“Una Furtiva Lagrima” - Vittorio Grigolo (Von Doyle Visual Remix)
This piece is inspired by the lyrics of “Una Furtiva Lagrima” and the magnificent interpretation by Vittorio Grigolo.
“Una Furtiva Lagrima” is sung by Nemorino who is madly in love with Adina but she is not interested in an innocent, rustic man such as he. He then decides to buy a love potion that is in reality just cheap wine, but when he sees Adina weeping, he assumes the "elixir" has worked and she has fallen in love with him.
I wanted to see how we could modernize Donizetti's opera, which was written at the beginning of the 19th century, in order to bring it into the Web3 era of digital art.
I fed the story to different forms of artificial intelligence and sometimes completed sentences from the opera were used as prompts. One thing that was fascinating was how different translations from part of the lyrics could give me totally different results.
By example the first two sentences: “Una furtiva lagrima negli occhi suoi spuntò”
The literal translation…
“A furtive tear in her eyes appeared”
And the poetic translation..
“Softly a furtive teardrop fell, shadowed her sparkling eyes”
...gave me results from two completely different universes.
The final piece is made of a mix of both translations and my own interpretation of the text.
I experimented with a few different styles of storytelling to put all of this together, but none felt right. Instead, I created a fresco, a mural of sorts, with all the parts of the story and slowly pan across it during the duration of the song in order to give viewers a chance to enjoy all the details while listening to the spectacular voice of Vittorio Grigolo.