Europe’s largest digital tunnel opened to the public on 17 December in Gorizia: a unique digital art gallery, 300 metres long and entirely clad in LEDs, creating around one thousand square metres of immersive surface.
The Digital Art Gallery is the result of the renovation of the Galleria Bombi, “one of the few examples of redevelopment that not only improves an infrastructure, but actually turns it into an artistic asset”, said Massimiliano Fedriga, president of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region, at the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
The Galleria Bombi was built during the Habsburg era and the tunnel was also used as an air-raid shelter. “Investments of this kind enhance the city and leave a permanent legacy after GO!2025. We will continue to work to make Gorizia and Nova Gorica increasingly recognised as capitals of digital art.”
The first work to take the stage — more than simply go on display — is by Refik Anadol, one of the world’s most influential digital artists and a pioneer of generative art based on artificial intelligence. His works have been shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, MoMA in New York, The Sphere in Las Vegas and, in Italy, at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence.
Not by chance, he has titled the work “Data Tunnel”, conceiving it specifically for the Friulian city and creating a continuous visual flow that runs along the entire LED wall, transforming the gallery into a “living” digital organism.
In detail, the LED wall, 100 metres long and 9.25 metres wide, creates a total surface area of 925 square metres. Above all, the distance between individual pixels — just 2.5 millimetres — and a resolution of 40,000 x 3,700 pixels generate an ultra-high-definition screen, managed by five professional workstations and 20 4K signals for video playback.
But the true protagonist is artificial intelligence: the core of the work is the Large Nature Model developed by Anadol’s studio — with computing power provided by Google Cloud — and trained on public environmental datasets including images, natural patterns, fragments of ecosystems and biological transformations. All data are open source, in the name of data ethics and transparency, and no personal or proprietary data are used in the generation of the works, the studio is keen to emphasise.
“The Data Tunnel created with the genius of Refik Anadol,” said regional councillor Diego Bernardis, “is a strategic asset for our tourism and local economy. With more than 100 metres of immersive technology, Gorizia now has a magnet capable of attracting visitors from everywhere, combining the historic character of our architecture with the most advanced frontier of digital art. We have created a place where artificial intelligence dialogues with the identity of the territory, making culture accessible, spectacular and free for all citizens.”
Meanwhile, at Gorizia Castle, a new multimedia experience is making its debut: an immersion into medieval and Renaissance atmospheres. The Corte dei Lanzi will provide the setting for themed video-mapping shows entitled Nel Castello tra Conti e cavalieri, dame e servitori, created as part of the Bando Borghi project.
“The Castle, the monument that symbolises the thousand-year history of our city, is becoming increasingly beautiful and enjoyable:
the multimedia equipment we have installed goes precisely in this direction, enriching the historic furnishings and works of art and allowing visitors to immerse themselves in the historical atmosphere of the manor”
said the mayor, Rodolfo Ziberna. The project is based on an infrastructure of six high-power projectors capable of producing a luminance of 86,500 lumens. This technical setup makes it possible to overlay the historic architecture with multimedia content that reconstructs the daily life and splendour of the manor.
The viewer is no longer a passive observer, but is immersed in a dynamic environment where banquets, investitures and scenes of court life reshape the perception of both internal and external spaces.
Cover image: Refik Anadol © Data Tunnel
