NuvolaProject
NuvolaProject is an art project founded in Rome in 2018 from the convergence of the research of Massimo Di Leo and Gaia Riposati, operating at the intersection of contemporary art, performing media, and technological innovation.
Gaia Riposati,—artist, actress, performer, and director—pursues a research practice centered on voice, body, and the word as instruments for creating and redefining presence, working across theater, the visual arts, and emerging media. Over the course of her career she has performed in and directed works by Chekhov, Pirandello, Beckett, Wilde, and Queneau, as well as Modigliani; she has created performances and special projects in venues such as the Louvre, the MADRE Museum, PAN (Palazzo delle Arti Napoli), the National Chalcography, the Ethnographic Museum of Rome, Trajan’s Markets – Museum of the Imperial Fora, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, and the Venice Biennale; she has collaborated with leading artists including Vettor and Mimma Pisani, Luca Maria Patella, Renato Mambor, Alain Fleischer, Piero Pizzi Cannella, Bruno Ceccobelli, Hans Hartung, and Sidival Fila; she has taken part in performative events dedicated to Joseph Beuys by Lucrezia De Domizio Durini and in Zerynthia’s experimental programs, conceiving the stage as a space of relation among identity, memory, and language. Since 2004 she has shared an artistic partnership with Massimo Di Leo, with whom she co-founded NuvolaProject.
Massimo Di Leo, a digital artist, technological innovator, and cultural entrepreneur, has been working since the 1990s in interactive communication, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence applied to creative processes. After an experience in the IT industry, he oriented his practice toward the creation of immersive environments and phygital systems, developing works in which algorithmic data converges with poetic intuition, and in which code becomes a narrative and aesthetic device. He collaborates with museums, foundations, and cultural institutions to design accessible, innovative interactive experiences, with a strong focus on cultural empowerment, collective memory, and sustainability.
NuvolaProject was born as the synthesis of these paths, developing works that merge artificial intelligence, machine learning, immersive environments, and performative interfaces, in a research that explores the thresholds of perception and consciousness. The duo’s phygital approach blends the physical and virtual dimensions, connecting audience and artwork in a living, often unpredictable, always open interaction. Their works have been presented in museums, festivals, and international cultural institutions, including the MACRO in Rome, the Javits Center in New York, and the House of Wisdom in Sharjah, in an ongoing process of redefining the aesthetic experience and the relationship between viewer and artwork.
In 2024, the Imaginaria cycle—composed of eight digital performative works in augmented reality—entered the permanent collection of Palazzo Merulana in Rome. Alongside their artistic production, the duo pursues an intense program of theoretical and educational research, collaborating with universities and academies to lead seminars and courses on the intersection of art and artificial intelligence, interactive languages, and new expressive modes.
In 2022, they published the volume Performing Media – un futuro remoto, analyzing performing media within the digital transition, while in 2024 they were among the founders of On/Off, the magazine by Zerynthya, contributing dIAlogos, a column dedicated to the maieutics of the contemporary in the age of synthetic intelligences.
NuvolaProject is a constantly evolving organism, a laboratory of visions in which art becomes a critical tool to explore the relationship between presence and virtuality, between imagination and computational data.