Akasha, the alias of Riccardo Franco-Loiri, is a visual artist and performer whose research unfolds within abstraction, merging matter and digital.
He explores post-internet aesthetics and visual art through the potential of code and light, delving into the relationship between perception and representation.
His work ranges from architectural videomapping to immersive performances and audiovisual installations.
In 2018, he co-founded High Files, a studio specializing in visual design for musical and theatrical shows, videomapping, and immersive museum experiences.
His video installations and performances have been presented at international events and venues including Mutek.Japan, Outline Festival, W1 Gallery London, Aiff Venice Film Festival, Constellation de Metz, Nextones, Seeyousound, and Bright Leipzig.
Hortus Occultum is a living archive of impossible botanicals — a secret garden where the plants of dreams and myths recombine into a new visual language.
Whispering mandrakes, dark roses, translucent ferns, light thistles, shimmering fungi, and obsidian trees populate an ecosystem born more from collective imagination than from soil.
The project draws inspiration from the great codes of fantastic botany — from Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur to the Voynich Manuscript and Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus — as well as from literature where imaginary plants reflect the human psyche.
Built upon this foundation, the artist trained AI models to generate new botanical forms born from digital pigments and visual memories of ancient herbariums.
Using object tracking algorithms, these synthetic plants breathe, grow, and drift in time.
The result is a nature generated from data and thought — an experiment in human–machine co-creation, translating ancient alchemical tables into the digital code of our era.
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