The Italian artist Mattia Sommovigo, known as Skygolpe, presents BLACKOUT, a powerfully evocative public intervention that transforms urban space into a semantic short circuit. By scattering enigmatic slogans across large-scale billboards throughout the city of Milan, the work becomes part of the artist’s broader exploration into the intersections of art, artificial intelligence, and philosophy.

The choice of Milan as the first stop holds deep symbolic value: historically regarded as the Italian capital of visual communication and advertising, the city marks an ideal starting point for a project that will gradually expand to other Italian and international locations.

Phrases like “INGOIA IL PROGRESSO” (SWALLOW THE PROGRESS), “LE MACCHINE SONO FEDELI” (MACHINES ARE LOYAL), and “IL FUTURO È GENERATO” (THE FUTURE IS GENERATED) cut through the urban landscape with a destabilizing and ambiguous lexicon that exposes the deep contradictions between technology and contemporary identity.

At the heart of BLACKOUT lies the philosophical practice of maieutics, once again central to Skygolpe’s conceptual development. While in the Socratic tradition it was the question that carried the force of doubt, here it is the affirmation that assumes this role: declarative enigmas etched into urban space, acting as silent detonators that fracture thought structures and provoke states of inner reflection.

In the creation of the visuals accompanying the texts, the artist chose to collaborate with an autonomous artificial intelligence, establishing a co-creative process. The result is a hybrid territory where the boundary between human and artificial production becomes deliberately blurred, challenging the very notions of creativity, origin, and authenticity.

A particularly emblematic phrase in this context is “ARTE SENZA ARTISTI” (ART WITHOUT ARTISTS), which goes beyond the issue of democratized access to visual creation to interrogate the gradual dissolution of the creative subject in the age of automation. In a landscape where images are generated by systems capable of absorbing and reprocessing humanity’s entire artistic heritage, the foundational concepts of modern art begin to fracture: authorship, originality, the singular voice of the artwork. Yet rather than a definitive crisis, this is better seen as a critical threshold, a point at which the role of the artist, the nature of creative gestures, and the meaning of aesthetic production must be reimagined. BLACKOUT situates itself precisely within this rupture, not to resolve it, but to intensify it, transforming it into a space for active inquiry.

Beyond the reference to Socratic maieutics, BLACKOUT exists within a broader theoretical horizon, engaging with foundational reflections on language and technology. Skygolpe’s work resonates in particular with Martin Heidegger’s insight in The Question Concerning Technology (1954), where he defines technology as a “mode of revealing”, one that both

discloses and conceals reality. The work channels this idea, suggesting that what technology produces is never fully transparent, but always marked by a persistent interpretive opacity.

In parallel, the project engages deeply with the philosophy of Emanuele Severino and his radical reflection on technology as the inevitable structure of destiny. In Tecnica e destino (1998), Severino identifies in technological supremacy a fundamentally contradictory nature: a promise of salvation that is also a threat of disorientation, an expanding horizon that absorbs the human at the very moment it seems to empower it.

In continuity with some of the most radical artistic experiments of the late 20th century, the project also follows the path traced by artists like Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and Lawrence Weiner, who transformed language into both a visual form and a critical tool. As in Holzer’s Truisms or Weiner’s Statements, the text in BLACKOUT does not convey a fixed meaning, it functions as an event: a linguistic apparition that invites the viewer into a suspended, unresolved dialogue. The deliberately contradictory messages destabilize any linear communicative logic, undermining the certainties on which many dominant cultural narratives are based.

Other phrases such as “EMPATIA DIGITALE” (DIGITAL EMPATHY) and “IL NUOVO DIO È DISPONIBILE H 24” (THE NEW GOD IS AVAILABLE 24/7) further emphasize the existential dissonance between human emotion and digital logic, between transcendence and hyperavailability, echoing the paradoxical contours of modern life.

This broad network of philosophical and cultural references is not intended as nostalgic celebration nor as simple provocation. On the contrary, it forms the theoretical foundation of a work that is deliberately open and complex, designed to provoke questions about our current condition, the ambivalence of progress, and our inescapable entanglement with technology.

BLACKOUT is an invitation to conscious reflection, not toward resolution, but toward the acceptance of instability. An aesthetic and intellectual experience that embraces contradiction as the fundamental condition of our time.