Welcome to the Participatory Art Project for Peace
Peace Proposals for the Future
I am thrilled to welcome you to this initiative dedicated to building a more peaceful world through art and collaboration.
My goal is to gather your peace proposals—your dreams and hopes for a better future.
How to Participate:
Do you have an idea for achieving peace?
Share it with me!
Submit your proposal using the form below.
If you wish, you can attach an image or a representative file—an artwork, a poem, a song, or any symbol of your vision of peace. This is optional but welcomed.
The Process:
All proposals will be collected over the course of one year.
At the end of this period, a committee will review every submission.
There will also be an online public vote to allow the web community to express its preferences for the best proposals.
The Outcome:
The top 100 proposals will be selected and published in a special book dedicated to peace.
This book will be printed in a limited edition and sent to world leaders (where permitted) and to the United Nations.
All submissions will also be featured on a dedicated blog, expanding their reach and continuing to inspire other creative minds.
My Motivation:
I strongly believe that art is a powerful tool to educate about collaboration and unity.
In a world that often feels too individualistic, we've lost sight of the value of working together.
This project is born from the conviction that together we can overcome the helplessness we sometimes feel when we’re alone.
Some state representatives seem to have forgotten their duty to represent the people—often serving personal interests and even engaging in war.
Through this project, I aim to return power to the community by collecting ideas from everyday citizens—from people all over the world.
Join In and Make Your Voice Heard:
I sincerely hope many of you will join me on this journey.
Your participation is essential to building a more peaceful future for all.
Contribute, provoke thought, inspire change.
Submit your proposals, share your ideas, and join me in this mission for a better world through art and peace.
You will interact with me through my avatar, which has my face and voice.
This will allow me to connect with many people across Italy.
Of course, if you need to write to me about the project, you can request my address from VaRu.
Thank you from the heart for your contribution.
With gratitude,
Vanessa
Ask me about the project — request information and talk to me about its themes.
Discover the steps of the project — the birth of the avatar, its training, and the performance.
Fill out the form below
The artists are present
Proposte di Pace per il futuro
The Avatar
Thanks to Questit Siena, Italy,
I had the opportunity to train an avatar to become a digital version of myself.
It has my face and my voice.
It holds my memories.
It embodies my ideas.
After two years of study and training, I launched an art project in which the avatar interacts with the public to create a collective artwork.
Michele Tittarelli explains how the visual realization of the avatar in my likeness was achieved and the process followed:
Photoshoot:
Around sixty photos were taken around the subject to capture every angle.
They were shot in evenly lit conditions to avoid strong shadows or harsh lighting.
Post-production:
The images were processed in Camera Raw (Photoshop) to enhance lighting in darker areas and to increase overall exposure.
Masks:
For each image, a corresponding mask was created by isolating the subject.
The subject was filled in white, and the background in black—this helped the software distinguish the subject’s form from the background.
Scanning:
The photos were imported into photogrammetry software, which aligned them by estimating the camera’s position relative to the subject (screenshot 1).
Once aligned (tie points), the software generated a dense cloud (screenshot 2), which was used to construct the mesh (screenshot 3).
Finally, the texture was generated using the original high-resolution images projected onto the 3D mesh (screenshot 4).
Michele Tittarelli
PhD – Digital and Interaction Designer at Questit.
Additional details about the creation of the avatar that resembles me:
Retopology
The extracted 3D model initially contained a very high number of faces (in my case, 2,482,080) and needed to be optimized. Through retopology, the model was reconstructed with around 5,000 faces, making it lightweight and suitable for smooth rendering.
Texture
From the scan, both the diffuse texture (color) and the normal map were extracted. These were then refined in Photoshop to enhance detail and correct imperfections.
Model
The 3D model of my face was then combined with a pre-selected body and prepared for animation.
The Questit design team behind my avatar included:
Designers:
– Michele Tittarelli
– Elena Isnenghi
– Francesco Sampoli
The Voice
The avatar has my voice.
Together with the Questit team, I recorded my voice, which was then cloned for the avatar’s conversations.
Voice cloning is done through software that captures a human voice and integrates it into a conversational system.
This was one of the most fascinating parts of training the avatar.
I encountered some challenges, such as pronunciation of English words, accents, and voice intonation.
VaRu is still young—only two years old—and continues to evolve.
Voice Cloning Team – Questit:
– Alessandro Arezzo
– Christian Di Maio
– Chiara Pugliese
– Michele Cardetta
Training and Conversation Design
I began training the avatar two years ago, in 2021, initially guided by Iolanda Iacono from Questit.
Speaking and enabling an avatar to speak requires knowledge of Conversation Design—a true science focused on human-machine dialogue.
At first, I had to understand the mechanisms behind this essential process. Then I encountered the gap between what I wanted my avatar to do and the limitations imposed by the algorithm.
I decided to overcome those limits and use conversations in my own way.
I’m the one speaking on the web, so I infused the dialogues with my personal touch.
VaRu is me on the web, and I’ve tried to make it resemble me as closely as possible.
In 2022, following a proposal by Ernesto Di Iorio, we connected VaRu to ChatGPT, enabling it to respond to questions I hadn’t anticipated or programmed.
This was the moment I fully understood the potential of AI as a tool for human enhancement—and also the risks it poses if left unmonitored, especially concerning the spread of partial, manipulated, or false information.
I realized how crucial it is to inform users about the possibility of receiving inaccurate content—just as it can happen on Wikipedia or elsewhere on the internet.
In the second phase of the project, I was supported by
Conversation Designer Me and Iolanda Iacono from Questit.
.
.
The Launch and First Experiments with the Public
For several months, I interacted with the public online and with expert panels to understand what people wanted to ask an artificial intelligence.
Through a form I also circulated in schools, I invited people to send in the questions they would ask my avatar.
After this phase, I began to understand how to develop my artistic project and how to communicate effectively with the audience.
I also realized how much lack of knowledge there was on the subject—an ignorance that often led to either fear or excessive enthusiasm.
I then put one of the two avatars I had access to online to collect data.
This avatar was also programmed to provide information about my courses, photography concepts, and aspects of my life.
Meanwhile, I continued training VaRu for my artistic project and its debut performance
Dopo questa fase ho cominciato a capire come sviluppare il mio progetto artistico, come poter comunicare con il pubblico. Ho compreso anche l'ignoranza che c'era sul tema, ignoranza che generava paura o eccessivo entusiasmo.
Ho poi messo online uno dei due avatar che mi erano stati messi a disposizione, per raccogliere dati, questo avatar era preparato anche per dare informazioni sui miei corsi, su nozioni di fotografia e sulla mia vita.
Nel frattempo continuavo a educare VaRu, per il mio progetto artistico e per la performance di debutto.
First event
The presentation performance at Santa Chiara Lab Siena Italy
November 10, 2023
Vanessa Rusci Presented “The Artists Are Present”: A Performance on Artificial Intelligence and Creativity at Santa Chiara Lab, University of Siena, Italy
Vanessa Rusci, international visual artist and researcher in new technologies, psychology, society, and artificial intelligence, performed The Artists Are Present on November 10 at 5:30 PM in the Auditorium of the Santa Chiara Lab, University of Siena.
The performance addressed the theme of artificial intelligence and its applications in today’s social and artistic landscape.
Vanessa Rusci explored the limits and potential of AI through the use of an avatar—a virtual assistant she transformed into her alter ego—presented in a performative artistic format.
One of the central themes of Rusci’s artistic research is memory: how precious, manipulable, fallible, and necessary it is for human evolution, and how easily it can be used as a tool.
The performance invited the audience to reflect on how our perception of memory might change with the rise of artificial intelligences.
During the event, the artist also introduced the collective project "Peace Proposals for the Future", the first collective art project created through an avatar.
This project engaged the avatar, the artist, and the audience in an artistic-conversational experience, whose purpose was revealed during the evening.
The avatar was developed by QuestIT, a leading company in artificial intelligence, and made available to Vanessa Rusci for study and experimentation in 2021.
For two years, Vanessa researched and experimented with AI, training the avatar with her memories.
The performance was created in collaboration with Professor Patrizia Marti, Professor of Experience Design at the University of Siena, who supported Vanessa Rusci both in her research and in the technical realization of the work.
Special thanks to Fondazione Vita – Higher Technical Institute for New Life Technologies for supporting the technical setup of the performance, and to Fashioning.ai for sponsoring the event.
upcoming events
past events:
Event “Feminine Technology: AI and Digital to Enhance Your Talent”
the artists are present, Peace proposals for the future
AI and new technologies make us aware of the need not to be left out of the future that is to come.
Comprehensive High School Grosseto
Wednesday 26th February 4-6pm Thursday 27th February 12-1pm
Presentation of the VaRu Autobiographies project and the project and conversation with students about artificial intelligence.
Presentation of the game "The Peace Council"
The jury convenes to deliberate the winners from April 25 to April 28, 2024
Ars Electronica (coord., AT), INOVA+ (PT), T6 Ecosystems (IT), La French Tech Grande Provence (FR), Media Solutions Center Baden-Württemberg (DE), Salzburg Festival (AT), Sonar (ES) and TU Dresden University of Technology (DE).
AI in communication, photography and art.
Divina Odissea - The artists are present
con la partecipazione di Michelangelo Bonitatibus
Presentazione del progetto selezionato
Artificial Intelligence and Inclusion with DivegenteMente.
With Sonia Papuri, Maria S. Stilo and Sergio Consonni.
Performance and Round Table.
