On Thursday evening, Gianluca Balocco will be in a darkened room on the third floor of a building in central Milan, where an image changes so slowly you only notice if you stay. On Friday evening, one of his works will be running in a Berlin film studio, in a room full of artists discussing about whether AI makes art at all.
M.O.O.R. stands for Mind Opens Our Reality. It is the name Balocco (Verona, 1964) has worked under for more than forty years as an artist, architect and self-described techno-humanist. This week the name turns up in two cities and two very different rooms. Both ask the same question.
5 November, Milan: Abandon Sight
Abandon Sight is Balocco’s solo show at BUILDING(third floor), , via Monte di Pietà 23, 20121 Milan, curated by Serena Tabacchi. Opening Thursday, November 5, 2026, 17:00–20:30 until 5 December 2026.
The show starts from antique tapestries and carpets in the Moshe Tabibnia Collection. Balocco reads their weaves, symmetries and worn patches as a store of memory, then turns them into chromolographic prints, light devices, moving image, sculpture and works that respond to whoever is looking at them. Uncertain shapes come out of the old textiles: hollows, empty faces, figures somewhere between a relic and a thought.
The title is not about giving up on seeing. It is about letting go of seeing on autopilot.
Abandon Sight – Impermanence Insight (2026) greets you at the door. It is an electronic canvas that changes over almost five hours, too slowly to catch at a glance.
The4thDimension – Transland (2025), shown in this configuration for the first time in Italy, uses eye tracking to watch you while you watch it. How your gaze moves decides which of tens of thousands of possible images appears. Those images come from thousands of Balocco’s own photographs of Italian landscapes, reworked into visions of the same places five hundred years from now.
Oracle (2026) answers each visitor with a response drawn from their own experience of the show.
6 November, Berlin: The New Human
The next evening, CODAME brings The New Human to Berlin. Friday, November 6, 2026, doors 18:00 at SCHOKOLADE, as part of The New Human @ Berlin
The question of the night is direct: is AI art, or is it artificial? Artists, technologists and designers will talk, show work and look at the question together, with art on the walls and running live on ARTEX Display.
M.O.O.R. is part of the line-up with two works:
ABANDON SIGHT BRUTALIST, a multimedia experience from M.O.O.R.’s long research into Impermanence, in which brutalist architecture dissolves and rebuilds itself into an unstable field of perception. Photography, image processing, sound and, in part, AI come together in it.
DIGITAL THINK, on the unstable line between a human gesture and a machine that watches, reads and anticipates it.
The thread between them
The same experience is in both cities. In Milan, Abandon Sight – Brutalist sits inside the installation, with RobinG’s sound, among antique textiles and slow light. In Berlin it unfolds in a room built for debate. One work is lived two ways, one night apart.
That is the link this week. Milan asks you to stop seeing on autopilot. Berlin asks what art becomes when the tools change. Balocco answers both rooms with forty years of practice. He calls it “hybrid thinking”: photography, drawing, observation of the real, digital processing, algorithmic layering and, more recently, AI all serve one line of research, and none of them is the goal of the work. The photograph, the carpet, the landscape and the person looking come first. Every tool, old or new, is there to change how they are seen.
Milan in the afternoon, Berlin the next evening: it is a short flight, and it is worth taking.
Plan your week
Abandon Sight · M.O.O.R. — Gianluca Balocco BUILDING TERZO PIANO, Via Monte di Pietà 23, 20121 Milan Opening: Thursday 5 November 2026, 17:00–20:30 On view to 5 December 2026, Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00–19:00 RSVP for the opening:
The New Human @ Berlin SCHOKOLADE Filmproduktion, Rosenthaler Straße 34–35, 10178 Berlin Friday 6 November 2026, doors at 18:00 Conversation “Is AI Art or Artificial?”, 19:00–20:00 Details and registration:
With thanks
This week works because two houses opened their doors to the same artist and let the work travel between them.
Thank you to BUILDING, and to Moshe Tabibnia, whose collection is where Abandon Sight begins, for giving M.O.O.R. the third floor and the time a slow work needs. Thank you to Serena Tabacchi for curating it.
Thank you to SCHOKOLADE for bringing and hosting The New Human to Berlin and making room for M.O.O.R. in the conversation.
And thank you to MOOR gianluca balocco, who has spent four decades showing that a photograph can be a place you walk into.
Milan, then Berlin. See you there.
Original article published on: https://codame.com/art/m-o-o-r-in-milan-and-berlin-the-same-week