ArtistProof is an art direction and production studio founded in Rome in 2015 by Matteo Basilé and Susanna Zuin. The permanent team covers art direction, photography, direction and production; for each project it extends to digital artists, curators and technical partners.
Co-founder, art direction
An artist, he has worked on the relationship between photography, the body and digital technology since the mid-nineties. His work has been shown at the Venice Biennale, MACRO Rome, MART Rovereto, Triennale Milano and the Guardian Art Center in Beijing.
Co-founder, strategy and project management
She founded ArtistProof with Matteo Basilé in Rome in 2015, after management roles at McCann Erickson, Leo Burnett and Ogilvy & Mather. She looks after client relations and production processes.
An agency starts from the message and looks for an image to carry it. We start from the image, and from the idea that an image acts before it communicates: it stops you, draws you in, stays with you. In Italy and in Europe this tradition is long, from the altarpiece to photography, and David Freedberg called it “the power of images”. That is where our research lives, in the history of images and in what images do to people.
FOTOSINTESI is ArtistProof’s method for bringing photography, live footage and artificial intelligence into one production process.
The work starts on set, with the images we make. AI enters the workflow to develop the visual material along the project’s direction; direction, selection and editing hold the different parts together in the final film.
The method is applied differently to each work. In the project pages we explain which materials we started from, where AI came in and how the result was built.
Alongside commissions, the studio develops research projects of its own. This is where it tries out new relationships between photography, moving image and interactive systems.
Some tools can also be developed for other contexts, through a dedicated project.
A video and fifteen photographic works in which the halls and courtyards of a Roman museum become submerged scenes, inhabited by figures like time travellers.
A phygital exhibition system in development. Through a dedicated app, each work, in a museum or a gallery, opens invisible layers of the image: it tells its own story, changes, or asks the visitor to complete it.
Visual research on speed as a cultural necessity for companies, combining motion design, photography and suspended settings.
Partner, digital art
Digital art curator, director and co-founder of MoCDA, the Museum of Contemporary Digital Art; previously at Tate. With her we build the projects that involve other artists: choosing the artist for a place, working with them, production.
Artists in Ipotesi Metaverso (2023), an exhibition whose production was managed by the studio
Refik Anadol, Sofia Crespo & Feileacan McCormick, Primavera De Filippi, fuse*, Fabio Giampietro, Krista Kim, Mario Klingemann, Pak, Robert Alice, Alex Braga, Joshua Chaplin, Damjanski, Joe Pease, Federico Solmi, Sasha Stiles, Pinar Yoldas, Quayola.
Films, campaigns, spaces and archives: every work begins with a conversation with the studio.
Contact the studio