viola_WORKS

_ Four ways to know four different faces of Milan, a city where art and beauty are hidden in every corner: from the incredible modern buildings, to the fascinating ancient monuments, through the districts decorated by murals, to the pubs and clubs loved by the locals.
Each card suit is an itinerary, each card is a step containing the indications to reach the next one. The Milanese will be able to demonstrate how much they really know their city while the tourists will get useful tips about the "must-sees" of Milan.

_ Paula Scher loves New York City.
Her work reflects the spirit of the City but at the same time contributes to the evolution of its appearance, collaborating with record companies, museums, theaters, cinemas, schools, parks and every other kind of institution in New York.
This number investigates the relation between the designer and her city analyzing the works she made. The four rubrics treat the different kind of creations she made during her career in the Big Apple: the record covers in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the collaboration with the cultural centres, the 24-year-long relation with The Public Theater, the design for public good. Somehow, these are four ways Paula dealt with New York City. The key element in the magazine is the map: its whole structure is based on the traceability of every single institution she collaborated with.

_What if we could push away death?
What would the real impact be? What problems would this create in our minds?
We developed this concept into a speculative design experience both physical and digital that shows the extreme planning about the theme of death and the rituals surrounding it. In particular, how superstition contributes to the way people experience end-of-life rituals in order to emphasize how important these performances are to make us forget the fear and the uncertainty of life and to remove the taboo around death and dying. HEX is an Alternate reality game that challenges people to approach superstition as salvation from death anxieties with the purpose of make users realize how this mental scheme isn’t that far from modern reality. As a matter of fact, this social experiment wants to highlight how superstition is still considered to be efficient against death for many people all around the world. A real nonsense that make us feel better giving us the illusion to control our lives.

_The animated film Mulan is one of the best Disney films we will always remember. For this reason our team decided to turn this adventure into a platform game as required from the brief of this Computer Graphics course. We had to imagine this fable ten years later and invent a new conflict between the characters of the film in order to create a new scenario to solve through an arcade game. We designed everything from the game code to the characters and settings. Another crucial part of this project was to represent Mulan scenarios and events into 3D graphics in order to set them between the game levels to engage the player into the game. We tried to create a flow in player’s mindset balancing the user’s skills with the abilities requested to finish each level. The is available in Italian and (of course) Chinese.

_Frame in frame is a short analysis about the visual role of mirrors and reflected images througout the history of both cinema and photography. Each volume investigates one of the two visual areas starting with digressions about examples of the past to explore the evolution of this technique up to modern days. Together with the composition skills required to succed in creating meaningful visual contents, both these articles explain the meaning of this method in relation with the visual storytelling. The photographic one, titled Mise an abyme, examines the beautiful works of Brassaï, Lee Friedlander, Gregory Crewdson and Alex Webb through their use of mirrored surfaces. The cinematic one, instead, focuses on the use of mirrors in films like The Truman Show, Citizen Kane and others through the meaning that this composition technique can add to their scenes. But, in particular, this part wants to investigate the amazing use of the frame within frame setting in Wong Kar Wai’s In the mood for Love and the significant role that this adds to the whole story.

_How long has it been since you’ve seen the stars? The short story of a cute boy dreaming about space walks us through the consequences of light pollution. The aim of this workshop project was to create a video with an educational purpose about the public good and the value of social cooperation that refers to kids between 6 and 10 years old. After a deep research about communication for kids,we decided to use a simple illustration and animation style purposely, as we aimed to reflect the message in direct and easy way aligned with language of kids of that age range and target: curiosity and participation in the Fridays for Future’s cause. The story starts with the kid dreaming about being an astronaut and continues showing the benefit of saving energy through a little gesture as turning off the light: seeing the stars.

_Cover Up is a photographic project about album covers. The brief was to take pictures that could be published in a real contest such as advertising, brand identity and no profit campaigns. I decided to focus on the music context, as it is one of my biggest passion, designing the album covers of most of the music genres: R&B, electro, indie, rock , jazz and alternative. In order to make the whole project effective, i tried to define a precise brand identity to simulate the real communication of a single record company. For this reason, these pictures i made have elements like bright colours, strong contrast and light experiments in common. To complete the identity of the record label i designed the graphics of every single album cover to emphasize and characterize each music genre. However, graphics aren’t that invasive because of the photographic approach of the whole project.

_What happens when mankind, after having irremediably modified the equilibrium of the Earth, stops being at the center of the world? This magazine tries to question the oppressive mental forms that prevent us from thinking the human and non-human world as strictly connected. In a hybrid world, absurd and at the same time welcoming, we want to break up the usual categories to reflect on our disturbed relationship with nature. In this scenario, Paradiso magazine dreams of the future and transcribes it through projects and ideas belonging to the scope of speculative fabulation, without neglecting the more lysergic and disturbing aspects of the path. This issue is dedicated to unusual ways of thinking about food with the intention of challenging and reinventing our food traditions. Algae, plants and molds are the great essence of this journey, our guides to the new world. The time has come to weave new symbiotic relationships with the non-human world, to do the impossible to prepare ourselves for the unimaginable.
Welcome to Paradiso.

_Elvario tells the story of the territory of Elva, a mountain municipality in the Cuneo Alps, in Piedmont, Italy, in particular through the narration of a peculiar craft that made it known in the world despite its condition of geographical isolation between the late 1800s and the 1960s: the collection, processing and export of human hair, processed and gathered into braids and destined for the manufacture of wigs. The project consists of a format that includes a system of hybrid devices-in which the main artifact consists of an online platform-that combines the narrative, intimate and personal aspect of the diary with the historical, technical and descriptive aspect of the atlas. This makes it possible to provide an in-depth glimpse of the territory through the accounts of those who lived it and still live it: in fact, the main narrative voices are precisely the men and women of Elva, whose testimonies have been collected and translated. Most of the materials used within the project are digitizations made ad hoc of documents taken from what has been called a "spontaneous archive" found on site, that is, an unofficial and unformalized collection of documents, obtained through the private initiative of some inhabitants.

_Museum displays are a form of visual communication. They communicate to the public through the objects but also through elements such as captions, explanatory panels, graphics and more recently through technological innovations such as the augmented reality. The curators' role becomes to communicate to the public a set of cognitive, aesthetic and emotional experiences capable of bringing the original meaning and context of belonging of the works of art back to the museum. But if we think of all the occasions in which non-specialist visitors can feel inadequate or excluded from the artistic world, we understand that there is a strategic and communicative lack in designing the exhibition tools. But how can art museum still be a relevant place for people's experience in a historical and social phase in which we are immersed in a boundless flow of images? What could its role be in the future? This is the most urgent challenge that museums should respond to and that this thesis seeks to investigate. To do this, interviews carried out with curators, cultural mediators and tourist guides will be taken into consideration, as well as effective case studies, to understand how the curatorial process currently takes place and which might be the most interesting exhibition solutions.

_Following a month-long trip between two politically opposite countries, the United States and Cuba, I decided to organize my analog photographs into a small zine to highlight the socio-cultural contrasts of these two realities. On the one hand Cuba, a communist country in dire straits after the international imbalances of recent years (covid pandemic and Russian-Ukrainian war), on the other its opposite, the United States and in particular New York, an ever-expanding city, the center of Western progress. In order to emphasize the almost opposite feelings that these two countries conveyed to me, I decided to use colors and references to compare the two realities: on the one hand, in color, the feeling that time has stopped in the 1970s, on the other hand, in black and white, the continuous frenzy of progress.