UMBRA CHROMATICA - Immersive AI Pavilion and Multi-Site Program

Entangled Others, Anaïs Goupy, Jennifer Gradecki & Derek Curry, Dejan Grba, Bradley Leonard, Magic Mike, Chloe McFadden, Julius Niemeyer, Silke Riis & Christian Schwarz, Alexander Scharf, Chaery Yoon

Curated by Maria Pia Napolitano de Majo and Adriano Tenore

A world you can walk through. A system you can question. UMBRA CHROMATICA is a three-year immersive project that explores the cultural logic of AI through extended reality, contemporary art, and trans-disciplinary research. Born as a digital pavilion for The Wrong Biennale, it evolves into something much more: a playable world, a collaborative lab, a shared language in constant revision.

At the heart of the project is a navigable pavilion built in Unreal Engine 5—part exhibition, part research organism. Like a game that thinks, it updates in real time, integrating audience interaction into its very fabric. Visitors shape the experience, and artworks become ongoing acts of inquiry. The pavilion will stream online for five months, then live on via open-source distribution on Steam and GitHub—extending access, enabling remix, and sustaining use far beyond the biennale.

From the digital realm, UMBRA CHROMATICA branches into the physical. In 2026, the project materializes in Munich (NEBYULA / Rosa Stern e.V.) and Boston (Northeastern University) through site-specific exhibitions and public programs. These “embassies” ground the research in embodied experience—connecting code to context, screen to street.

In 2027, the project returns to its curators’ roots in Naples, with a citywide program of workshops and a public conference. The goal: to push AI discourse beyond elite academic and tech spheres—into underrepresented regions where digital literacy is often stifled not by disinterest, but by systemic exclusion. Here, participation becomes a form of redistribution.

Finally, in 2028, UMBRA CHROMATICA concludes with a zine festival at Maximiliansforum Munich—an international open call for grassroots publishing on AI, art, and radical research. Through print, performance, and informal knowledge exchange, the festival becomes both archive and afterlife.

The artists and researchers involved interrogate AI not as neutral infrastructure, but as a site of friction, mythology, and meaning. Their works explore algorithmic bias, speculative interfaces, ritual computation, posthuman aesthetics, synthetic voice, and the ghosts of machine vision. Technologies used include LLMs, GANs, behavioral agents, sound synthesis, and custom-built systems—not just for creation, but for critique.

UMBRA CHROMATICA is a proposition:
That art can be a research method.
That AI can be playable, legible, and strange.
That sustainability means open-source thinking, critical access, and long-term care.

It’s not just an exhibition. It’s a system. A commitment. A space to rethink how we make, use, and imagine technology—together.

Design: Chaery Yoon