Clapis and the Art That Inhabits the Digital

Imagine an arid landscape, red hills at sunset, avatars climbing down from horses and golf carts, kneeling over holes dug by hand and pulling pieces out of the sand. Shortly after, the same digital bodies move in a circle around a DJ set, sync their steps, gift fluorescent flowers, propose bond rings. This is not a film set. It is the territory where Federico Clapis, one of the Italian artists most closely focused on the convergence of sculpture, technology and social experience, is building what he already considers the next ordinary condition of human life.

Clapis, born in Milan in 1987, has followed an unusual path. For years he built a large audience with comic sketches and musical parodies on YouTube under the name Doctor Clapis. In 2015 he closed that chapter and publicly declared his identity as an artist. The shift was a complete renegotiation of the relationship with his audience: from laughter to introspection, from pure entertainment to the materialisation of psychic states, power relations and technological dependencies. An inner journey that had begun years earlier in an ashram in India continued to feed the work. Spirituality, death, transformation, alienation and the construction of identity remained the core themes. Technology, from digital devices and social networks to blockchain and immersive environments, became the language through which these themes take form.

The resin and 3D-printed sculptures, the infant bodies connected to drones or devices, the public installations such as Crypto Connection shown in London, the exhibitions at the Triennale di Milano, the Moco Museum, in Tokyo and across various European and South American venues, established a solid reputation. Clapis moved between galleries, museums and the cryptoart circuit without losing sight of the conceptual dimension. Every work already functioned as an emotional and social diary of the generation that lives on screen. Now the diary has expanded. It has become a livable space.

Two recent projects make this evolution clear. The first is Clapis Tower on Spatial. One of the events it hosted was the exhibition curated by the anonymous collector 33NFT during the Future Feast at the Adam Tower in Amsterdam. A desert environment, digital shows, talks on the history of collecting and curation, explorations on horseback and by golf cart. People dig. Inside the holes they find artworks. At the end they dance.

Clapis describes that moment as the point of origin. The most enjoyable part and, in the long run, the most revealing. There he saw the future of human social reality. Not as an abstract projection, but as an experience already underway, with mechanics of presence, collective discovery and after-parties that become the real gravitational centre.

From that insight a second, more radical step emerged. Clapis shifted the emphasis onto electronic music and immersive sociality inside a gaming platform that, born for a young audience, is now welcoming growing numbers of people in their mid-twenties, thirties and forties. Sunset Club is the space where he produces and plays his own music, and where he builds interactions: dance synchronisation, flower gifts as signs of appreciation, VIP status, bond proposals, the possibility of “ghosting” anyone who becomes a nuisance. Conceptual installations remain on the lower level. Above, the dance floor. Figurative art does not disappear; it becomes background and support for an experience that touches music production, relationships, status and shared presence. Clapis has been working on this environment continuously for more than a year. He treats it as a serious laboratory. A place where millions of visitors generate a creative density that traditional circuits rarely reach.

The NFT boom had turned the metaverse into an almost compulsory promise. Then attention scattered, many projects stalled, numerous artists changed direction or left the field entirely. Clapis stayed. He continues to develop experiences inside a gaming platform, produces music, designs social mechanics, keeps installations and dance floors active. That continuity, at a time when others walked away, reveals a way of thinking that does not follow passing waves of interest.

Three recent works illuminate how his thinking keeps moving between the digital and the material. One shows two white skeletal figures, articulated like anatomical mannequins, pulling the arms of a Stretch Armstrong until the figure is stretched taut. The human becomes an object possessed by the dominant machine. The work originated from a Blender render in 2019 and now achieves photorealistic rendering thanks to artificial intelligence. Another piece recovers a project from 2018: the skeleton of a car, bodywork open, windscreen replaced by a cracked smartphone screen displaying everyday apps. Clapis had spent time in scrapyards studying the forms long before physical realisation became optional. AI allowed the work to exist with reduced effort while keeping the original intention intact.

The third work is a deliberate return to matter. An iconic bust, interpreted as an archaeological relic, made from wood paste and resin. The material is unstable, fractured, porous. According to the artist it reflects the transient character of the moment we are living through in art and in every other sector.

These works hold together critiques of technological power, memory of the creative process and an awareness of precariousness. At the same time, the immersive worlds in which Clapis is investing energy point in a concrete direction: not only representing the human-machine relationship, but inhabiting it, designing its social rules, allowing music and relationships to enter.

WUF follows this trajectory because it touches central nodes of the present. Art is no longer only an object to contemplate or a token to collect. It is becoming an environment, a protocol of interaction, a space in which experiences are produced and shared. Clapis, with his history of moving from the attention economy to introspection and now toward large-scale digital environments, offers a concrete case of how an artist can use platforms not as a showcase but as raw material. The desert where people dig and the club where they dance are not metaphors. They are the places where, today, someone is already testing what it will mean to live together.