Event
The New Atlas of Digital Art 2025: Immersive frontiers
Immersive Frontiers, the frontiers of immersiveness. The theme chosen for the sixth The New Atlas of Digital Art 2025 is a call to the international community for two days of sharing, experiences and workshops, a critical exploration of forms of cultural fruition and mediation, entertainment experiences and, of course, art.
All MEET spaces will be inhabited by The New Atlas of Digital Arts 2025. The Theater with international panels, the Immersive Room with Marc Da Costa and Matthew Niederhauser’s exhibition The Golden Key, the Galleries with Jean-Michel Jarre’s Promptitude, and the ground floor with XR/MR experiences coordinated by Metagate.
Atlas 2025 is divided into three thematic cores, populated by theorists and practitioners from the international vanguard, who examine the new relationships between perception, cognition, and cultural mediation. A thought laboratory for practitioners interested in the technical aspects and conceptual transformations underlying the evolution of creativity in the digital age.
Immersivity: new narrative frontiers
The first session of Atlas 2025 provides an overview of the current state and future prospects of immersive technologies. This panel explores how immersiveness is evolving from a simple technological innovation to a mature expressive language capable of redefining the relationship between creator, work, and audience.
Panelists in this session will include Jeffrey Schnapp, a researcher in the digital humanities and theorist of new forms of immersive storytelling. Alongside him, Mathieu Gayet will talk about how immersive technologies shape collective narratives within museums, festivals and urban spaces. Jenny Thibault of SAT (Société des Arts Technologiques) in Montreal will illustrate how immersive technologies are redefining contemporary performance space.
Museums, archives and cultural heritage: AI and immersivity at the service of cultural mediation
The second topic area focuses on cultural institutions and how they use artificial intelligence and immersive technologies to transform the preservation, interpretation and enjoyment of heritage. This session addresses the dual challenge of “educating” the digital to cultural content and, in parallel, using emerging technologies to innovate how culture is accessed and valued.
Candice Chenu, head of digital cultural project and cultural private event at Fondation Louis Vuitton brings the case history of the immersive experience on architect Frank O. Ghery and the Fondation Louis Vuitton app as an intelligent cultural mediator.
Also on this panel is Rasa Bočyté of the Sound and Vision Museum of the Netherlands, an institution at the forefront of the use of AI for the preservation and enhancement of audiovisual archives. The Italian contribution is represented by Mauro Martino, an artist and researcher in the field of data visualization and generative AI applied to cultural heritage. Together they demonstrate how artificial intelligence “brings to life” archives and creates new forms of cultural mediation that extend, rather than replace, the role of individual creativity in heritage interpretation.
Also participating in this panel is Veronika Liebl of Ars Electronica, one of the most influential international experts on issues of art in relation to technology and society.
Distribution and new economic models
The third topic area focuses on the impact of immersiveness and AI on production models, distribution and economies of cultural content. As technology redefines the entire value chain, this session explores new economic opportunities and structural changes in the world of communication, entertainment and entertainment.
The panel includes Agata Di Tommaso of Diversion Cinema, a pioneer in the distribution of VR and immersive content, who will explore new channels and fruition models for these experiences.
Luke Kemp of the Barbican in London brings his experience in running one of Europe’s most innovative cultural centers, which has been offering hybrid models of cultural offerings for years. Together, these experts will explore how real-time interconnectedness and the integration of AI into creative processes are generating new economic and production paradigms.
Rounding out the panel is Rachel Parent of Hub Montreal, an innovation platform for the creative industries.
The new Atlas of Digital Art 2025: exhibitions and labs
Two exhibitions run through the Atlas expanding the reflection on immersiveness and the role of artificial intelligence as a co-creative tool in art:
Promptitude, by Jean-Michel Jarre and The Golden Key, by Marc Da Costa and Matthew Niederhauser.
Two different experiences from two expressive worlds that complement each other thanks to different perspectives. On the one hand, immersiveness and AI as an instrument of collective cultural regeneration capable of unifying the human narrative in the dialogue between contemporary reality and millenary myths. On the other, the daring and instinctive attitude of Jean-Michel Jarre, who for the first time ventures into a visual art exhibition. A work, the one from the French musician, which traces his imagery together with artificial intelligence to compose 19 portraits of hybrid creatures. And finally asking the AI to give them a title and a brief description, with poetic results, sparks of self-awareness shared between man and machine.
The ground floor of MEET during ATLAS 2025 will be animated for two days by Metagate’s program of labs, contests and workshops and art, in collaboration with artist Emanuele Dascanio, Sara Calandra and the Nebula collective.
