My interest in science started when I was sixteen years old during a lecture on subatomic particles. At that time I wanted to "see the invisible". My interest in art started exactly the same year. During a summer travel, I visited the National Gallery at London where I was deeply impressed by a Botticelli painting – Venus and Mars. Coming back to Italy I had to choose between Science and Art at the university (a nice example of bifurcation!). At that time my reasoning chose science (nuclear engineering), but really I never was able to choose science or art ... I instead chose both.

During most of my life the interests for science and art remained separated. I lived this division as a schizophrenic, fractured between two worlds characterized by different attitudes and philosophy. After many years I realized that the schizophrenia is a property of the culture that has an obsessive need to classify in separate classes different aspects of the same cognitive process of the surrounding and internal reality.

I investigate the learning possibilities of machines in order to solve real problems like process diagnosis or control. In this research I try to emulate the human mechanisms (artificial neural networks, fuzzy logic) and evolution mechanisms (chaos, genetics). In my art I try to evoke the process of self–organization and emergent behavior (artificial life) like metaphors of mind, society, culture and communication. During these paths I try to utilize all the means I dispose, from the scientific formalism to the inward search, from the computer simulation to the aesthetic quality.

Avoid creating a community with the same doctrines of the culture that brought you there. As you are on a new world you need new mental categories. Don't divide strictly art, science, engineering and philosophy. They are not separated worlds, but different approaches to the same cognitive problem. This consciousness could help you when big problems are born from the ghosts of the mind. On Earth they have generated enormous damages to the environment and pushed the people to antisocial behaviors.

You are involved in a magic action that is one of the most advanced steps in the development of the complexity of our world. As pioneers, you are colonizing not only another planet, but also a new "cultural space" still void at the moment. To be pioneers you have to be light, without "theories" and open to search in its own ways. There you have to sow not only people and villages but a new way to be. Maybe you are on Mars not only to know the red planet, but also to look at our blue planet and to know more deeply mankind itself and its possibilities. The rise to the virtual planet has to start now and here on Earth. Then we will know that the Martians we have searched out for many years were inside us.