When art meets technology – a trend towards immersive art experiences.

THE FAKE FACTORY is a pioneer in the immersive art field. Founded by the Italian artist Stefano Fake, THE FAKE FACTORY is now an international collective of artists, programmers, architects, animators, poets, philosophers, performers. Stefano Fake consider optics technologies a tool, like a paint brush. He is most interested in what these technologies enable artists to create. “Digital technology allows artistic expression to be released from the material world, gaining the ability to change form freely,” says Stefano Fake. “The environments where viewers and artworks are placed together allow us to decide how to express those changes.”
It took time for technology to catch up to The Fake factory’s vision. Their first exhibit, in 2001, consisted of a small empty white room filled only with television reproducing 16million colors in a 30 minutes experience. The last one in 2021 was a 2.000 square meters venue filled with monumental video-projections.
Today, the collective operates temporary traveling exhibition spaces around the world, collaborating with local partners, public and private museums, light and digital art festival organisations. Their digital installations around the world had more than 4 millions visitors from 2015 to 2021, setting a record for a single-artist installation in the new millennium. The Italian new media artist Stefano Fake was also one the first media artist creating successful traveling immersive digital exhibitions about Italian Classical Art (The Italian Beauty 2015, Caravaggio Experience 2016), the great masters of European Art (Klimt Experience 2016, Van Gogh Experience 2016, Monet Experience 2017, Magritte Experience 2018). The mix of technology and art, Stefano Fake & THE FAKE FACTORY helped create, is now popping up seemingly everywhere. Exhibits projecting giant renderings of Van Gogh, Klimt, Frida Khalo, Dalì and Monet toured dozens of US cities in 2021, while standalone immersive art installations are in scores of galleries and public spaces. Dedicated spaces for immersive art have recently opened in New York, Washington DC, Miami, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and other cities in the US.
Immersive art, it seems, has made a place for itself in the cultural landscape. The installations of Stefano Fake & THE FAKE FACTORY in some Italian museums (Palazzo delle Esposizioni Rome 2016, Venaria Reale Turin 2017, Mudec and Fabbrica del Vapore Milan 2017-2018), the work of Gianfranco Iannuzzi in France for the digital museums of Culture Spaces (Atelier des Lumieres Paris, 2018) and Massimiliano Siccardi (director of some van Gogh’s digital exhibitions in the USA), are a clear example of how Italian creativity has been able in the last 20 years to create trends capable of conquering the world.
(INTERNATIONAL ART REVIEW – 2021)