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07/08/26 – 13/08/26, Castello Visconteo, Locarno
Locarno Blueprints @ Locarno Film Festival
Blueprints is a new initiative of Locarno Factory and Fondazione CinemaO. A forum that explores how emerging technologies and scientific breakthroughs are reshaping creativity and storytelling in the decade ahead.From August 7 to 9 and 11 to 13, we gather at 9 am in the beautiful courtyard of the Castello Visconteo. Six public conversations, each centered on a transformative idea, debated with a leading thinker of our time.
The paradigms now taking shape — led by artificial intelligence, quantum science and advanced computing, together with the hardware, data and investment infrastructures they depend on — are redrawing more than economies and geopolitics. They reach into our cultural identities, and into the terms on which creative work gets made. How the current generation of artists, creative professionals, and entrepreneurs learns to work with these technologies — and what it makes of them — will shape what storytelling looks like ten years from now.
A new "creative deeptech" frontier is emerging, where advanced science and technology meet the making of culture. Blueprints exists to direct our collective intelligence to the exploration of this new frontier — to create a space where fresh lines of inquiry can generate new knowledge.
The 2026 Blueprints programme is curated by Carlo Rizzo and Giulia Yoko Galbarini, co-founders of Fondazione CinemaO.
All talks are free and open to the general public.
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Fri 07.08, 9.00 am, Castello Visconteo in Locarno
What Will We Create With Computers That Are Alive? ✱ Morning debate with Ewelina Kurtys ✱
With Ewelina, we explore the frontier beyond silicon. At FinalSpark, human neural organoids connected to electrodes are being tested as a new computing substrate: processors a million times more energy efficient than silicon, but fundamentally different in kind. You don't program a biocomputer; you teach it. Every familiar distinction shifts: manufacturing becomes growing, error becomes individuality, switching off becomes something closer to dying, and owning a tool becomes caring for a living system. Artists are already working with these organoids, probing what it means to create with a collaborator that is neither machine nor mind. If the next creative tools are alive — grown, taught, cared for — then how does the creative act itself change?
Dr. Ewelina Kurtys is a neuroscientist and technology entrepreneur working at the edges of how emerging technologies reshape thought, creation, and interaction. She works with FinalSpark, the Swiss company pioneering biological computing with living human neurons, and is the founder of EKAI Ltd, a UK-based consultancy for science-driven innovation.
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Sat 08.08, 9.00 am, Castello Visconteo in Locarno
Whose Story Will We Remember? ✱ Morning debate with Stefanie Schulte Strathaus ✱
With Stefanie, we explore what happens to memory when its survival depends on hardware.
Film is a fragile medium. Reels decay, formats become unreadable, and entire bodies of work are just one hardware failure away from oblivion. Keeping an archive alive is a daily technical battle: digitization at scale, restoration, and migration across systems designed to be replaced. New tools, like AI-assisted restoration and innovative storage media, promise to preserve more than ever before; but every technology also decides, quietly, what stays and what goes. Ten years from now, what will still be watchable — and what will have simply disappeared?
Stefanie Schulte Strathaus is the Artistic Director of Arsenal Filminstitut in Berlin. She sat on the Berlinale Forum selection committee from 2001 to 2019 and founded Forum Expanded, directing it from 2006 to 2020. In 2021 she launched the biennial festival Archival Assembly. She serves on the boards of FIAF, the master's program "Film Culture" at the University of Jos, Nigeria, and the Harun Farocki Institut, and co-edited Accidental Archivism: Shaping Cinema's Futures with Remnants of the Past (2024).
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Sun 09.08, 9.00 am, Castello Visconteo in Locarno
What Foundations Are We Building for Future Authors? ✱ Morning debate with Philippe Rixhon ✱
With Philippe, we explore what it takes to build the missing infrastructure of digital creativity. Culture may feel immaterial online, but it runs on hard things — data, metadata, standards, exchanges — and today that machinery lags far behind the reality of creative work. Contemporary works are made by distributed teams, with AI in the pipeline, across formats and platforms; a single piece of IP now lives as film, game, series, and experience at once. Yet the systems that track rights, attribution, and remuneration were designed for a simpler world of single authors and single works. What would creativity look like on top of infrastructure that finally matches how it actually happens? A conversation about the invisible engineering beneath digital culture — and why the future of authorship may be decided at the level of data.
Philippe Rixhon works on digital rights with creative enterprises, standardisation bodies, and governments, focused since 2009 on synchronising content access with authors' remuneration. He contributed to the European Commission's Study on Copyright and New Technologies and, in 2023, to the launch of Valunode, an exchange for machine-actionable metadata. He advises WIPO, the European Commission, and EUIPO, co-chairs the JPEG Trust project, and holds degrees spanning engineering, management, theatre directing, and philosophy.
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Tue 11.08, 9.00 am, Castello Visconteo in Locarno
What Is the Cultural Afterlife of the Quantum Revolution? ✱ Morning debate with Sabrina Maniscalco ✱
With Sabrina, we explore how linear time has always carried politics, not only physics. As laboratories and nations compete to harness it — computing power, encryption, advantage — Quantum Theory itself tells a quieter, more unruly story: a world that is entangled, indeterminate, resistant to mastery. Artists and storytellers are drawn to precisely what the race overlooks, finding in quantum's stranger implications new narrative forms, new ways of imagining agency, authorship, and what counts as real. A conversation on physics, power, and the new grammar for telling stories.
Sabrina Maniscalco is CEO and co-founder of Algorithmiq Ltd, a startup building quantum algorithms and software. She is Professor of Quantum Information and Logic at the University of Helsinki and Adjunct Professor at Aalto University, Vice Director of the Finnish Centre of Excellence for Quantum Technologies, and sits on scientific advisory boards including the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Austria and CERN's Quantum Technology initiative.
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Wed 12.08, 9.00 am, Castello Visconteo in Locarno
Are We Ready to Build a New Creative Economy? ✱ Morning debate with Jenny Fielding and Aldo Podestà ✱
What gets funded today decides what we'll be making with tomorrow. Venture investment is a kind of forecasting — in the thousands of pitches crossing a desk, patterns show up long before the products do. Jenny Fielding has spent years reading those early signals from New York, and Aldo Podestà sits on the other side of the equation, building a reasoning system small enough to run on a single machine. When a capable model costs little and fits on hardware a small film studio can own, access stops depending on the budgets of the few.
Together, they will help us map the creative economy of the next decade. They will identify where investment will concentrate, where new resources will be needed, and what becomes possible when powerful tools are widely accessible.
Jenny Fielding is one of the most active global pre-seed investors, having been first money into over 300 companies, and co-founder and Managing Partner of Everywhere Ventures. She spent 7.5 years as Managing Director of Techstars, is a two-time founder, a lawyer by training, and an adjunct professor at Columbia University and Cornell Tech.
Aldo Podestà founded Giotto.ai in 2017 to build AI that is powerful, portable, transparent, and controlled by its users, working to bridge frontier AI research with implementation across private and public institutions.
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Thu 13.08, 9.00 am, Castello Visconteo in Locarno
What Will We Be Capable of Imagining? ✱ Morning debate with Renée Cummings ✱
With Renée, we discuss dependency and the creative self in the age of artificial intimacy.
What happens to the inner life that art is made from, once our machines meet us everywhere? We're moving from an attention economy to an attachment economy. Our tools no longer just capture our focus; they hold our confidences, soothe our anxieties, and influence our decisions. Creativity has always fed on what attachment removes: friction, longing, boredom, and the unmet need that turns inward and becomes expression. If our machines now meet us everywhere, what becomes of the inner life that art is made from?
Prof. Renée Cummings is an award-winning ethicist in AI, data, and technology, and the first data activist-in-residence at the University of Virginia's School of Data Science. She is a senior fellow at All Tech Is Human, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a member of the World Economic Forum's AI Governance Alliance, and — as a criminologist and criminal psychologist — recognized among the world's top 100 women in AI ethics.
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What we have shared with the public in the past
Locarno Future of Reality conference © Silvia Cipelletti
Looking at Animals
A film programme curated by Arindam SenIn partnership with Separato Magnetico
22–23 July 2026
Looking at Animals brings old and new zoological experimental films, acknowledging Cinema’s primordial link to animals, and seeking to playfully vitalize the productive linkages between representational animacy and film’s material and structural properties, towards, hopefully, a more congenial inter-species future.
22/07/26 — Looking at Animals (Chapter I)
Works by Guy Sherwin, Rose Lowder, Joyce Wieland. All films on 16mm.
⟢ Tickets here.
23/07/26 — Looking at Animals (Chapter II)
Works by Stan Brakhage, Amy Halpern, Joyce Wieland. All films on 16mm.
⟢ Tickets here.
Towards a Cinema of the Commons
A film programme curated by Azdore Collective24–26 July 2026
What happens if we stop thinking of cinema as a product and start treating it as a shared space? Each session introduces a different format that turns watching into an active experience — speaking, sharing, and imagining together.
24/07/26 — Session 1: The Film Is Not Enough
Short films by Yugantar (1981–1983). India's first feminist film collective. Followed by discussion.
⟢ Tickets here.
25/07/26 — Session 2: Living Archives — Memory as a Common Space
Do You Love Me?, Lana Daher, 2025, 75'.
⟢ Tickets here.
26/07/26 — Session 3: Cinema as a Collective Result
Numax Presenta..., Joaquim Jordà, 1979, 115'.
⟢ Tickets here.
Ghosted
Cinema Of Spectral CosmologiesA film programme curated by Paula Veidenbauma
1–2 July 2026
Ghosted engages with expanded notions of spectrality in moving image practice. The ghost is approached as a way of attending to and holding together fragments, residues and light ephemera. Rather than focusing on the ghost as a visible figure within the frame, the programme considers it as something that holds together that does not fully cohere, and that can also ghost, disappear without notice.
01/07/26 — Ghosted: Real Estate (Chapter I)
Works by Nicolas Provost, Tekla Aslanishvili, Ieva Raudsepa. Conversation with Ieva Raudsepa after screening.
⟢ Tickets here.
02/07/26 — Ghosted: Moveables (Chapter II)
Works by Erik Bünger, Valentin Degnieau, Niklas Feinik, Bo Wang, Kush Badhwar. Conversation with Niklas Feinik after screening. In collaboration with Argos Centre for Audiovisual Arts, Brussels.
⟢ Tickets here.
Echoes of the Unknown: Interspecies Visions
A screening cycle curated by Camilla GilardoniThe films presented suspend the logics of domination, multiply temporalities — geological, vegetal, cosmic — and stratify narratives, disrupting the devices through which stories of colonization have historically been constructed.
24/06/26 — 8:30 PM
Secret Garden (Nour Ouayda, 2023, 27’); Last Things (Deborah Stratman, 2023, 50’) ⟢ Tickets here.
26/06/26 — 8:30 PM
Fanfictie: Volcanology (Riar Rizaldi, 2025, 16’); Bienvenidos Conquistadores Interplanetarios y del Espacio Sideral (Andrés Jurado, 2024, 95’) ⟢ Tickets here.
It was only a provisional order
Exercises in chronological disobedienceA screening cycle curated by Mila Azimonti
Sat 20/06/26 — 3:00 PM
The Spider Elephant; TX-Reverse; Strain Andromeda The ⟢ Tickets here.
Sun 21/06/26 — 3:00 PM
Shokouk: A Cosmicomedy in Four Acts; Space Is the Place ⟢ Tickets: here.
08/06/26 – 15/06/26 – 22/06/26
Compulsive Archive
FILMS AS ZINES is a screening series curated by Giulia Vallicelli, focusing on DIY cinema, riot grrrl publishing and queer circulation of moving images from the 1990s and 2000s.Across three evenings, the program brings together the low‑budget, offbeat and queer work of the Kuchar brothers, Sarah Jacobson and Lucy Thane (Cinenova).
Two guided visits to Compulsive Archive extend the experience into the world of zines, books and working materials, where underground cinema meets self‑published print culture.
12/06/26 – 14/06/26
Women & Cocaine
A three-evening series, "Dorothy Arzner: Radical Craft". 𝑾𝒐𝒎𝒆𝒏 & 𝑪𝒐𝒄𝒂𝒊𝒏𝒆 is a monthly pre-code cinema series hosted by Caroline Cassin, celebrating the fierce and liberated women of early cinema.For the first time, the series comes to Milan → Register here ✩
05/06/26
San Damiano
Screening of San Damiano, presented by director Greg Sassoli, as part of the Milano Film Festival 2026 OFF programme. Register here.20, 23, 28/05/26 (h19)
Prove dascolto
On May 20, 23, and 28 at 7 PM, CinemaO hosts three evenings dedicated respectively to Leila Shahid, bell hooks, and Samah Jabr. Curated by Tafano, with DARNA Cinema and the screening of Prove d'ascolto produced by Okta Film.18/05/26
Cannes Next — The Future of IP in the Age of Machines
Fondazione CinemaO, in collaboration with Tower Peak Partners and Encypher, presents a collection of leading industry voices and case studies exploring how technology is transforming the IP value chain in the audiovisual sector. The publication will launch exclusively as part of the Cannes Next program on 18 May 2026.05/05/26
The Black Cube, Issue 01 — Launch Event
CinemaO opens its doors for the launch of “Quantum and the Moving Image: Dialogues at the Intersection of Artistic and Scientific Research”.A publication born from conversations at Civa Festival in Vienna.
Screenings by S()fia Braga & Chino Moya · In dialogue with Eva Fischer, co-editor.
24/04/26
Canneseries — Panel
“THE NEXT FRONTIER OF IP INVESTMENT WITH FONDAZIONE CINEMAO: EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES TRANSFORMING AUDIOVISUAL VALUE CHAINS”Elisa Alvares (Tower Peak Partners LL.) & Carlo Rizzo (CinemaO) explored emerging applications in AI, cryptography, blockchain and transmedia development and their impact on production and distribution models.
12/02/26
Berlinale EFM Startups Program
2 open roundtables on the evolution of the IP value chain21/01/26
UnDavos (during the World Economic Forum)
Panel on the future of Screen Culture6-9/01/26
CES Innovation Awards
CinemaO chosen as Judges for FilmTech12/12/25
BaseCamp Altrove
Creative Audio Description Workshop21/11/25
PÖFF — Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival
Roundtable on the future of Cinema Spaces11/08/25
Locarno Film Festival
Future of Reality conference opening session, with Véréna Paravel and Philippe Parreno04/06/25
Hamburg International Short Film Festival
Roundtable on tech adoption in independent filmmaking production15/05/25
Cannes Next (Cannes Film Festival)
CinemaO Official Launch + Presentation of Issue 00If you want to participate in upcoming events, get in touch