Questions Not Asked
An Interview with Mattia Cuttini
Mattia Cuttini is an Italian digital artist and a pioneer in the field of crypto art. His work is rooted in both an intellectual and technical curiosity that leads him to combine audio, graphics and performance with cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain.
His interest in 90s pop culture goes hand in hand with that in machines, pushing him to experiment with the physical and technological limits within which his artistic practice unfolds.
Cuttini creates contaminations between analogue and digital, as well as between natural and artificial, to question the collision between physical fragility and digital immutability. His work slowly reveals itself over time, inviting the public to rediscover the pleasure of losing themselves in wonder.
The artist is originally from Udine, Italy, and part of the non-profit association Kaleidoscienza, which deals with scientific dissemination through heterogeneous creative and artistic activities. His work has been featured on numerous crypto art platforms including SuperRare, KnownOrigin, Objkt and Async Art.
In this interview we discuss his work and his recent solo show that took place in November 2023 at the NFT Factory in Paris.
Beth Jochim (B.): You worked in the electronics industry for a decade before choosing a career as an artist. What made you take this direction?
Mattia Cuttini (M.C.): Creativity has always been part of my life. I attended the Arturo Malignani technical institute in Udine, Italy, and when I got my first job I started spending my money to buy musical instruments. I set up a small recording studio at home and started using the PC to create graphics to support my music. At the time the Internet was not yet widespread and I could only use it at work where there was also a photocopier, which I used pushing it beyond its limits. Then I discovered the DeviantArt community, which was the largest online art community at the time, and a new world opened up to me.
When the electronics market hit the crisis, I signed up for an evening course for graphic designers to acquire the professionalism that I lacked. During this period I worked in several communication and web design agencies then, in the summer of 2018, Massimo Franceschet aka hex6c introduced me to blockchain technology. On November 9th, 2018 I created and sold my first piece on SuperRare and exactly five years later, on November 9th, 2023 the vernissage of my solo exhibition entitled “Back and Forth/ Mattia Cuttini 1999 > 2023” took place in Paris.
In 2020, Professor Ahmed Elgammal invited me to participate in a digital artistic residency on Playform, which is a platform he designed to make AI accessible to artists without skills in computing. From that moment I continued my journey working between physical and digital, producing works that became part of important collections, and developing a theme dear to me which is that of dematerialization.
B.: You once said that you prefer to leave your audience with doubts rather than answers. What guides your artistic practice?
(M.C.): We live in a world that provides us with many answers, but which has unaccustomed us to the pleasure of asking questions. Not having a traditional education in the artistic field, I am first and foremost a cultural consumer. I buy art books and go to exhibitions, but without first finding out what I’m going to see. I want to stand in front of the work as if I were a blank slate to be filled with emotions, to let myself be driven by curiosity. Everything makes sense after I have processed the experience; then it’s time to do the research. Udine, despite not being a very large city, is artistically quite vibrant and this has helped shape my interest in going beyond the obvious and helped me broaden my knowledge and seek different interpretations. This is why I want my work to be a stimulus to ask ourselves new questions and find new answers.
B.: You are among the first artists to experiment with blockchain when this technology was still little known. You boast important collaborations, including the one with XCOPY. What was the defining moment in your career as a crypto artist?
(M.C.): I believe there are a few moments that have shaped my path over time. The first is the digital residency at Playform Studio that I mentioned before. This experience allowed me to give life to “Defined Undefined” (2020), a body of work created using artificial intelligence in which I experimented with technological error as art. It is made up of 6 pairs of Defined-Undefined works for a total of 12 pieces, which were then put up for sale on SuperRare. I trained Playform’s GANs-based system by feeding it with more than one hundred images of new works made with rubber stamps assembled post-production. The color scale that I chose included a few colors such as white, red, black, and gray. This has contributed to creating an abstract work in which the concept of what is defined meets and collides with that of the undefined, just as my work as an artist meets and collides with that of the machine.
Another significant moment was the collaboration with my digital family, that is Sparrow, XCOPY, OficinasTK, Serste, and ilan katin for the creation of “TXU.TOTEM” (2019). The work is hosted on the Async Art platform and is a collective exploration of the concepts of gods and elements and the relationship that binds them together. Finally, my acquaintance with the Italian crypto artist Skygolpe since the days of Telegram group chats is also very important.
B.: In November your solo exhibition entitled “Back and Forth/ Mattia Cuttini 1999 > 2023” took place at the NFT Factory in Paris. You described the show as an installation that traces your artistic work from the beginning to today, but also a creative laboratory. Can you expand on this point?
(M.C.): When I said this I was referring to the website that was prepared for the exhibition, however it can extend to the show itself because it was not easy to organize and present 24 years of work. The idea of a single show developed during the Glitch Art Residency at Château du Feÿ in 2022 and from conversations with Benoît Couty who is the artistic director of NFT Factory in Paris.
I had to find a system to catalog the works that took into account both the aesthetics and the technique used to create them. I therefore produced 12 sections that I wanted to represent like a telephone keypad to remember the strong connection that my work has with the machine. This subdivision can also be explored online on my Instagram account, where for each group (i.e., Xerox Art, Design, Glitched, Photographic, Rubberstamp, Generative, AI Generated, Pixel, Assembled, Collaborations, Fonts, Audio) I offer a framework of the work.
B.: What relationship do you have with your collectors?
(M.C.): One side of web3 that I find very positive is the fact that the interaction between artists and collectors is much closer. The latter are in all respects an integral part of the community, which for me is a group of people that share a mindset. Personally, my relationship with collectors has grown and developed over time. I am often in contact with some of them and it happens that I prepare information material to accompany the work they have acquired. This allows me to further strengthen the bond with them and offer a more precise context for my works.
B.: In the last two years the world of crypto art has experienced notable ups and downs, however, despite the bear market, your work is going well. What advice would you give to an artist who wants to start taking their first steps in the field of crypto art?
M.C.: The first piece of advice is to always be true to yourself and not distort your work in the name of current trends. It is important to find your own voice to be able to work on an ongoing basis and continue to experiment without being satisfied with the first results. The second, which is more practical, is to have a social presence on X (formerly Twitter) and practice on NFT platforms such as Zeroone and MetaMask or with Teia and Temple Wallet for the Tezos blockchain.
B.: Any project for 2024 that you can share?
(M.C.): My work between digital and physical will continue. I will be working with GANs-based systems using as usual my image dataset as input to create new animated abstract works whose images are expanded by adding a Photoshop layer in post-production. I will also participate in “Screensavers”, a project conceived by Aleksandra Art following a recent online dispute between two influential people from the art world. And finally, I will focus on a physical exhibition in Udine to develop the theme of dematerialization. I believe it is our job to preserve art, which is why I am interested in bringing to the public the issue between the immutability provided by the blockchain and the fragility of a physical artwork in which the ink can fade over time.
To follow Mattia Cuttini: linktr.ee/mattiacprodukt
