GM ☀️ Rome has a new museum, and it is all for digital art. Last night MAM, the Media Art Museum, opened in an old cinema near Porta Pia. Inside it there is also a brand new gallery, INSULA, with eight artists from our space on the walls. I walked through with my phone. Here is what I saw 👇 Everyone posted the opening. Almost nobody told the story behind it. Here is everything I found out. WHEN THE IDEA WAS BORN Nobody gives a single day. The answer is inside the museum: HyperMedia, the show curated by the founder Gianluca Del Gobbo (@flxer), retraces 27 years of work. Count back and you land in 1999. 1996: Flyer is born in Rome. 1999: Shockart.net opens. It became a reference point for web art, with shows in Rome, Valencia, San Francisco and New York. 2001: FLxER, one of the first tools for mixing video live. 2004: the first LPM, Live Performers Meeting. 2006: the ABO Silver award for web art. 2014: Live Cinema Festival. Along the way came AVnode, a network of audiovisual artists, and WAM, the Web Art Museum project. 2026: all of it gets one address. WHY IT WAS NEEDED LPM moved from city to city for twenty years: Amsterdam, Eindhoven, Cape Town, Mexico, Minsk, Münster, Apulia. For the last two years it was held in the Moroccan desert. On October 22 it comes home, into a room built for it. And Del Gobbo says many other Roman festivals are already asking to be hosted. THE BUILDING The former Cinema Avila, Corso d'Italia 37/D, between MACRO and Galleria Borghese, 15 minutes on foot from Termini. 1,000 square meters. The main hall was born as a theatre and had a very short life. The stage is still there, more than 6 by 9 meters, hidden behind a screen that lifts. Three spaces: the immersive room, a foyer for installations, a classroom for workshops. THE ROOM 300 square meters, 27 projectors covering walls, ceiling and floor. The museum calls it one of the largest immersive rooms in Europe, and the first permanent one in the world designed for live performance. In September they announced a partnership with Garagecube, the makers of MadMapper. WHAT IS INSIDE HyperMedia, on view until May 30, 2027: 35 collectives, 48 artists, ten countries (Australia, USA, Hungary, Italy, Turkey, Chile, France, Germany, UK, Netherlands), with the whole Shockart archive. Net Art: GMUNK, Joshua Davis, Jaromil, Ross Mawdsley. AI: Francesca Fini, David Szauder, V3RBO. Immersive: "Continuum" by Kati Katona, and "Pixel Orchestra vs FLxER" by Ultravioletto, where the public plays with the images in real time. Every year there will be a new show with the same structure. IT IS ALSO A SCHOOL Visual Sound Academy started today, with residencies and workshops for young artists. Courses for children and teens start in 2027. WHAT COMES NEXT October 22-25: LPM, 27th edition. November 5-7: Live Cinema Festival. November 20-28: Fotonica, 10th edition, between MAM and the Hungarian Academy. WHY THE PARTNERSHIP WITH OUR SPACE MAM comes from net art, VJs and live visuals. @domvsnfts and @Romenewmedia created INSULA (@Insula_Roma), a gallery born inside the museum and announced one day before the opening, to bring in artists emerging from Web3. DOMVS describes it as a place "where digital culture finds a physical home". First season: solo shows, curated releases, guest curators and the Rome New Media Week meet-ups. THE FIRST SHOW "Digital Art & New Media", October 9-21. Eight artists, three curators. DOMVS presents #1 Crush with "twilight" (the golden frames full of internet memes), Robinson St. George with "inferno" (I filmed "the fountain") and g0naji with "Tender Heresy", three films. Rome New Media Week presents noper, with his lo-fi surf dreams, and 0009: wildflowers that turn out to be folds of 90s streetwear. Those are the flowers in my photo. @WaitHopeFound with @30CamposEliseos, the first guest curators, present SARES (archetypes turned into data sculptures, the particles in my video), EV3 (art made with code) and Celestial Body (typography and braille). Three of the series went live on SuperRare the same day they went on the wall. A FEW THINGS YOU MAY NOT KNOW Two artists from the gallery, @0009ine and @g0naji, are also in the museum's permanent Net Art section. Both of them followed the opening from far away. They could not be in Rome. Satyrus wrote that they had never seen so many people at an NFT exhibition. This morning a Japanese magazine was already writing about MAM. And the museum opened on its founder's birthday. October 9. MAM is open every day, 11 to 19. If you come to Rome, put it on your list.