Ciao, my name is Lazzaro Marco Ferrari.
Lazzaro, nom de guerre, Marco, the given name. Ferrari is the label I bear from my ancestors.
I’m a “stitcher of songs”, that is, as in ancient Greece, the one who, as an itinerant performer, tells epic poems, legends and passes down myths and mythologies from one community to another, and also the one who joins these tales and collects them to generate a single sound that flows into the universe.
How do I do it? I have learned to tell stories in one hundred and eight possible ways, thanks to mythic imagination, artistic talent, and thirty years of creative independence.
My journey began at a place named Wonder, which, as today, is still part of me, my inner child. From crude drawings in my classmates’ school diaries to long days spent at the junkyard crafting with the scraps of abandoned dreams, to long afternoons on Venice Beach enlivened by the revolutions of the iMac G3 and cheap MiniDV camcorders, to discovering the secrets of cinema, to constructing virtual environments in the Metaverse, and finally to the revelation that we can deconstruct limiting inner narratives, opening ourselves to the mythic imagination, an interactive organism as a space of potential storytelling, giving rise to new personal cosmos.
Element-Zero.com: A thousand different lives
In 1998, Element-Zero.com’s first front page was created from a mixed-media piece that included scans of an acrylic painting, prints, and collage, showcasing the blueprint of a medieval underground alchemy lab. The many “rooms” stand for the various fields that the digital acronym represents.
For instance. 7. Adobe Illustrator, or AI, is an acronym for Illustration/Digital Art. 1. HTML stands for Web Design, and so on.
Element-Zero v.2 (1999)
By the time Matrix was released, the second version of the Element-Zero Front Page had already gained prominence due to its content, which was solely focused on the marriage of new technology and its “digital sculptor” approach.
“Art has nothing to do with the squalid repetition of the Goddess Nature,” Lazzaro whispers in the new website’s introductory tune.
The Khoreia Festival’s “The Choral Dance,” which will make its premiere in Chinatown, Los Angeles, a few months later, and Wild Children, an ambitious initiative of “Creative Community,” have joined Element-Zero’s interactive creation.
Element-Zero v.3 (2001)
The success of the “Khoreia” Digital Art Fest and a Flash animation created for Burning Man 2K, inflate the popularity of Element-Zero beyond belief, which, in fact, at the dawn of 2001, becomes one of the first “online communities.” Credits to the loyal support of the Los Angeles ’tribes, LA Weekly reviews, but above all to the Mistress of Communications of Burning Man, who publishes the work of the Italian artist.
Five years before the advent of social media, Lazzaro was already able to communicate in real time with his followers, to the point that his digital creations were often rewarded with ‘outside’ contributions. Music, poems, images, and photographs dot the E-Z galaxy.