EXHIBITION, LECTURES & PERFORMANCES
9 - 13 NOV @ GALTECA GALLERY
The body is a matrix of data, emotionally encapsulated, defragmented and disembodied, in a constant flow of fake memories and super sensorial experimentation. Extracorporeal digital age is a reality that requires a network of information to replicate itself over and over again. Who are you in this environment and how do you deal with it?
Artists from Germany, Italy, Finland, Great Britain and Austria present their research and digital artworks, challenging both the cognitive and the emotional system of the audience. Nine works of video art, robotics, animation, sound engineering and live performance are playfully exhibited in the futuristic space of Galateca Gallery.
timeline
9 nov | 7 - 9 PM - EXHIBITION OPENING
10 nov | 6 - 7 PM - JUST A LITTLE AVATAR DANCE: AN ARTIST’S JOURNEY, lecture by Claudia Hart (SUA)
11 nov | 2 - 4 PM - ME, durational performance by Johanna Nuutinen (FN)
12 nov | 3 - 4 PM - SONGS FROM MY ANALOGUE UTOPIA, video performance by Christian Faubel (DE)
13 nov | 2 - 4 PM - ME, durational performance by Johanna Nuutinen (FN)
General opening hours of the exhibition 12 - 8 PM.
Echoes of a Forgotten Embrace
APOTROPIA [Antonella Mignone + Cristiano Panepuccia] (IT)
video, one channel, 04’
The work takes inspiration from the concept of emotional memory, depicting the encounter of two lovers in a liminal dimension, a place where movements preserve the memory of the past and create a synthesis of the entire action. Echoes of a Forgotten Embrace is one of the chapters that constitute DROP, a project divided into several autonomous works focusing on the dialectical relationship between the concept of Infinity and Control as a fundamental issue of human nature. The video work has been created with a mix of body projection, light painting, real time randomization and animation techniques.
APOTROPIA is a Rome based duo formed by dancer/media artist Antonella Mignone and artist/composer Cristiano Panepuccia. Their artworks have been exhibited internationally in Japan, Austria, UK, USA, Italy, Poland, Mexico, Columbia, Taiwan etc.
“Our work explores the interconnections between performing arts and all forms of audiovisual expressions. We are influenced by philosophical, anthropological and scientific themes with a focus on symbols, myths and cultures of mankind.”
The looking trace
CAMILA LEVY DANIEL, LEYLA DE LA HOZ & PEDRO GIACOMOLLI (AR)
video, three channels, 17’
The portraits of three women are suspended in time. The work is a sample of frail bodily states in an out of context experience. The viewer becomes involved in a space completely unrelated to his times, entering an alternative universe marked by the graceful passage of time.
Camila Levy Daniel, Leyla de la Hoz and Pedro Giacomolli are 3 young sound and image designers working and living in Buenos Aires.
Crystal Forming Robots on Overhead
CHRISTIAN FAUBEL (DE)
robotics with overhead projection, interactive installation
The installation simulates the growth process of crystal structures. Each robot operates autonomously and is driven by the light of the overhead projector. When a robot has collected enough energy through its solar panel, the energy is all released at once through a small motor and the robot will make a random movement. The robots are equipped with tiny magnets, so that when they come close while they are moving, they attract each other and dock together. Over time a crystal-like structure emerges from more and more little robots forming larger clusters. Through the overhead projector this process is magnified and an abstract real-time movie of the real physical robots is projected to the wall.
Christian Faubel is an in(ter)disciplinary scholar working between the fields of autonomous systems research, neuroscience, media art and design. He is currently working at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. In 2002 he founded derstrudel as a framework for the mediation of a relaxed approach to electronics. He creates artifacts, workshops and performances using a playful and experimental approach to technology and cosiders them to be in the tradition of philosophical toys as they combine the mediation of scientific concepts with pleasure and amusement.
“I am interested in what enables autonomous behavior and how complex autonomous behavior may result from the interaction of very simple units and from the dynamics of interaction between such units.”
MIRRORS
EMILIA IZQUIERDO (UK)
digital drawing and painting, video animation, 3'
Mirrors (2016) is a loop video animation that refers to confusing or disorienting situations in which it is difficult to distinguish between truth and illusion or between competing versions of reality. Playing with spatial disorientation the piece refers to an indistinguishable spatial state - physical and mental - where the sense of reality is threatened. The piece addresses this state of entrapment and disorientation of our bodies and the need to break out of it exploring how technology, social systems and personal relationships affect the way we see and understand the world.
Emilia Izquierdo graduated from Slade School of Fine Art and has a M.A. in Art and Politics at Goldsmiths University. Since 2012 her works have been exhibited in UK, Dubai, Italy, Spain, Egypt, USA, Argentina, Turkey, Correa.
“My medium is drawing, painting and digital technology. This creates a visual language that combines the tactile and the digital touch. Power relations are an important element in my work: the subjugator and the subdued, technology and the earth, the natural and the human, the colonizer and the colonized. I use soft mediums to depict hard realities, exploring these power relationships. ”
Corpus Prophetias
FRANCESCA BONFATTI (IT)
video, one channel, 4'
Starting from complex and mysterious mnemonic mechanisms, the work explores the thresholds of the unconscious through the ritual action mediated by images, words and movements. It's a search which has as its starting point the implicit dialog we have with our body, the continuous flow of trade and information aware and not between us and it. Perhaps the physical body contains a "corpus" as a set of laws that determine its inherent potential of "revelation" or of "action revealed.”
Francesca Bonfatti is a Photographer and Video artist born in Rome in 1970 but she lives and works in Venice. She has a degree in Fine Arts by Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. Her works have been selected for exhibitions and festivals in Italy and abroad (Spain, Greece, Colombia, Portugal) and published in various online contemporary art magazines.
“My art work research revolves around the concept of space-action reveals, that line blurred between where we are and where we appear. I explore and push over sensitive experiences, in a visible presence space, leaving out shadows and lights being, ego spaces inaccessible and flooded where the action space becomes a place of the unexpected, the possible and the change.”
ME
durational performance
9 nov (7 - 9 PM), 11 nov (2 - 4 PM), 13 nov (2 - 4 PM)
The concept resides in the acclaimed short dance film ME- Story of a Performance, which was premiered at Pompidou Center Paris, and a durational performance built around it. ME dives into the inner and outer worlds of a performance from four different viewpoints: how the dancer imagines the performance, how the spectator experiences it, how it can be seen from an objective point of view as a graphic code and how the dancer encounters their audience. Through these different stages a new interpretation for a different world is born - a performance that sucks both the performer and the spectator into the journey of the performance.
Dancer-choreographer Johanna Nuutinen ( b. 1983 ) graduated from the Finnish National Opera Ballet school in 2002. Since then she has been a member of the Finnish National Ballet and created a successful career with the company while dancing soloist parts in works by Tero Saarinen, Ohad Naharin, William Forsythe, Johan Inger, Jacobo Godani, Sylvie Guillem, John Neumeier, Jorma Uotinen among others, as well as created her own productions to the stage and on film. Since 2015 she has been working as a freelance artist. Currently in her works she explores the themes of identity, metamorphosis and the durational aspect of a performance. She collaborates with renowned visual artists and her works have been presented at over 40 countries across the world.
“ME challenges the audience to meet the unexpected, face their preconceptions and the performer to unlock her mental and physical boundaries through the continuos movement. It offers a journey into the magical world of the renowned abstract dance film and surprises the public with the poetic yet strong physicality and touch.”
SONIC CURRENT
participative sound installation
Sonic current is a site-specific sound installation which transform architectural locations into “conscious” agents. The transformation of the site into a body, with its sense organs (microphones) and actuators (loudspeakers), enable the site to articulate and manifest itself in an open dialogue with its visitors. Sounds from visitors, environment or other exhibited installations, captured as external stimuli by the microphonic “ears”, are distributed over a digital, audio rate artificial neural network. Inside the highdimensionally dynamic, self-regulating network, sound circulates recursively in multiple recurrent layers, resulting to diversely fragile resonant frequencies, an equivalent of a wide spectrum of flickering colors. The visitors can identify basic similarities of their body with the installation (input-output causality, dynamic memory) and can interact by various ways.
Kosmas Giannoutakis creates dynamic sound artworks by interconnecting human agents, sound bodies, acoustic sites and audiovisual computer systems through the medium of sound. Using feedback mechanisms in order to create complexity and to control non-linearity, he is researching the catalysis and communication of emergent sound phenomena. Kosmas’s work have been presented in various festivals and workshops in Austria, Germany, UK, Singapore, Canada, Cyprus and Latvia.
“Inspired by the cybernetic vision, my artistic practice is focused on the meta-level of music creation. My concept of meta-composition is defined as a self-organizing system, that procreates music by acting on real time and space.”
o.t.
live video manipulation, participative installation
o.T. is a composition of auto-generated abstract moving images. The moving structures are created with video feedback, a process that starts and continues by pointing a video camera at a playback monitor, causing the picture signal to cycle in an endlessly repeating loop. As in o.T. the feedback process progresses, dynamic abstract forms are autogenerated. During the evolution of these forms, the picture signal is manipulated through a modified video mixer and body movement – placed between the camera and the playback monitor. Slowly the body interacts with the picture signal, and prevents the system descends into chaos by balancing purely electronic forces.
M. Kardinal studied Fine Arts and Art History from 2004 to 2008, including 2007 in Siena, Italy. In 2008, she took up her Master’s studies in Fine Arts with a focus on photography, film, and new media. An intensive confrontation with photography and new media led her to study in Rome from 2008 to 2009. Back in Germany, she was a master student of Arno Fischer from 2010 to 2011. Influenced by her intense work in photography, she began to work with obsolete video-technology. M. Kardinal successfully completed her studies with a Master of Arts degree in Fine Arts in 2012. Since 2004, she has participated regularly in solo and group exhibitions; also, her video-work is screened in national and international exhibitions and Film Festivals. In 2015 her work got honoured by the President of the Federal Republic of Germany. Since October 2015 she receives the Caspar-David-Friedrich scholarship from the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture (Germany). Her works are in the SØR Rusche collection Oelde/Berlin.
promenade
video animation, 2 channels, 4'
In Promenade the movement of the trees use recordings of movement of people portraying animals, in an attempt to explore how motion can both define and transcend the categories that divide living organisms. The choreography in the animations highlights the mechanical and structural similarities behind vegetative, human and animal bodies.
Thomas Grogan is a French and British artist. In 2016, he obtained a Master’s degree from the Royal College of Art in Design Interactions after graduating from l’Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne. Born in 1991 in Nottingham (UK), Thomas grew up in France where he spent most of his time playing Basketball at a high-level. He currently lives and works in London. His practice investigates the relation between ‘products’ and identity, subverting ready made objects through digital and physical interventions to create polysemous artworks. Thomas has exhibited in various group exhibitions and festivals including institutions such as the V&A, the Roundhouse, the Southbank Centre, the New Museum and Le Commun.
“The extrapolation of pragmatism is at the centre of my practice, creating artworks in which the absurd is ephemeral. My work explores technologies’ mystification to highlight contemporary paradoxes.”