Canto 19 – Dante Reloaded: You Will Own Nothing

Canto 19 – Dante Reloaded: You Will Own Nothing” is a poetic video that reimagines Dante’s verses through the lens of spiritual capitalism and ideological control. The work blends satirical and philosophical commentary with AI-generated music and visuals, edited by the artist to evoke digital disorientation and lyrical resistance. Giovanni’s narration guides the viewer through a surreal descent, where ancient judgment meets contemporary manipulation. The piece is part of a broader body of work exploring the intersection of poetry, technology, and social critique, using rhythm, tone, and visual flow to reflect the artist’s tactile sensibility and poetic mission.

 

 

This artwork includes a video
Title: Canto 19 – Dante Reloaded: You Will Own Nothing Year: 2025 Tools Used: DaVinci Resolve, AI-generated music and visuals, handpan and drumkit performance, voice narration, poetic scripting Credits: Concept, composition, editing, and narration by Giovanni

Synopsis
In this contemporary reimagining of Dante’s Inferno, Canto 19 – Dante Reloaded descends into a digital circle of Hell shaped by unelected global influence and faith in technocratic solutions over human ethics. Echoing the original canto’s condemnation of simony, this episode exposes a new breed of ideological merchants — those who redistribute wealth upward while cloaking control in utopian language.

The sinners here are architects of public-private paradoxes: prophets of optimization who preach equity while consolidating power. Their sermons echo through glitching data vaults and algorithmic temples, where belief is monetized and ethics outsourced to code. The cultic aura of elite summits becomes a digital cathedral of influence, its rituals looping in pixelated purgatory.

The punishment is symbolic: each figure is inverted within their own ideology, their feet ablaze with the fire of ambition, their heads submerged in the noise of their own systems. The descent is not just spatial but conceptual — a journey through corrupted language, fractured logic, and seductive aesthetics of control.

The video fuses AI-generated visuals and music with tactile rhythm from handpan and drumkit, layered with poetic narration. Edited in DaVinci Resolve, each frame is sculpted to evoke disorientation, satire, and lyrical resistance.

Canto 19 – Dante Reloaded is part of a broader poetic cycle exploring the spiritual cost of optimization and the aesthetics of descent. It invites viewers to question who speaks for the future — and at what price.