Urbana Verba

Urbana Verba is the first-ever digital project that uses Artificial Intelligence systems to create urban audiovisual artworks, drawing from different literary texts and artistic expressions. Envisioning the city as both a physical and an imaginative concept – and hence retrieving the Latin etymology of the term urban: that means “relating to a city”, but also “elegant”, “refined”, “polished”, even “bold” – the projects aims at offering brand-new representations of any metropolitan space, transforming traditional narratives into a visionary immersive experience.

Milan Factory of Future

Milan Factory of Future is Urbana Verba’s first endeavor, dedicated to Milan and its unique dynamic of artistic invention and cultural evolution, which makes it a truly poietic city: that is, a city capable of producing ever-new forms of creativity (as in the meaning of the Greek poieo = to make, via thoughts and actions), anticipating modernity and shaping the future.

The artwork – whose title is inspired by the “never-ending factory of the Duomo”: an unlimited model of innovation, active in Milan for over five centuries – celebrates the city’s eclectic nature by means of a cinematic loop of transformative frames, generated from texts and images belonging to the sphere of art, literature, architecture, and design, in an indefinite time lapse orchestrated on the sudden transmutation of points of view. Merging old and new cues in a continuum with no beginning nor end, Milan Factory of Future overcomes all chronological limits of traditional storytelling, offering a prismatic product, whose immense futurability lies in its own unfinished aesthetics.

Prompted by the genius of Milanese (by birth or choice) writers and artists, the visual frames flowing on the screen are filled with countless possibilities yet to be developed, subverting the viewer’s expectations with their unconventional beauty, in constant oscillation between the real city and its imaginary projections.

The “never-ending factory of the Duomo”: an unlimited model of innovation, active in Milan for over five centuries.

Leonardo da Vinci’s renaissance landscape

A Renaissance-like landscape – created using the backdrops of Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings – can thus easily evoke both the real (geographical) and imaginative scenery of the city, fostering a passage through that “green plain, run by waters” and ringed by mountains that Carlo Emilio Gadda described as enclosing Milan in a 1953 text. Condensing Milan’s complex hydro- and orographic system, the Leonardesque digression – filled with a soft light, upon suspended musical notes – hints at the bold and idealistic quality of the Milanese spirit, nourished by the surrounding nature, rich of waters to control and mountains to climb. The image of the mountains, in particular, begins to loom here as an aesthetic and ethical ideal of fulfillment: as a peak to always strive for, in a perpetual discipline of improvement.

A Renaissance-like landscape, created using the backdrops of Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings.

Carlo Emilio Gadda

Only from the harsh, opaque mountains and the hard work they represent – in the audio-visual journey rendered in granitic tones and almost musical absence – can the city emerge, with its bright colors, noises, and contradictions.

Mountains in granitic tones and the hard work they represent.

Dino Buzzati

This leads to the heart of a dreamscape, inspired by Dino Buzzati’s words and drawings: it is a mixture of the material and the immaterial, of the natural and the spectral that we can glimpse in the frames rapidly changing in front of us, in which Milan’s familiar spaces undergo a visionary shock, albeit mitigated by a playful irony.

The city is in fact embodied in two of Buzzati’s “wonderful” dogs – as he would describe them – mentioned in monologue that he recorded for the RAI on March 10, 1959, as well as portrayed in various paintings: a poodle named Tobi, a “dog of immense spiritual capacities, capable of taking the tramway all by himself just to go from Piazza della Repubblica to Piazza Piemonte, and vice versa”;

A poodle named Tobi, a dog of immense spiritual capacities.

and Bettina, a marvelous boxer whose seductive beauty Buzzati compares to that of a mysterious woman. These urbanized (humanized) dogs seem to replicate that relationship of human and intellectual dependence that binds the city to its inhabitants: so that the poodle alludes at Buzzati’s sarcastic (and ultimately affectionate) critique against the posh, wealthy surface city, filled with manicured streets and luxurious outlets; whereas the boxer suggests the fascinating pressure of another, underground yet vertical Milan, whose darker hues and crowded streets are the traces of a perpetual creative transformation.

Bettina, a marvelous boxer whose seductive beauty Buzzati compares to that of a mysterious woman.

Steeped in lights and shadows, fantasy and reality, urban detail and imaginary topography, the Buzzati-inspired Milan proves an unorthodox mental object and eventually turns into a metaphysical landscape – in between a painting by De Chirico and a lunar crater or desert, dominated, from times to times, by mineral images of the Duomo (as per Buzzati’s 1957 oil on canvas, Piazza del Duomo) –, where the writer sits, he too incessantly deformed by the succession of the visual sequence: that is, by the journey in the phantasmagoric mazes of his mind, into the uninterrupted flow of creativity, technique, and imagination that presides over his works as well as over Milan’s endless metamorphosis.

Buzzati-inspired lunar crater or desert, dominated, from times to times, by mineral images of the Duomo di Milano.

This metamorphosis – expressed throughout this section of Milan Factory of Future with a fast-paced music – ends up taking the erratic forms of love and desire, precipitating the viewer into beautiful yet disrupting female faces: a tribute to Buzzati’s comic-strip eroticism, but also to the truly desiring substance of all future and futurist forms.

The visage of the lady, embodying the essence of Milan.

Milan - Explosive Prismatic City

An actually Futurist quality lies at the core of the following part of the artwork, which revolves – for the first time explicitly – around the Duomo, transformed into an explosive prismatic surface that absorbs and refracts the whole city. An underground musical bit runs over an iridescent plastic synthesis of infinite urban tesserae which, upon closer observation, reveal a spatio-temporal kaleidoscope that seems to have engulfed otherwise unthinkable architectural pieces from other cities in Italy (such as Florence, Pisa, or Venice) and maybe the world (New York), so that Milan appears to embody Antonio Sant’Elia’s ambition to “invent and rebuild ex novo the modern city like an immense tumultuous building site, agile, mobile, dynamic in its all part” (1914). Milan raises from the constant displacement of jagged geometries as a vibrant yet orphic city propelled upward, running (or flying) through a mesmerizing weave of red and yellow fragments. A form of hyper-sensory stimulation – that recalls, at times, the Cubist poetic de-composition explored by painter Robert Delaunay in his multiple visions of the Eiffel Tower –, this extreme vertical adventure slows down only to turn the race through Milan’s skyline into an horizontal exploration of the city, still in keep with its Futurist roots.

Milan, deconstructed into its elemental forms.

The Duomo transformed into an explosive prismatic surface that absorbs and refracts the whole city.

Milan unveils a spatio-temporal kaleidoscope.

The myriad facets of the city of Milan, complex forms and geometries.

Invent and rebuild ex novo the modern city like an immense tumultuous building site, agile, mobile, dynamic in its all part.

Futurism

A train – one of the Futurist symbols of speed and dynamism par excellence, of which Marinetti wrote in his founding Manifesto: “We will sing […] of broad-breasted locomotives, champing on their wheels like enormous steel horses, bridled with pipes” (1909) – suddenly makes its appearance in Milan Factory of Future, vibrating on the tracks toward the Central Station over a subtle background rhythm of drums, while the frames become tinged with blue and yellow-orange iridescent tones, just like the now-rounded shapes of buildings, cars, and people that succeed uninterruptedly in the sequence.

View from the moving train approaching Milan.

The train departs from Milan's Central Station.

Indeed, the train does not stop its run in the station, continuing its journey through the most architecturally modern areas of Milan, such as Porta Nuova (where we get a glimps of the Bosco Verticale, the Unipol Skyscraper, the Unicredit Tower): this new urban excursion transforms the Futurist traces into softer lines, that somehow remind Botero’s sensual and voluptuous sculptures, at once suggesting the futurable forms of science fiction cities, populated by fluid figures dancing to the notes of a delicate soothing music. Abruptly interrupting the dancing digression, however, the Futurist train suddenly reverse its direction, first hurtling its race into an increasingly industrial and metropolitan landscape filled with Kandinsky-like graffiti and then jumping beyond the visible (and real) edges of the city, to venture into another mental, imaginary space: that of a deserted sea (and sky) mottled with colors as of sunset, where a suspended music is punctuated as if by a lapping of water.

BAM - Tree Library Milan.

BAM - Metropolitan landscape filled with Kandinsky-like graffiti.

Botero’s sensual and voluptuous sculptures.

People dancing at the Palazzina Liberty Dario Fo e Franca Rame in Milan.

Alessandro Manzoni

The inspiration for this section of Milan Factory of Future comes from one of the city’s most famous writers: Alessandro Manzoni, who in the XI chapter of The Betrothed describes the Duomo as seen by Renzo, upon his arrival in Milan, as a “gran macchina” (great machine) “towering in isolated majesty over the plain, as if it arose not in a city but right in the midst of a desert”. This is ultimately what the viewer would expect in this section of the artwork: that is, to see the splendid peaks of the Duomo suddenly rise up; yet we are left to contemplate a bi-dimensional scenery, which recalls another part of the novel, where the “Lombard sky, which is so beautiful when it is beautiful, so radiant, so peaceful” appears “glowed with a thousand nameless colors” (XVII).

The Lombard sky as described by Alessandro Manzoni.

Alessandro Manzoni - "The Lombard sky glowed with a thousand nameless colors".

It is then the moon – “the pale moon hung in a corner of the heavens, shorn of her beams, yet conspicuous against the immense pale-blue background, which warmed imperceptibly to a rosy-yellow well down its eastern slope” – that later rises from the waters, instead of the cathedral.

Alessandro Manzoni - "The pale moon hung in a corner of the heavens".

Bruno Munari

Forever associated with a transformational and generative power – as well as with magic, oneiric life, and the very core of the human existence –, the moon ideally connects this section to the ones inspired by Leonardo and Buzzati, at once mediating the transition to a playful detour in the mind of one of the greatest designers of all time: Bruno Munari. A tribute to Munari’s ever-lasting, poetic interest in the changing form of nature as much as in the everyday objects as forms of art, this section guides the viewer in a light exploration of the whimsical con-fusion between the natural and the artificial, the children’s drawing and the designer’s creation.

"In winter nature sleeps and when it dreams, fog appears. Walking inside the fog is like prying into nature’s dream". by Bruno Munari

Over a nocturnal musical motif – that soon slips into the sounds of dawn – the moon risen from the waters grows and later sinks into a fog bank populated by trees. As the music becomes melancholy and the scenery turns fairy-like, one of Munari’s most famous books comes to mind: Nella nebbia di Milano (In the Fog of Milan, 1968), made of images and suggestions created by the use of different papers capable of recreating a fog effect. “In winter” – Munari wrote – “nature sleeps and when it dreams, fog appears. Walking inside the fog is like prying into nature’s dream: birds make short flights so as not to lose their direction, signs in the streets disappear, vehicles go slowly, you can barely see them for an instant and they vanish. Red, green, yellow lights color the vast masses of fog in the night, everything becomes unreal. Only inside their homes do humans and animals carry on their activities.”

Drawing A Tree

And yet, if in the 1968 book the foggy atmosphere of Milan found its lively contrast in the colorful and fantastic world of the circus (represented at the center of the small volume), in Milano Factory of Future it is precisely the dreamy quality of the fog that gives life to the color: that of the trees and of the marvelous chirping birds, which multiply and endlessly change in an extraordinary variation of styles (e.g., drawing, pointillism, watercolors). It is in this variation that – for Munari as well as Milan – lies the true art of design, which can never be detached from life; this is why the video continues with a restless series of everyday objects or elements, whose evolutions respond to an open aesthetic quest for an art understood as living sense: eggs, bottles, cutlery, monkeys, faces and masks, increasingly complex and ever-changing geometric patterns that alternate black and white with constructivist-like colored compositions.

A Tale of Three Little Birds.

Playing with art, exploring pointillism.

Zizì becomes part of the world of mass production.

Playing with art, exploring textures.

Umberto Boccioni & Giacomo Balla

When these fade away, the viewer gets one last glimpse of a Milan that seems to have come straight out of Giacomo Balla’s Futurist paintings: a knot of colorful and dynamic lines and curves, crossed as if by racing cars, where light and speed appear broken down into vortices that are continuously re-composed in an acceleration of instants, punctuated by the ringing of a bell.

A tangle of vibrant, dynamic lines, intersecting as if by racing cars.

And it is a series of vortices – a word that etymologically bring us back, to the continuous and never interrupted flow of the Milan Factory of Future and its point of (non)departure – that merges and blends with the glass and iron arches of the Central Station, teaming with trains and people against the bright colors of the background. Soon transformed into rays, the arches radiate a dazzling rainbow light that turns them into doors, mirrors, gateways, passages, once more, to the future…or better yet to Leonardo’s natural scenes, which suddenly start flowing again in the artwork and its infinite loop: because the future – and Milan knows this well – is unstoppable motion and poietic transformation also (or just exactly) of what exists.

The Navigli of Milan.

The glass and iron arches of the Central Station, teeming with trains and people against the vivid colors of the background.

The arches radiate a dazzling rainbow light that transforms them into doors, mirrors, portals, passages, once again, towards the future.