Industrially produced objects are extremely vulnerable because they are constantly discarded and thrown away by humans. Both humans and goods are victims of the culture of consumption. These discarded objects, which end up in the sea carried by rivers, are gradually destroyed into tiny pieces and become unrecognizable, eventually reaching a state of entropy.

However, Maria Cristina Finucci hypothesizes that, with the help of artificial intelligence, these fragments could emerge from the chaos and manage to organize themselves into a new and different form of life.

In 2014, at the MAXXI Museum in Rome, the artist opened the first Embassy of the State of Plastic Islands, the Garbage Patch State, which she founded at UNESCO in 2013. On that occasion, a census was made of thousands of different plastic objects that could be discarded after use and end up contributing to the plastic islands. Each object was cataloged and assigned a progressive number.

Finucci used this photographic archive to simulate their metamorphosis. With the help of a specially created AI program, she fragmented the photos of these objects, simulating the process that they actually undergo after being abandoned in the sea.

Each fragment was then recomposed and fused together with others to form a single image, where the original shapes are no longer recognizable because they have undergone a metamorphosis into new hybrid forms.

The question Maria Cristina Finucci now poses is: what does an object feel when, after being destroyed, undergoing a metamorphosis, and regaining strength, it returns to the cycle of life and the universe? How does it feel when, after its apparent death, it is reborn in a different form of life? Is there a memory of its previous life? With the help of augmented reality, it is indeed possible to recover the memory of their previous life. By pointing a smartphone at any square, the corresponding original image will emerge. The ARTIVIVE app can be downloaded for free by scanning this QR code. It can also be done from the screen.