Ari Mazzeo is an Italian avant-garde artist, writer, curator and designer whose work spans performance art, video, film, documentary and multimedia media art performance in public space. Initially trained in communication, design and technology, Ari pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York, Cape Town, Barcelona, Bangkok, Toronto, Roma, Boston, Mexico City, focusing particularly on language, technology lexicon of collaboration, and visual imagery through design fiction and digital storytelling. She became more widely known outside the art world when her project "Art-ficial Intelligence" at V&A London Design Festival. She also starred in and directed the Like/ Pink Mirror tribute to David Lynch. She is an educator, and researcher at MIT University where she works on introducing innovative film design research and experimental media format, design fiction and pedagogies for complex societal challenges with experimental art projects in the public sphere. She has created and implemented the process of embodiment (EMB) with multidimensional disciplines in city design. Founder of the Design Fiction Design Studio, a creative studio for educational innovation based in Toronto, Canada. The DFS studio co-creates digital stories, documentary, performance and city design for all. She taught at Harvard University, Master Design Engineering Program and advised students for the final thesis projects introducing artistic intelligence and complex methodologies for societal challenges as interdisciplinary paths in between art, science, engineering and performance for public space. She also collaborated with experts of different fields and institutions disseminating the Michale Chekhov Methodology for actor, director and performer, included non-actor and designer. She actively collaborate with museum, university, institution such as Victoria and Albert Museum, Harvard University, University of Toronto, Concordia Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Moma, Carnagie Mellon, NYU Tisch, among all, to develop the concept of embodiment as a method and a format to apply to innovative education with particular attention to the VR/AR and AI technology for collaborative pedagogy to co-learning. She is training regularly experts in film, acting, media and creative industries in digital format and innovative methodologies for systemic frameworks and tools to collaborate and connect. Career Ari Mazzeo 1990 Ari performed in Roma, Doula, Cape Town, London, during the 1990s. One of her most-cited performances, Art-IFICIAL Intelligence, which she conducted in London and other cities around the world, involved her, students and the community along with a series of public speculative performance; the performance ended only when the collaboration is an action by the encounters. Two early pieces, "Private Space, Public Life of non-human species" and "AI Dreams Of A Global School", are included in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Digital Design Weekend and London Design Festival. During the late 1990s, Ari made a number of additional recordings ethnographic interviews "Christ is bornas design intervention as tribute to PierPaolo Pasolini "Comizi d'Amore", the first journalistic documentary film about sexuality in Italy, that were released either as public performance. Among the Pasolini, In 2001, she performed at University of Roma La Sapienza, a major event as tribute of Buckminster Fuller " Bucky. Designing Future scenarios in between art and science involving many counter-culture figures and rising avant-garde musical stars as virtual avatars, including Stella Adler, Frida Kahlo, Frank Zappa, John Cage, Federico Fellini, David Lynch, Donna Haraway and David Bowie. 2000 After her doctorate about Co-learning for Creative Arts Education, Ari started travelling internationally and work in the United States at Harvard University, School of Design and Engineering Science teaching the courses of Design Research, Methodologies and Practice and Studio in Design Engineering. She also was advisor for final thesis, Phd and experimental projects for the School of Design and Engineering Science Program MDES, Art, Design in Public Domain. She performs "Body Building" at Harvard School of Design as first experimental art and media interaction in between human and non human bodies. She also applied it to dialogical conceptualisation of technology as experience, place is described in terms of the plurality of histories, interactions and meanings that characterise people’s different engagements with particular spaces for performance arts and documentary in hybrid format of video series in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Pittsburg with her performance " Sprawl. Embodying Cities#Sense and Sound. To discuss how, through participant-observation fieldwork and exploration of urban sprawls, urban sprawl might co-design a vibrant and textured rendering of cultural others, multifaceted dimensions of humanity. Senses, smells, colours, sounds and feelings: could a city be embodied? Who is the embodied citizen?.
2021 Ari was appointed at Harvard Univesity as visiting professor School of Engineering and Applied Science and GSD Harvard School of Design Master Design Engineer. After, she affiliate at MIT Art, Culture and Technology Program as researcher and is presenting a series of lectures, workshops and intervention entitled, Choreography and the City, with Richard Sennet, Gediminas Urbonas and Adesola Akinleye, investigate the embodied design of public space. In collaboration with Concordia University, Mel Oppenheim School of Cinema, Ari research add layers of exploration with the AI and Future of Storytelling. Cities as co-learners in between human and non-human. In particular she investigates the potential for such machine–human collaboration in video storytelling in public sphere. What if the machines could interact with emotional arcs in video stories? What if could storytellers use this information to predict how future audiences might respond? These questions will be at the core of my applied research using the documentary as medium of communication and awareness.
Inventions Format Ari has invented several experimental media format that she has used in her teaching and performances. Co-learning- 4 phases of creative oblique thinking The educational methodology Co-learning created by Laurie Anderson in 2016, is a pre-phase tool for the ideation process of any creative industries. Ari has updated and modified this methodological device over the years testing it directly in community, place and city with her students worldwide. The 4 phase of creative oblique thinking for complex ideation projects are based on a mixed use of somatic practices, embodiment and emotions as the following: observation, co-creation, simulation and feedback. Applied to several fields of creativity, the format helps artists and creators for any creative industries to break creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking.
Speaking in tongue- Talk series The online educational series for creators and artists was the first format in the history of University institute to use applied interdisciplinary dialogue to break the silos in between disciplines.
EMB- Embodiment City Place and People The EMB protocol is used both as tool as well as technique of breaking ideas into tiny segments, called bit as insight to acquire information during the research phase or field work of a creative process ask the body first. As hybrid protocol with computer, the protocol and the collection of the fragments/ insight into continuous strings or random clusters that are played back in overlapping sequences to create new textures of information through the body as first interface. The bit are very short, like film frames. If you slow them down enough, you begin to hear them separately to feel through your body how city, people and place are all interconnected and infinite in one system of relationship.