Second Life is a great platform to learn, if used right. Although forever being interested in art I never knew much about Italian Futurism. nexuno Thespian's and especially Myhns Mayo's works changed that. Digging a bit deeper for a blog post about a previous exhibtion of Myhns Mayo I saw that this has especially for me as German reasons back in history. Read my post about Fortunato Depero und Myhns Mayo's rebuilts in Second Life here.

And I was glad to learn about it. The Futurists has been driven by pushing Italy from the huge cultural history to the future and they influenced art and design in all Europe. But the biggest innovation was the integration of music, sounds and poetry. Examples are to be found in the installation here too.

Tullio Crali: Cityscape, 1939

Myhns Mayo finished in collaboration with Giorgo Mayo a huge project. They rebuilt 3 famous works of Futurism in 3D. But upon that you find in the huge installtion many small items taken from paintings and drawings. There are so many details to find:  interactive and animated puppets and in the tunnels a train for a guided tour.

More adventurous visitors find a plane to fly and to practise 3D Aeropainting. To paint aeroplanes was a special range in Futurism, starting with a manifesto in 1929. An exhibiton with the same name has been shown all over Europe.

Fortunato Depero: Skyscapers and Tunnel, 1930

As blogger I was in the lucky position to be one of the first to see the installation, lag free and undisturbed. I was there several times for hours, highly enchanted and excited. Asking myself what the magic is, which is not only the really excellent work. It is the memories that came up in me. The works reminded of the toys and books of my childhood (my parents always insisted in good design of toys and books with artistic approach). I understood how much the Futurism influenced design for decades.

But there was more...a forgotten feeling came up: The believe in future and the glorification of the modern times. The times when we all believed in a better future to come up, when he have been reading books of Jules Verne, Stanislav Lem, Isaac Asimov and Hans Dominik. These times when we believed that the future will bring an easier life for everyone. I recently was reminded by a philosphers talk that during these decades politians has been influeced by philosophy and social science to work on visions for the future. The party started to be over for me by reading the report of the Club of Rome: The Limits to Growth. Since then the believe in future changed step by step to a fear of future which stayed until today. All big social utopias died without replacements and politics are influended by technocrates who are in charge of lobbyists.

Fortunato Depero: Campari advert.

It was good to be reminded of that. And it is excellent of Myhns to literally  visualize us the important influence of Futurism to art and design of the 20th century. I am sure you will have that deja vu experience too. It impressed me as well that Myhns did not left out the works for advertising as this Campari man. Often when I talk to artists I get the impression that they find it under their genious level to create for money. But actually there are enough examples that advertising works can become even more influential than artworks.

I highly recommend Citta' Futurista. The installation provides lot's of note cards and other information about the works in case of interest. But even without that it is really fun to explore. For the visit please make sure to have Advanced Light Model, Ambient Occlusion and sounds enabled.

Opening  September 13th 2013 at 01:00 PM SLT

Taxi: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Myhns%20Land/209/157/3498