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Let’s talk about you: what is your background, what do you teach, and what are your research interests?
My name is Pietro Conte, I was born and raised in Milan and I teach Aesthetics at Ca' Foscari. My research focuses on the notions of hyperrealism, illusion and immersiveness. I am currently working on the ways in which virtual reality and artificial intelligence are radically changing the traditional concept of image.

Tell us about your academic path.
After graduating in Philosophy at the University of Milan with a dissertation on the concept of symbol in the cultural environment of the so-called Heidelberg Romanticism, I took my PhD at the University of Siena with a paper on Johann Jakob Bachofen. After two years at the University of Basel on a scholarship, I obtained a research grant from the University of Milan. My studies on Bachofen had led me to take an interest in funerary symbolism and thanatology; I was particularly interested in wax funeral masks and the question of the cast, the imprint, the maximum conformity to the model. Hence my passion for hyperrealism and the inability to distinguish between image and referent. After my years as a fellow, I obtained a research position at the University of Lisbon, where I worked from 2015 until the end of 2018, when I won the selection process that brought me to Venice.

Can you offer any advice to researchers in the early stages of their career?
Undergraduates sometimes ask me about the meaning of research and the possibilities for those who wish to continue their academic career. And we need to be honest, right from the start: in humanities, and especially philosophy, the path that may eventually lead to putting temporary employment behind us tends to be long and riddled with a variety of obstacles. In short, it is a difficult world, and I am convinced that this should be made very clear to those who are beginning to think about what they will do 'when they grow up' and try to imagine themselves as researchers and teachers. Partly because a second aspect that I discuss with those who are interested in an academic career stems from this, and that is that there is only one essential condition if you want to succeed: an unbridled, and in some ways insane, passion for studying, reading, investigating, and exploring cultural and human issues that - I don't know how to put it – ‘call to us’, attract us, and keep us awake. And that maybe tomorrow, perhaps through our work, they will call, attract and keep others awake. To have the ability (and the luck) to be able to speak to these ‘others’, to leave a mark on their lives and to pass the baton on to them along the way: this, I believe, is the intellectual's true worth.