Italian selection

The artworks representing Italy at the 3rd Quadrilateral Biennial have all been created by artists who were pioneers in the field of what we still define as new media art, despite the fact that it is anything but new: 0100101110101101.org, Elastic Group, Lorenzo Pizzanelli, and Carlo Zanni.

Each of the featured works brings to the forefront a different aspect of the many ways in which digital technologies have been employed in creative processes: 0100101110101101.org highlight media manipulation in their acts of appropriation and re-distribution through means of mass communication; the duo Elastic Group penetrate the urban info-sphere and its architectures with their usage of video and its elastic and multilayered nature; Pizzanelli employs new media to enhance an ironic vision of history and politics; and Carlo Zanni envisions new narrative genres such as data cinema, where cinema and net art converge.

If we analyze the four works individually, each of them can tell us about various angles from which different media as well as disciplines intersect, and about points where nature and fiction meet in the complex coexistence and cross-contamination of the whole interdisciplinary field of media.

Marinetti, the founder of Futurism, appears as a bust in an open valise to answer our questions. The post-modern multimedia portrait, in which the subject literally comes to life, is titled Marinetti alla Quarta (2009) and the latest creation of the artist Pizzanelli. The artist "gave birth" to Marinetti and developed his intelligence in a manner similar to how he raised his new-born son. It is not a coincidence that, in introducing his work, the artist states that, “the project Marinetti alla Quarta shapes as an embryo, destined to evolve thanks to interaction and external stimulus in order to rise to a mature form." This statement also points to another important aspect of the project, in which interaction with the visitor plays an integral role. As Pizzanelli puts it: “It will be from the dualism between the public (stimuli provider) and the director (selector of the stimuli) that the work will become concrete.”

A software based on an exhaustive archive of Marinetti’s writings allows users to talk to the artificial intelligence character and to transport Marinetti into modern times. The software in fact is intelligent enough to respond to our questions from within the mindset of Marinetti’s time, that is, more than one hundred years ago. Yet it should be no surprise if some of the character's answers perfectly fit in with our times. In Marinetti alla Quarta, the past comes to life in the present as a "cyborg" taking different forms: a robot, a website, and a sculpture—the valise presented in the Biennial. The mind (Marinetti's character) behind these different embodiments remains the same, and by increasing and evolving its intelligence through visitors’ questions, it becomes more and more unpredictable.

In his previous project Iconoclast Game (2003), Pizzanelli utilized the technology of video games to analyze Western art history—from the Byzantine period to the contemporary—in light of institutions' power to transform images into “sacred icons.” The game fulfils the double function of recalling an avant-garde predilection for the use of games and of assuming a “playful attitude” in positioning itself against institutions. It allows for the treatment of complex issues by placing them into a net of cross-references from which visitors can extrapolate, depending on their context.

Iconoclast Game deserves some attention as the precursor to Marinetti alla Quarta. While impersonating, depending on their choice, Marcel Duchamp or his female alter ego Rose Sélavy visitors are guided through twelve levels corresponding to different periods in the history of art and represented by art icons such as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. The goal is to free the artworks from the museums’ constraints. Past and present, reality and fiction, life and art, good and bad coexist in the same frame. There is a doubling of the cosmos that opens up in the prologue, and a doubling of the main character Duchamp's identity. Thus, the harmless angels of Giotto’s Compianto di Cristo come to life as implacable aggressors; their tears, designed in the unmistakable style of pop artist Lichtenstein’s drawings, become dangerous weapons against which players can defend themselves only by using an umbrella.

Whereas Duchamp in Iconoclast Game is the symbol of a transition from the modernist to the contemporary period, Marinetti is the icon par excellence of Futurism. The Futurist Manifesto, written in 1909, became an anchor for a movement driven by artists who glorified, through their work, speed and new technologies. Their work, and above all their attitude, was translated and morphed from generation to generation and reached contemporary digital media—even though the attitude has considerably changed and can be more institutionally driven.

With Marinetti alla Quarta, Pizzanelli takes his work to a new level. If nothing was left to chance in Iconoclast Game, unpredictability is the essence of his latest work. Interaction with visitors played an important role in the video game, but in Marinetti alla Quarta becomes crucial in defining the "intelligence" of the software, and thus the work. The project not only is his latest production, but also reflects his entire research and personality as an artist. His irony and concept of play make the work appear simple and direct—easy to understand by the public at large, despite its very complex content.

If Pizzanelli "resurrects" Marinetti from the past, the artist duo known as 0100101110101101.org (Eva and Franco Mattes) in their series Synthetic Performances (2007- present) recalls a number of artists who pioneered the field of performance art in the 60s and 70s by re-enacting some of their most popular early works—highly subversive projects at the time they were first staged, but now undisputed icons of contemporary art. Performances by Marina Abramović, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Valie Export, and Gilbert and George are re-enacted by the two artists in Second Life, a parallel world built in cyberspace whose number of citizens has exponentially increased since its launch in 2003—a place where people can assume new identities, "live," start businesses and realize their secret dreams.

The increase of both the population of Second Life and the businesses started in the virtual world has created quite a competitive market. Since the virtual currency of Second Life, called Linden Dollars, can be traded for actual currencies, the intersection of the real and virtual has been made tangible. Galleries have been opening in Second Life—some more popular than others, depending on their ability to advertise their presence; news about their art events have recently reached more traditional media channels. This brief introduction to Second Life provides some background for understanding the work of 0100101110101101.org, whose Synthetic Performances go beyond the mere quotation of celebrated artists and are not meant to celebrate either them or performing art at large.

From the series of 0100101110101101.org’s re-enactments, Marina Abramović’s Imponderabilia (1977), Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971), and Gilbert and George’s The Singing Sculpture (1968) were chosen to be featured in the Biennial as a single channel projection. Abramović’s piece was recently shown at MMSU as part of the travelling exhibition Re:akt, curated by Domenico Quaranta. The choice to present this piece again next to two other Synthetic Performances highlights different aspects of the work, such as the dematerialization of the body.

In the original version of Abramović’s Imponderabilia, she and her companion Ulay were standing naked inside a doorway, facing each other so that people had to pass between the artist's bodies if they wanted to cross the threshold and walk through the door. In Shoot, Chris Burden asked a friend to shoot him in the arm to become, in the very moment of the violent act, a living sculpture. In The Singing Sculpture Gilbert and George ironically play with the de-humanization of the modern era. In all of the three original performances, the role of the artists’ bodies is pushed to the extreme of physicality, and therefore becomes paradoxical in the cyberspace performances where embodiment is virtual and controlled through the programming of code. The avatars that enact the performances in Second Life do not resemble the original artists. Instead, they are modelled after the Mattes' in an ironic play with identity. The resemblances between the avatars and Eva and Franco Mattes' physical features in fact do not reveal much about the artists' changeable and cryptic identities. Despite their Italian origins, the artist duo cannot be framed either in terms of nationality or a specific art genre; on their website they proclaim to be “a couple of restless European con-artists who use non-conventional communication tactics to obtain the largest visibility with minimal effort.” 0100101110101101.org, and, more recently, Eva and Franco Mattes, are only the last in a series of reincarnations with whom the artists identify themselves in art, as well as life. The appropriation of a piece of history and its mise en scene in Second Life has allowed 0100101110101101.org to indirectly work with media codification and to “render” the idea of both the immateriality of the body in cyberspace and its reflection in physical space.

With My Temporary Visiting Position from the Sunset Terrace Bar (2007 - 2008), Carlo Zanni seems to bring us back to a much more reality-bound scenario. Set in the city of Ahlen (Germany), the video depicts a landscape framed at sunset. The style of shooting resembles that of an amateur movie—a detail that seems to reinforce the aspect of realism in the online film. However, as soon as we learn that the colour of the sky is determined by data retrieved from web-cams placed in Naples, we realize that this landscape is as real as the one of 0100101110101101.org's performances in Second Life.

My Temporary Visiting Position usually can be seen either in live or in archive mode. In the Biennial the video is shown in archive mode, featuring the colour of the sky at a certain moment on a certain day. Seen in live mode, however, the background of the landscape may completely change from one day to the next. A poem by the Syrian novelist Ghada Samman, and music by the celebrated American composer Gabriel Yared accompany the work. Words, images, and music speak about notions of exile, migration, and border, which are underscored by the flock of swallows that fly across the sky. Its digital quality seems to further stress the dichotomy of nature and fiction. Music, narrative, video painting, data retrieval, life and fiction, virtual and physical all converge in this five-minute hybrid video.

My Temporary Visiting Position from the Sunset Terrace Bar further develops Zanni's vision for a new narrative genre emerging from the convergence of net art and cinema. The artist coined the term “data cinema” for this new genre when he launched his first net movie, The Possible Ties Between Illness and Success  (2006 - 2007) where data produced by visitors to the movie website—as analyzed by the search engine “Google Analytics”—increases the symptoms of the illness that affects the movie's main character in proportion to the increase of his success (determined by the numbers of visitors to the website).

In Zanni's works the portrait and landscape genres often meet in the flow of information that shapes them. A flow of data relating to economics or politics contributes to the creation of portraits as well as landscapes. Images grabbed from international newspapers shape the snow that the protagonist of Zanni's net game Average Shoveler needs to shovel in front of his house in Manhattan (a task that he absurdly will never be able to accomplish as snow / information overwhelms him). In his Internet portraits—such as 4 Untitled Portraits (2003-2004) and the Altar Boy series of "net sculptures"—live data gathered from the Internet forms the pupil of the eyes of the portrayed person, thereby affecting the physical features and metaphorically reflecting on the status of the eye as the mirror of the soul. Zanni’s drawings, prints, paintings and installations extend his virtual works into the physical realm and freeze a moment in the data flow, as if to give tangible proof of an accelerated hallucination.

Landscape, identity, and its physical manifestation, the body, are also at the core of the research undertaken by the duo known as Elastic Group of Artistic Research. Their project ReMixing City (2009), created for the Quadrilateral Biennial, incorporates all these aspects. A three-channel video projection depicts the urban landscape as it meets and becomes interwoven with the information highways.

Positioned at the centre of the triptych, the video Amniotic City serves as the focal point of the artwork. Amniotic City, one of the projects most representative of the Elastic Group's body of work, is presented in its original version, created in 2004. It is a spatial simulacrum of the modern urban condition where an invisible osmotic membrane (the net info-sphere) links and, at the same time, isolates citizens from the contemporary metropolis they inhabit—the amniotic city, the chaotic flux of economic data, the technologies of image transmission, words, statistics, immigrant flux, layers of movement. The project investigates the city and its relationship with architecture and the body, which are merging in virtual as well real space. Amniotic fluid surrounds us before we are born, and is used here as a metaphor for the substance of the city that embraces our bodies: a membrane through which information transpires and affects architectures in order to arrive at our bodies. It is a city in which we are totally immersed and feel alienated at the same time. The horizontal and vertical flows of the modern era overlap in the city's complex structure. The epidermis of the body expands and fuses into the epidermic texture of the city; the elastic nature of the video becomes a means of penetrating this texture.

The other two videos in the triptych consist of a mix of images and video extracts from past works, composing a video collage that exemplifies the avant-garde predilection for “mixing” in order to find individual expression for a synthesis of the arts. These "flash memories" are selected from images that best represent recurrent themes in the Elastic Group's research: the continuous transformation of the video language, and the state of constant change that characterizes the digital era and its relationship to its inhabitants.

The Elastic Group of Artistic Research describes their project as

All that represents the culture, both human and conceptual, of the digital frontier. The expanded city that encompasses all the chaos of the city without limits inhabiting the wireless universe, the World Wide Web. In times of crisis, when everything changes rapidly and without limits, even the work changes continuously, becoming an uninterrupted flow, an infinite metamorphic video.

In ReMixing City as well as their past works, Elastic Group chose video as the medium to investigate and penetrate the information matrix. The video becomes an expanded body, as it did in their performance Video Contact (2004) where a TV monitor, transmitting images of urban alienation, replaced the head of the performer.

The stratified language of the electronic image is capable of redefining architectonic space and providing it with new meanings. “Through the usage of different layers," explains the duo, "and with the substitution of different pieces of the video image and […] usage of the zoom, it is possible to simulate a virtual continuity, an experience of infinite depth of the space, such as the concentric circles on the water’s surface.”

The "elastic" in the name of the group refers to “the elasticity of the video surfaces, to the possibility to rethink and re-dimension the experience of the space through the usage of the moving image.” The artists state: “The space of the video is the elastic space par antonomasia, able to penetrate any surface."   Elastic also is a quality of the body's skin and of the urban texture, which, as Marshall McLuhan stated, is sensitive, soft, and changeable, depending on the flux of information.

Overall, the works by the Italian artists and teams included in the Quadrilateral Biennial distinguish themselves through their "polyhedral" research, built up from different kinds of entities, each associated with a different number of dimensions. Nature and fiction, real and virtual, past and present, viewers/participants and artwork are all joined to each other. Each of the artists emphasizes a different aspect of media, but they all work within an art genre or perhaps, more accurately, from an "art approach" that is both defined by local culture and, at the same time, transcends geographical boundaries.

Elena Giulia Rossi