Gli Infiniti di Bruno (Bruno’s Infinities)

Gli Infiniti di Bruno (Bruno’s Infinities) is a multi-modal body of work unfolding across print media, real-time 3D environments, libretto fragments, and synthetic datasets. Blending traditional material practices with digital tools and machine learning, the project conjures traces of an imaginary lost opera centered on speculative episodes in the life of sixteenth-century philosopher Giordano Bruno.

Celebrated in his own time as a master of artificial memory and a radical advocate of Copernican cosmology, Bruno envisioned an infinite universe populated by innumerable intelligences. Bruno’s “infinite infinite” is placed in tension with the seemingly limitless yet mathematically bounded spaces of machine learning, staging an uncanny encounter between Renaissance metaphysics and contemporary algorithmic logic. Through images, fragments, and iterative states, the work considers how human and artificial intelligences shape one another’s fictions, memories, and possible worlds.

Development of the project was supported by residencies at the Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University in 2023 and continued during Catanese’s 2024 Fulbright U.S. Scholar appointment at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, Poland.