The Work That Listens, Responds, and Remembers:

A sensitive system, a technological threshold where contemplation gives way to living interaction. Unspoken Archive – L.I.B.E.R.T.A.S., created by Emanuele Dascanio and unveiled at the MEET Digital Culture Center as part of The New Atlas of Digital Art (June 19–22, 2025), marks a turning point for the entire phygital art ecosystem.

Metagate, the Milan-based startup at the forefront of mixed reality experience design, has chosen this work as the manifesto of its vision: art as dialogue, as archive, as a permanent imprint in the digital dimension. And this is no metaphor. L.I.B.E.R.T.A.S. is the first interactive Mixed Reality installation ever inscribed directly on the Bitcoin blockchain via the Ordinals protocol. Every audience interaction is recorded, stored, and cryptographically secured within a decentralized network. The work remembers, evolves, accumulates traces—becoming an invisible archive, a collective memory, a digital body that grows through exchange.

Here, technology takes on flesh in a radically new form: the visitor engages with the work through a voice- and touch-sensitive interface powered by artificial intelligence. It is not the artwork that speaks, but the relationship that gives rise to the work itself. Dascanio’s vision—long anchored in a meticulous, almost alchemical painting practice—reaches a new frontier, where the artist’s gesture dissolves into algorithmic structure. Yet the intensity remains: it simply migrates from brush to voice, from canvas to data, from linear time to distributed permanence.

Metagate complements this perceptual revolution with two other immersive projects that enrich the curatorial framework of the MEET VILLAGE. Archive of the Future, developed on the OpenGate XR platform (a no-code project co-funded by the European Commission), showcases the winning works of the Atlas 2025 Call and invites the public to actively shape the immersive space through uploads and personalized interactions. The digital landscape shifts in real time, generating an experiential cartography in constant flux.

Meanwhile, the Interactive Materials Archive, created in collaboration with IUAV Venice, offers a new epistemology of reuse: every discarded material becomes a sensory narrative, explored through XR interfaces and catalogued in a visual, participatory database.

Yet it is L.I.B.E.R.T.A.S. that defines the living core of this new digital art atlas. It clearly reveals that collecting is no longer tied to the preservation of objects, but to the activation of processes. The collection becomes an archive of interactions, a map of emotions, a cryptographic flow of memory. The value lies not in the immutability of the work, but in the vitality of its continual redefinition.

Collecting, then, becomes a relational act—a symbolic investment in the longevity of the relationship between human and machine. Data is no longer mere information: it becomes testimony.

In this context, Metagate’s presence at MEET is far more than a technological showcase. It’s a curatorial proposition that deeply questions the role of the artist, the function of the public, and the very future of art as a tool for transmission, listening, and remembrance. A threshold, indeed. And Dascanio, through his breathing, responsive, remembering work, emerges as the first witness of this new ethic of digital presence.

© Charlotte Madeleine Castelli | All rights reserved