CODAME x Milan Design Week — A Night of Art, Technology, and Transformation
Thank you to everyone who joined us for an unforgettable evening exploring the intersection of art, technology, and human imagination during Milan Design Week.
On April 24th in Milano, something quiet and electric happened at the same time.
A room filled with artists, technologists, designers, hackers, mentors, and curious humans — many meeting in person for the first time after weeks of connecting across screens. By the end of the night, ideas that had been moving between Milan, San Francisco, Bucharest, Kiev, Stuttgart, and beyond finally shared the same space — breathing the same air, catching the same light.
Thank you to everyone who joined us for an unforgettable evening exploring the intersection of art, technology, and human imagination during Milano Design Week.
To the volunteers who carried equipment, welcomed strangers, poured drinks, fixed cables, translated, documented, and quietly held the night together — thank you.
To the artists who trusted us with works still in motion, still becoming — thank you.
To the friends, partners, families, and supporters who keep showing up, season after season — thank you.
This gathering was made possible through the generous support of our partners. A heartfelt thank you to Google for hosting us, Schokolade for the aperitivo that sparked connection and conversation, and creAtIva for extending and nurturing the international creative community that made this night so vibrant.
None of this exists without you.
A first for CODAME: ARTEX and Print Club, in public
April 24th also marked something we’ve been building toward for a long time: the first public release of ARTEX — our exploration into a living medium for digital art that can persist, adapt, and evolve over time — alongside the launch of Print Club, CODAME’s new collectible art program.
ARTEX began as a question we kept hearing from artists and collectors alike:
Will this work still exist in twenty years? Will it still breathe in 2036?
Instead of answering defensively, we answered as a medium — modular, sensitive, alive.
A painting that breathes. A sculpture that notices you.
Art that lives with us, not as interruption, but as companion.
Print Club is the other half of that promise: a way for living art to take root in the physical world — in homes, studios, offices, cafés — wherever someone chooses to invite it in.
Seeing both step out of the lab and into a room full of people for the first time was a moment that won’t repeat.
To the early collaborators who shaped this — Lorenzo Gecchelin, Alessandro Merletti De Palo, and many others — this is your night as much as ours.
Video by Dario Bagio Torrisi
The works that joined us in person
The evening featured a series of immersive and thought-provoking works by visionary artists, the following projects from The New Human Creative Hackathon traveled with us physically, alongside their creators. Each one is less a conclusion and more a doorway:
✨ Elsewhere — Eugenio Marongiu’s surreal, densely mediated portrait of hyperconnection in contemporary life. Figures share the same space but live in parallel dimensions of absorption — gazes locked downward, bodies present, attention permanently routed elsewhere. The work refuses the easy verdict of dystopia or progress and instead asks the harder question: what is this condition revealing about who we are becoming? A piece that felt eerily at home in a room full of people putting their phones away to look at it.
✨ Interactive Mirror Portal — Alex Thevenot built a mirror that doesn't just reflect — it transforms. No screens, no digital trickery. Just geometry, reflection, and movement, asking: what if the mirror didn't just reflect who you are, but revealed who you could become?
✨ CAPTHA Robot — Vladimir Grankovsky, the father of CAPTCHA, has taken the center stage as both presence and provocation, this work explored the blurred boundaries between machine agency and human perception. More than an object, it became an encounter—inviting curiosity, discomfort, and dialogue. Some people walked away within seconds. Others leaned in. And some stayed — having surprisingly honest, strange, and memorable conversations precisely because the system wasn’t trying to be liked. That tension — between discomfort and curiosity — is where ART+TECH lives. Maybe you get more from a conversation when it doesn’t flatter you. Maybe directness is its own kind of care. Maybe it’s not for everyone — and that’s fine.
✨ Materialized Enhancements — Newton Winter, Anton Kulaga, Livia Zaharia, and Markel Kori turned 3.8 billion years of evolutionary code into a participatory artwork. Pick your enhancement genes from real published research, sign your composition, and watch a unique 3D-printable totem of "the new human you" emerge. Built across 1,500 km of trains and flights between Milan, Bucharest, and Munich. Pure CODAME energy.
✨ Magni-fire — Zeo Zhang, Matteo Rederer, and Florian Rederer opened a window into Matteo's imagination, where ABC drawings become looping worlds you can zoom into, drag through, and play inside. A reminder that in a world of hyper-realistic generation, the raw imagination of a human mind is still the rarest material.
✨ A Mind of His Own — Emanuele Ratti's grid of granular silhouettes, where one purple disruption cracks the pattern of conformity. Through ARTEX, this work is no longer fixed — the disruption can travel, follow you, disappear, and re-emerge somewhere else. Difference as something experienced, not owned.Highlights from the broader constellation
Highlights from the broader constellation
Even the works that didn’t physically travel to Milano were very much part of the night — projected, shared, played with, talked about. A few that kept coming up in conversation:
✨ EmpathAR — quite possibly the most-played piece of the evening. Vanessa Cuevas and team built a real-time AR overlay that reads posture, expression, and movement, and renders a live “Social Battery” label over each person in frame: Energized → Engaged → Present → Fading → Needs Space. People kept pointing it at each other, then at themselves, then at strangers across the room, then back at themselves. Equal parts mirror and mischief.
✨ DRIFT – Astronaut Diary — Ming Jyun Hung’s immersive web piece about a stranded astronaut, built with React, GPGPU particles, and AI-generated diary entries. A quieter, more introspective take on The New Human: not augmentation, but endurance. Anchored by Etta Helfrich’s haunting Three Sparrows, it asks what remains of us when everything external falls away.
✨ Illy is a Primitive Intelligence — Yagiz Mungan's semi-intelligent listening instrument, now living inside ARTEX. Tap and hold to speak or sing into the mic, release to hear Illy's harmonic reply. The deliberate antithesis of Siri, Alexa, and Cortana — Illy doesn't understand language at all. It listens for the sonic properties of your voice — attack, loudness, roughness, pitch — and answers back in tone, timbre, and color. An emotional mirror, free from symbols. A perfect counter-melody to the rude New Human avatar across the room.
✨ Coral Holobiont — Jon Somerscales and Enrico “Mad” Paiardi’s collaborative web experience that uses body tracking and websockets to let participants experience themselves as a particle system, connected in real time with others. A gentle, expansive answer to “what is the New Human?” — not one body, but a holobiont. A coral.
✨ Call Into Being — Briam Rolon and Helen Lam’s fulldome + AR piece moving from isolation to collective brilliance through three scenes: dark mirror, critical mass, emergent form. Particles become galaxies. Glitches stay in on purpose. We are a collection of somethings making a whole that the math never predicted.
✨ Sonic Lens — Silvie Claes, @Srix, and Bart Cuppens turn uploaded video into layered sonic and visual interpretations through modes like place, tension, calm, memory, rhythm, atmosphere. Inspired by bells — one of humanity’s oldest public sound technologies — and asking what happens when we stop treating sound as background and start reading the world through it again.
And these are just a handful. Every other project from The New Human hackathon is part of the same constellation — go wander through them in the Showcase Archive and tell us which ones move you.
Next stop: San Francisco. Then Berlin.
April 24th wasn’t a finale. It was a refueling.
The same constellation now travels west. The New Human at San Francisco Design Week is our next stop — same spirit, new room, new conversations, with ARTEX and Print Club continuing to find their feet in public. If you’re in the Bay, come raise a glass with us. After that, we head to Berlin. The New Human (in Berlin)
Both events are free and open. Donations go directly to supporting these type of initiatives and artists behind the work.
We don’t build the future alone. We build it together.
That sentence has been our quiet north star this whole season, and Milano made it feel less like a slogan and more like a fact. We watched it happen.
So — to the volunteers who showed up early and stayed late, to the artists who let the work be seen before it was “finished,” to the friends who brought other friends, to everyone who asked a real question (even of a rude robot) or made a real introduction or held space for someone else’s idea:
You are the medium.
Thank you for being part of it.
Want to keep building with us? Create with ARTEX
See you in San Francisco. See you in Berlin. See you wherever the next room opens.
— With love, CODAME ART💜TECH