Author: Alessandro Arnold

Can a wall become a space for storytelling, a visual device capable of bringing together art, language, and design? This question gave rise to Alphabet City – Exercises in Urban Art, an exhibition curated by Professor Giulio Vesprini, featuring a selection of works by students from AANT Academy in Rome. The exhibition will open on Friday, July 3, 2026, at 5:30 PM at the Palazzina Sud of Lido Cluana in Civitanova Marche, as part of the Tabula Rasa Visual Arts Festival.

Giulio Vesprini, an AANT lecturer, is an artist and designer engaged in research at the intersection of public art, graphics, and urban intervention. For years, he has developed practices related to typography in space and to the relationship between sign and architecture.

The project originated within the workshop of the same name, held last year during AANT’s Refresh Week, and conceived as a research lab focused on the urban poster format. In recent years, this language has emerged as one of the most dynamic within contemporary public art: accessible, replicable, and capable of activating immediate connections with the urban environment. Within this context, Alphabet City explores the poster not only as a visual output, but as a narrative and relational device.

The Alphabet City project took shape within the workshop of the same name, held in March 2025 as part of AANT Refresh Week. It was conceived as a research lab for students enrolled in the three-year courses, focused on the format of the urban poster. The starting point of the workshop was a “pilot wall” at AANT’s headquarters in Piazza della Rovere, a place understood not merely as an exhibition surface, but as a structure of meaning.

In recent years, the language of the poster has established itself as one of the most dynamic forms within contemporary public art: accessible, replicable, and capable of creating immediate connections with the urban context. Alphabet City therefore fits into this landscape as a design exercise that explores the poster not only as a visual output, but also as a narrative and relational device.

On display in Civitanova will be works by students Enrico Pezzali, Stefano Fedele, Gabriele Formiconi, Gabriele Petcu, Giulia Caiola, Giulia Trombetti, Matteo Donati, Marianna Branconi, and Matteo Sinopoli. The exhibition design, created by Giulio Vesprini and produced by Materie Unite in collaboration with AANT, the event’s cultural partner, offers a coherent vision between educational research and curatorial practice, giving the public an experience that connects education, territory, and contemporary visual culture.

On April 21, AANT Academy hosted a new appointment of Meet the Expert, the format dedicated to direct dialogue between students and professionals from the creative industries. The guest speaker was Luigi Maria Perotti, director, screenwriter and documentary filmmaker, in conversation with Professor Valerio Di Paola, coordinator of the Bachelor’s Degree in Videomaking, Story, Cinema and Media Design.

The event, held within the framework of the partnership with the Libero Bizzarri Foundation, focused on an in-depth exploration of some of Perotti’s most significant works, including “L’infame e suo fratello”, “Florence Fight Club”and “La via di mio padre”. These works reflect a consistent interest in social and historical dynamics. At the same time, the evolving nature of his practice clearly emerged, now increasingly oriented towards the potential of generative artificial intelligence. Recent projects such as “Tales from Neurocene” and “The Final Chapter”, also developed in dialogue with the academic world, demonstrate a research approach that integrates audiovisual languages and technological innovation, opening new perspectives for content creation and consumption.

The event provided a stimulating opportunity for direct exchange, effectively connecting education, the creative industries and research, and offering students of the Academy’s Bachelor’s Degree programs concrete tools to interpret the ongoing transformations in the audiovisual landscape.

About the guest: Luigi Maria Perotti is an Italian director, screenwriter and documentary filmmaker working in the field of documentary cinema and contemporary storytelling. After graduating in Communication Sciences, he developed a professional career between Italy and abroad, creating projects for cinema, television and auteur documentary. Throughout his career, he has collaborated with major production companies and with Rai Cultura, contributing to formats such as “Di là dal fiume e tra gli alberi”, where he refined a language that combines visual research, attention to place and narrative depth.

Jianwei Xun,, a collective name for human and artificial intelligences conceived by  Andrea Colamedici,, arrives at AANT and teaches its first course at the Academy. The series of meetings involves 20 students from all three-year academic programs in a cross-disciplinary, immersive educational journey.

The title, “Defense Against the Dark Arts: Thinking Through AI,” ironically echoes the famous Hogwarts subject from the Harry Potter saga and bends it in a philosophical direction: the “dark arts” we must learn to defend ourselves against are not spells, but the mechanisms that steer attention, automatically manufacture consent, and silently replace skills within the everyday infrastructure of our cognitive lives—mechanisms that are all the more effective the less they are recognized.

The course begins from an observation that is as simple as it is radical: generative artificial intelligence has already transformed the way we think, write, work, and perceive reality, and yet the overwhelming majority of people do not have adequate tools to understand what is happening.

The course is structured around seven sessions between March and May 2026, each entrusted to a different voice, according to a principle that is both methodological and philosophical: no single perspective is sufficient to navigate such a vast and constantly changing territory. It begins on March 20 with an introduction by Maura Gancitano and Andrea Colamedici, who situate the course within the theoretical framework of hypnocracy and prompt thinking, the philosophical work developed in recent years precisely through Jianwei Xun.

The following five meetings bring to the center of the discussion an equal number of distinct forms of expertise and sensibility. Giorgiomaria Cornelio, a poet, director, and performer born in Macerata in 1997, is an editor of Nazione Indiana and the author, among other works, of La specie storta and Fossili di rivolta for Edizioni Tlon, as well as L’ufficio delle tenebre. His work moves across poetry, cinema, and performance art, constantly interrogating the relationship between imagination, language, and forms of life, and has been presented at the Venice Biennale, Santarcangelo Festival, and the Science Gallery in Dublin.

Alex Braga, a musician and producer born in Novara, is the creator of A-Mint, the world’s first adaptive musical artificial intelligence, developed with Roma Tre University researchers Francesco Riganti Fulginei and Antonino Laudani: a neural system that learns in real time the improvisational code of the musician it interacts with and performs a duet with them, without any prior training, in a form of human-machine creative collaboration that has brought Braga to the stages of Ars Electronica, Sónar, the Centre Pompidou, and RomaEuropa.

Nicola Zamperini, a professional journalist born in Rome in 1970, is the author of Manuale di disobbedienza digitale and Lavorare (da casa) stanca for Castelvecchi, and curates the Telegram channel Disobbedienze, where every day he presents a news item from the digital world accompanied by a critical interpretive key. His work focuses on the cultural genesis of techno-corporations and on the distortion that algorithms produce in the fundamental dimensions of existence, from friendship to memory, from birth to death.

Francesco Marino, a journalist and digital strategist, is the author of Scelti per te. Come gli algoritmi governano la nostra vita e cosa possiamo fare per difenderci (Castelvecchi, 2021) and Turisti della realtà (Edizioni Tlon), as well as curator of the digital culture project Pillole di futuro presente on Instagram. His perspective investigates the way digital platforms redefine our relationship with reality, transforming every experience into content to be produced, consumed, and monetized.

Luna Bianchi, a legal expert specializing in intellectual property and co-founder of Immanence, a benefit corporation dedicated to assessing the social impacts and ethical risks of algorithms and artificial intelligence systems, is also a member of the World Economic Forum Working Group for Metaverse Governance and, since 2025, of AANT’s GenIALab research laboratory. Her work stands precisely at the point where law, ethics, and AI governance meet, with the aim of building a culture of innovation that is responsible and attentive to fundamental rights.

The series concludes on May 22 with a roundtable discussion that does not aim to draw final conclusions, but rather to show what happens when such different perspectives are brought into dialogue.

For the students involved, these sessions represent a concrete opportunity to develop a new kind of design literacy. The goal is not simply to use AI, but to learn to think through it: to recognize its logics, understand its implications, and integrate it consciously into creative processes. In this scenario, every prompt becomes an act of thought, every output a construction of meaning. This is an increasingly central skill for anyone working in the fields of the arts, communication, and technology.

On March 31, AANT – Academy of Arts and New Technologies in Rome hosted a new event in the OPEN AANT series, dedicated to engaging with key figures in the contemporary creative scene. The guest was Silvio Lorusso, writer, artist and designer, who presented his book “The Designer Without Qualities.”

At the core of the talk, moderated by Professor Gianna Angelini, Scientific Director and Head of Internationalization at the Academy, was a highly relevant question: what does it mean to practice design today, in a context where tools are increasingly accessible and the boundaries of the profession are becoming more fluid? Lorusso’s book fits into this scenario as a critical reflection on the role of the contemporary designer, highlighting contradictions, expectations and blind spots within the field.

Through the concept of the “designer without qualities,” the author explores a widespread condition: a less clearly defined design practice, suspended between creative autonomy and market dynamics, between experimentation and precarity. This analysis restores complexity to the designer’s role, emphasizing the need to rethink its identity, tools and responsibilities today. The event provided an opportunity for in-depth discussion and exchange for undergraduate students, offering useful perspectives to navigate the current design landscape.

About the speaker: Silvio Lorusso is a faculty member at Lusófona University in Lisbon and a tutor at the Design Academy Eindhoven, one of Europe’s leading institutions for design education. His work is characterized by a critical and interdisciplinary approach, addressing the transformations of design within the contemporary context.