Giusy Amoroso’s vivid digital imagery takes nature to its most beautiful extremes

Step into the vivid world of Berlin-based digital artist and art director Giusy Amoroso, and you’ll find beautiful and complex ecosystems that unravel across a digital 3D landscape. Expansive, unique, and grounded in nature, Giusy’s works are distinctively hers. Originally from Naples, Italy, Giusy first became interested in digital art and VFX when learning digital sculpting as part of her product design course. But, “artistically it was never enough for me to only design beautiful objects,” she tells It’s Nice That. Instead, Giusy was far more “fascinated with creating stories and arks, especially ecosystems of their own”. Turning to her inspirations in sociology, philosophy and nature, Giusy began to craft more aesthetically realised and hypnotising environments, characters, and worlds in her art – which is her signature style today. She eventually moved towards VFX video directing, as “there is an extended effect on how deeply you can be sucked into the digital multiverse by a moving image,” she explains.

Beautiful sounds, senses, and sights are infused into all of Giusy’s work, and every piece feels animated by a pulsating life of its own. When asked about her inspiration for such complex works, Giusy immediately calls on nature. “I clearly see nature as programming,” she says, referencing the fusion of technology and nature in her visuals. Beautiful fractals from the biosphere make Giusy’s work appear innovative and forward-thinking without becoming futuristic. This is because her work remains in the realm of today’s world. “I only use certain elements as references to visually reprogramme the known,” she says, cautious to keep her vision fixed on the present moment. “With all my work, I try my best to focus on the now and to interconnect to who I am today”. It’s easy to assume that refraining from futuristic vision may create something quotidian, but she’s content in knowing that “the digital multiverse does not regulate [her] through scientific rules.” Instead, she readily plays with “the digital transcendence of nature’s biotechnical fractals on a cosmic creational scale”.

Giusy’s visual language has also attracted many collaborators. “Collaborations can come about on different terms and matters,” she explains, detailing how “they arise in the digital multiverse to then be taken into the physical world.” Giusy recalls her collaboration with clothing-brand Superconscious, which involved using her Exoskeleton series, a piece “that visualises the evolutionary state of the human being into the superior form of a chrome and metal exoskeleton.” Beautiful re-imaginings of skeletal fractals in a cyborg-like state “fused perfectly” with Superconscious. But, “with every body of work, comes a new approach on conceptualising it,” she explains. This is particularly true for Giusy’s latest collaboration with performance artist Agnes?, where she created the digital visuals for the performance piece Transgenesis. For Giusy, Agnes?’s piece is “an important and impactful installation and performance,” that spoke to her on its messages of transition and transformation. Those ideas “are at the forefront of what this project is all about,” she admires.

Agnes?’s epic performance as a “hybrid genderless creature” provided Giusy with plenty of material to make world-shattering conceptualisations of transformation that rung true to both Agnes?’s visuals and gender-transformative subtext. “I imagined the creature as enlightened and evolutionary,” she says. “A godlike creature with the creational power of a mother.” And, just like Agnes?’s powerful performance, Giusy’s visuals work to “reflect on our own transitioning and transformation,” essentially acting as a “gateway for us to imagine our own evolution.” The visuals contain “flesh, muscle, tentacles, a womb, a heart and the miraculous surface of octopus skin and its transformative texture,” Giusy describes. It's also the social text which is important for Giusy. “There is an extraordinary importance of trans culture and life to the art world,” she argues. “I feel that Agnes? has shown us in a bold and beautiful way how we should perceive a transformative process. Limitless and with bravery.”

Now, Giusy is busy working on IOR50, the studio she co-founded with Sam Aldrige last year. “Our clients are spread all over the world and we work together with different agencies and brands,” she tells us. Together, the two of them “constantly push new digital concepts as [they] switch between art direction, VFX creative direction or CGI supervisor roles” in their collaborations. IOR50 collaborates with a wide variety of artists too, yet Giusy is clear that “it is truly our own aesthetic, but we apply it in a more commercial way.” As for what’s next in Giusy’s source of inspiration, she tells us that she’s always hungry to see “new places, people and environments.” Ultimately, “I want to strengthen the connection to nature more, to generate new inputs for my art,” she says. “Maybe I might move to the woods for the time being.”