On the occasion of the Nineteenth Contemporary Art Day promoted by AMACI - Association of Italian Contemporary Art Museums, La Matematica del Segreto e altri storie, an exhibition and research project by Valentina Vetturi, is inaugurated at MA*GA. Valentina Vetturi's work for the MA*GA Museum was born within the three-year program "The Museum in the Post-Digital Era", supported by the Ministry of Culture, Fondo Cultura 2021, and highlights the profound cultural transformations that languages of digital technologies have brought to our society and how the contemporary art museum can become a central place for discussion, narration and education about these universes with which it is important to familiarize ourselves in order to understand our time.

Valentina Vetturi is one of the Italian artists who, in a more complex and articulated way, has carried out research dedicated to the relationship between social, economic, cultural transformations and the web, understood as an immaterial, impalpable and at the same time physical, material infrastructure. The exhibition is articulated through a series of works that allow us to delve deeper and clarify some key words that characterize our digital contemporaneity such as, for example: Hacking, Metaverse, Cryptocurrency, Artificial Intelligence. At the center of the project is the new production of artist who gives the exhibition its title: The Mathematics of the Secret. The work takes the form of a series of lecture performances in which human and artificial intelligences dialogue around the theme and history of money. Vetturi invites three scholars: an art historian, Maria Giovanna Mancini, an economic sociologist, Adam Hayes, and a philosopher, Mara Montanaro, to activate reflections on money, its history, its uses, its relationship with power, its non-neutrality with respect to the transformations of our society.

And it places the narratives of these scholars in dialogue with text to text and text to image models, in a series of three video conferences that will alternate in the exhibition. The Mathematics of the Secret "looks at money as a relational technology that transforms in space and over time depending on its origin, uses, purposes. The work thus questions the orthodox conception that identifies money as a mere instrument of exchange, a neutral veil. Debt, taxes, stones, cryptocurrencies, material and digital objects , wheat, gold or data, central banks and decentralized systems are some of the words that make up the structure of this work".

The itinerary will also include works such as In the Corridor of Cyberspace, an artist's book that presents and crosses The Cypherpunk Mailing List (1992/2000), one of the first mailing lists in which scientists and researchers discuss crucial issues for net cultures such as privacy, anonymity, identity, cryptography and digital currencies. Another work will then be Crypto. Party, a space – workshop dedicated to issues relating to digital culture in which the public can navigate through publications, videos, documents and sound interventions to deepen our relationship with the internet.