At the 2022 TheFork Awards press conference, I found myself beside Gerry Scotti explaining NFTs and digital art to a substantial press audience. Behind those public minutes was a project managed from proposal to delivery through Bloxi and Marketing Multimedia, now TIG.
The objective was to create an award aligned with the theme of the future for the fourth TheFork Awards, organised with Identità Golose. The solution was an AI-generated digital artwork under the art direction of Giuseppe Lo Schiavo, delivered as an NFT to the People's Choice Award winner.
The visible moment and everything before it
I coordinated the project end to end: client relationship, proposal definition and analysis, activity management, artist and supplier relationships, NFT technical work, communication and delivery. As often happens with events, the audience sees the final step; the project exists because many earlier decisions were made at the right time.
Bloxi was the structure through which we managed the work; its story appears in the project page and the dedicated article.
Talking about NFTs without hiding behind terminology
In 2022, NFTs, blockchain and generative art were highly visible terms. The risk was using novelty as decoration or presenting technology as though it were the value of the artwork. At the press conference, my task was to make the ideas understandable: explain what was being delivered, what role the NFT played, and how digital art, brand and recognition could belong in the same project.
The press conference took place at the il Viaggiator Goloso venue in central Milan. Speaking alongside Gerry Scotti and in front of an important press audience was the most significant personal moment: not because it changed the project, but because it made our responsibility for what we had built and how we described it publicly visible.
From the press conference to IBM Studios
On the evening of 25 October 2022, Gerry Scotti hosted the gala dinner at IBM Studios in Milan. Rome restaurant Pulejo received the People's Choice Award. The setting brought together brand, dining and entertainment; the digital prize had to work within that experience without asking the audience to understand the technology in advance.
Edition of the TheFork Awards at which the NFT prize was presented
That distinction matters: innovating at an event does not mean asking guests to study the technology. It means designing an object, a narrative and an award moment that work even for people encountering that language for the first time.
Coordination protects coherence
Coordination was not only about maintaining a timeline. It had to align the artistic vision, the client's expectations, technical feasibility and the way the project would be presented. If those layers had told different stories, the novelty of the NFT would have amplified confusion rather than value.
The complete case is on the TheFork project page. The relationship between production and experience also appears in Building events that leave a mark, while the earlier Lenovo case offers another application of digital art and technology.
What remains of that evening
What I remember most is the move from backstage complexity to the simplicity required on stage. Months of relationships, revisions and choices had to become a brief, honest explanation. I still consider that a central skill: understanding a complex project well enough to explain it without flattening it or retreating into jargon.
