The NEFFIE project: Technological innovation, artistic co-creation and social augmented experience

Abstract

This article presents the NEFFIE (which stands for ‘Neuroaesthetic Photography’) project, a contemporary reinterpretation of Franco Vaccari’s iconic artwork, presented 50 years ago at the 1972 International Venice Art Biennale and entitled Exhibition in Real Time No. 4: Leave on the Walls a Photographic Trace of Your Fleeting Visit. Thanks to today’s technological innovation, NEFFIE develops Vaccari’s idea from a more contemporary perspective. Vaccari’s original photo booth becomes a technologically revisited booth that uses an algorithm and wearable sensors to reshape the subjective emotional-cognitive responses derived from viewing particular images, thus generating the ‘cognitive photograph’ or ‘COFFIE metapicture’. These metapictures are subsequently minted as NFTs (non-fungible tokens) objects and then displayed on a virtual wall, the ‘COFFIE wall’, generating what can be defined as a Virtual Exhibition in Real Time, a hypothetical contemporary re-actualization of Vaccari’s artistic proposition. The NEFFIE project could be considered a pervasive media art proposal capable of promoting social cohesion, by encouraging creative participation and co-creation. The project is being developed in Milan, thanks to a fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration between the Research Center in Advanced Technology in Health and Well-Being of San Raffaele Hospital, and ICONE, the European Research Center in History and Theory of the Image of Vita-Salute San Raffaele University. This multidisciplinary approach combines art-historical theoretical thinking with the world of technological innovation. In particular, the NEFFIE project integrates the visual and conceptual tools of photography with the methodologies and knowledge of biomedical engineering and computer science.