One of the pioneers of Italian New Media Art, Giuilana Cuneaz explores the boundaries between science, technology, and imagination. Her exhibition Wunderkammer Digitale, on view at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale della Lomellina in Vigevano reinterprets the historic tradition of cabinets of curiosities.
There are artists who pursue a technique and others who reinvent it. Giuliana Cunéaz belongs without doubt to the latter. Born in Aosta in 1959, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Turin before embarking on a multifaceted journey: from sculpture to video installation, until discovering – almost by chance – the potential of 3D computer graphics.
It was 2003, and in Italy the subject was nearly unknown. “For me it was a turning point,” she recalls. “3D contained all disciplines, from painting to cinema. Suddenly I could create my own worlds, shape forms, animate them, without relying on sets or stage artifices.” This revelation defined her artistic language and positioned her as one of the first voices of New Media Art in Italy.
TECHNOLOGY, CHALLENGES, AND CREATIVE POSSIBILITIES
At the beginning, the technical limits were overwhelming: endless rendering times, inadequate equipment, and exorbitant costs. Today, however, Cunéaz works with an ease that would have been unimaginable two decades ago, thanks largely to artificial intelligence. Yet she remains cautious: “With AI I am faster and more autonomous,” she explains, “but one must not be deceived. AI tends to produce standardized images. It becomes truly interesting only when I can force it into ‘mistakes,’ because in those mistakes unexpected solutions emerge.” Cunéaz does not merely use technology; she questions it, provokes it, and seeks to wrest a margin of mystery from its mechanical logic.
WUNDERKAMMER DIGITALE: A CABINET OF CURIOSITIES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
This creative tension is fully expressed in her current project, Wunderkammer Digitale, presented at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale della Lomellina, inside Vigevano’s Sforza Castle, until December 15. The central installation, Matter Waves Unseen, combines 3D animations with raw clay sculptures. Some of the sculptural forms appear to emerge directly from the digital images, settling into the drawers of a cabinet of curiosities like enigmatic relics of a world suspended between natural and artificial.
“I have always loved the idea of exploration,” says Cunéaz. “It is like digging beneath the skin of things. The wunderkammer allowed me to contain the marvels discovered by observing matter at the nanomolecular level.”
ART IN DIALOGUE WITH HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY
The exhibition acquires particular resonance in dialogue with the Roman artifacts of the Strada Collection. “Ancient objects preserve a beauty that often surprises us for its modernity,” Cunéaz observes. This is not her first engagement with archaeology: as early as 2002, with Glassway, she had explored the relationship between ancient and contemporary glass. In Wunderkammer Digitale, raw clay – a primordial, fragile, and living material – becomes the counterpoint to digital animations, while the encounter with ancient objects opens a silent dialogue that stretches across centuries.
Cunéaz describes herself as an “explorer of the invisible.” For twenty years, she has studied nanomolecular structures which, when observed through the electron microscope, reveal striking similarities to the visible world. “It is as if forms were chasing one another from the micro to the macro,” she explains. For her, the invisible is not only a scientific category but also a poetic territory: “It is like silence or emptiness. We can fill it with imagination, or allow it to guard its mystery. And it is precisely this mystery that fuels our curiosity.”
QUANTUM QUIRKS AND THE ART OF SCIENTIFIC PARADOX
Her work constantly oscillates between rigor and fascination. Science offers tools and knowledge, but also unveils paradoxes. With her project Quantum Quirks (2024), dedicated to quantum physics, Cunéaz confronted a dimension where reality and illusion intertwine. “The most recent discoveries present us with mysteries more than answers,” she reflects. “And perhaps it is precisely there that art finds its space.”
For Cunéaz, the responsibility of the artist is to resist being overwhelmed by technological tools. “The machine offers excellent collaborators,” she admits, “but without a project it produces only a jumble of banalities. The artist must preserve a personal vision and a personal language.” Her art, suspended between science and wonder, reminds us that the unknown is not something to be eliminated, but a space to inhabit.
LINK
- Between dust and algorithms. A day with Damiano Tata in his studio - October 24, 2025
- Giuliana Cunéaz: art as an exploration between science and wonder - September 12, 2025
- Beyond the screen: immersion, embodiment, and empathy at Venice Immersive - August 29, 2025
