For The Guardians, 2011
The realm of the virtual, how it affects our experiences and shapes our memory, is a recurrent concern in my artistic practice, other than in my personal life.
In a society where online social networks daily experience an affluence of million of users, where the ultimate place of meeting people is facebook, and where group sports have been replaced by solitary home virtual simulation, the physical experience of the other has become superfluous, or so it appears.
In 1980 John Berger affirmed that ‘man becomes aware of himself returning the look’, concept reinforced by an earlier suggestion by Emmanuel Levinas that the gaze of others upon us demands us to define ourselves. In 2012, as this experience seems to becoming redundant and our gaze is mediated through electronic devices, what will happen to our faces? Will they loose any reason to exist, to look and being looked at or to talk and being talked to unless it happens in a virtual world, or will they change shapes to adjust for these new ways of interacting? If the virtual is the ultimate path of choice to experience the world, what will remain of the disposable Real?
With the use of cardboard models and plastic figures I am interested to propose a reading of the future state of a memory based on virtual experiences, and of a society that is becoming increasingly aseptic and oblivious to the physicality of the other. Furthermore the use of toys in infantile psychology is often linked to the action of remembering, of reconstructing a memory and understand it; in my practice it symbolizes the struggle to remember and understand an event, an action, or a person that has only been experienced virtually. The use of a monochromatic color palette (usually white for the constructed images and very dark for pictures of existing elements) reveals the greater degree of uncertainty that virtual experiences naturally carry with them, whilst the choice of the large format camera and an end-to-end analogue process is inscribable into the element of craft and performance that are fundamental to my art, as they oppose to a world that is disappearing to become concept only (Baudrilard).
Specification:
Analog C-41 prints from large format colour negative (5x4inches). 20x24 inches
In a society where online social networks daily experience an affluence of million of users, where the ultimate place of meeting people is facebook, and where group sports have been replaced by solitary home virtual simulation, the physical experience of the other has become superfluous, or so it appears.
In 1980 John Berger affirmed that ‘man becomes aware of himself returning the look’, concept reinforced by an earlier suggestion by Emmanuel Levinas that the gaze of others upon us demands us to define ourselves. In 2012, as this experience seems to becoming redundant and our gaze is mediated through electronic devices, what will happen to our faces? Will they loose any reason to exist, to look and being looked at or to talk and being talked to unless it happens in a virtual world, or will they change shapes to adjust for these new ways of interacting? If the virtual is the ultimate path of choice to experience the world, what will remain of the disposable Real?
With the use of cardboard models and plastic figures I am interested to propose a reading of the future state of a memory based on virtual experiences, and of a society that is becoming increasingly aseptic and oblivious to the physicality of the other. Furthermore the use of toys in infantile psychology is often linked to the action of remembering, of reconstructing a memory and understand it; in my practice it symbolizes the struggle to remember and understand an event, an action, or a person that has only been experienced virtually. The use of a monochromatic color palette (usually white for the constructed images and very dark for pictures of existing elements) reveals the greater degree of uncertainty that virtual experiences naturally carry with them, whilst the choice of the large format camera and an end-to-end analogue process is inscribable into the element of craft and performance that are fundamental to my art, as they oppose to a world that is disappearing to become concept only (Baudrilard).
Specification:
Analog C-41 prints from large format colour negative (5x4inches). 20x24 inches
