The identity of the city

  • March 25, 2011 12:22 am

I am currently artist in residence in Sheffield, at Access Space, an astonishing community project which embodies the shape of a hacklab and that of an art gallery, mixed with something else which is difficult to explain.

The idea is to build autonomous machines made of recycled material, a serie of assembled sculptures which will be animated by micro circuits and solar panels. 

Sheffield is an interesting place, its identity is not marked by spectacular landmarks or magnificent architecture, while its industrial history points to the worldwide known production of steel.

Since the Noise_Objects will be inserted in public space, the observation of urban territory is relevant part of this research. I try to absorb the taste of the city, its working class history, its bricks and the smell of metal, as well as the sound which, I imagine, used to reverberate over the the city, once upon a time commonly depicted dominated by a dark foggy cloud.

I am reading a book by writer Fred Pass about being brought up in the suburbs in the 40ies and 50ies, looking for an understanding of the peculiarity of this place.

The circuits will be made of solar panels, piezos, small speakers, leds, and a minimal amount of components trying to reach the widest possible result: give life – light and sound – to inert matter, and allow these new entities to speak about the city itself, capturing the attention of random passengers, birds and stray cats, or, otherwise,  structuring an ephemeral existence which can also be per se.

Noise_Objects in Public Space

  • March 24, 2011 5:47 pm

Abstract

“The technical object exists not only by virtue of its functioning in exterior devices (…) but by virtue of phenomena of which it is, itself, the centre. This is why it possesses a fecundity or non-saturation which grants it a progeny. …
Many abandoned technical objects are incomplete inventions which remain as an open-ended virtuality and could be taken up once more and given new life in another field according to the profound intention which informs them, that is, their technical essence.”
Gilbert Simondon. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. 1958.

A parallel attitude is present in the practices which generate the field of ‘arte povera’ (trash) and that of noise music. If a noiser uses what is considered disturbance, error, accident, as musical elements, a painter can make art of scrap, garbage and obsolete technology: in both cases a fundamental transformation of the symbolic value of the source material is actuated. Both present a form of dissensus towards established systems of production and fruition, proposing the invention of a methodology of creation that wants to be personal, ethical and free.

Description

Noise_Objects is a series of sculptures made of recycled material, simple electronic components and micro circuits (using chip CMOS 4093, among others) which intertwine the hacker’s philosophy – diy and intolerance towards closed systems – with the disruptive conceptual provocation of an art piece.
Noise_Objects are self-standing creatures powered by solar panels, performing functions that trigger events and reactions belonging to the realm of symbolic logic and visionary thinking.

This work challenges the perception of the contemporary commodified environment – and the idea of technical object – through the creation of machines in the form of self-contained micro-entities performing irrational, aberrant behaviours which generate processes engendering a semantic clash.

References

Marchel Duchamp’s ready-made and ‘The Large Glass’.
Bruno Munari’s ‘Useless Machines.’
Qubais Reed Ghazala’s anti-theory and circuit bending.
Nicolas Collin’s hardware hacking.

Space

Noise_Objects like viral seeds intersect the city space disseminating fragments of an alien discourse. What’s the message they are trying to tell?

Illusion

Camouflage: everything seems normal, nothing attracts the passenger’s attention, although a distracted look may reveal that… something is slightly out of order!

Cellular Automata

  • April 12, 2010 1:10 am

It was the city of London. Reality was just a projection, the representation of an underlaying regular grid of cells.

What will happen if, and when, one of these cells would gain consciusness of its own status as a being?

Noise music was the key to decrypt this mystery. 

L’antidoto all’incertezza

  • March 23, 2010 9:09 pm

On Thursday March 25th  I am invited to present my art work at Brera Fine Art Academy in Milan: h 14:00 – 16:00, Aula Magna (Napoleonica). FOCUS is a trans-disciplinary series of lecture and this years’ theme is ‘Dispositivi e affetti’.

"Crediamo di vivere in un epoca dove le peculiarità della nostra natura
umana indefinita, precaria, disorientata, flessibile si sono
storicizzate e complicate perché messe al servizio del capitalismo
cognitivo. Qualità che hanno un pregio nella loro inutilità sono
diventate strumento di produzione di merci linguistiche. Per affrontare la complessità da cui siamo attraversati abbiamo scelto
una posizione di nomadismo: molte personalità rappresentative di
eterogenei campi del sapere saranno chiamate a discutere in particolare
il processo di mutazione che ha investito il nostro sistema cognitivo,
le nostre relazioni e i rapporti di lavoro. Se possibile vorremmo
guadagnare attraverso questa mappatura, la possibilità di divenire più
consapevoli e di appropriarci quindi della nostra potenza di agire."

Codename Musocco

  • March 14, 2010 3:04 am

Virtual Entity Alpha Minus is out now!

…a simple application to make the soul of a file:
create, edit, expand, scan souls and annotate genetic
and semantic relations among files in their aura… 

landl ord impug n ideol ogic

  • March 7, 2010 11:39 pm

autoh ypnos is unsen suali se tiny abatt oir soubr ette likab
ility rhesu s exarc hate inglo rious ly senec titud e glenr othes
crink le wrist lock pika ideol ogic lesso ning wile exarc hate
balka nisin g exten uator y octod ecimo pagan ised undec eive
secur eness arill ode seism ometr y disco ursed deion ise confl
agrat ed trifl urali n penet ratio ns telep honin g pumic ed
etern ized silva n jingo es menfo lks telep honin g memor ex
secta rian pasti l regro w crink le inacc essib le meant ime
misco ntent urati c narco tize lesso ning zoome try leagu e

more

On noise

  • February 10, 2010 4:15 pm

Kant has written a treatise on _The Vital Powers_; but I should like to
write a dirge on them, since their lavish use in the form of knocking,
hammering, and tumbling things about has made the whole of my life a
daily torment. Certainly there are people, nay, very many, who will
smile at this, because they are not sensitive to noise; it is precisely
these people, however, who are not sensitive to argument, thought,
poetry or art, in short, to any kind of intellectual impression: a fact
to be assigned to the coarse quality and strong texture of their brain
tissues.

Bots, bots, bots

  • February 8, 2010 5:00 pm




(nothing else than bots)

The myth of transmutation

  • February 5, 2010 2:15 am

The Influencers,
one of the most exciting art festival in Europe nowadays, started
yesterday: James Acord’s, the world’s first nuclear sculptor, told the
story of the years he spent learning how to execute the most modern
alchemy, the conversion of radioactive waste into inert material and
subsequently into sculptures. Acord, the only person in the world
licensed to work with radioactive material, through his 20 years long
research digs into the hypocrisy of the nuclear era, whose policies,
developed in war ages, are dipped into secrecy. The idea of transmutation
goes back to its mythical root, that of the alchemic prodigious of the
conversion of an element into another element. The idea that matter is
interchangeable is still of incredible appeal, triggering actions and
reactions. The sculptor made, among others, an interesting reflection
around nuclear cemeteries and all those contaminated places where there
should be non-verbal signs of danger to be universally
understandable for centuries: here is a struggle it is predictable that
the symbolism of danger will change in human culture so how to create a
sculpture which serve its purpose long enough?

– written in Barcelona –

Viral Monster

  • February 2, 2010 3:51 pm

When I think of Virtual Entity as a science fiction project, I imagine a sort of noisy humus, or blinking plancton, as if matter – that is immaterial matter, or information – would redistribute itself continuously, and shiny bonds would connect particles of fragmented pieces of predigested elements, forming the body of that monster whose unstable structure is made of textual souls, and of the space around them. Virtual Entity is, indeed, the formation of such processes of instantiation, and of the linking of those uber-structures that are above the file-body. If this is deeply connected to the mythical approach to this subject – the myth of digital birth and digital creation, isn’t it anyhow hard to deny that a creature, whose body is entirely made of pointers (to bodies which are not present), is a monstrous creature?
Thus, jumping out of this dreamy dimension, it is necessary to admit that the so called ‘viral archive’, the horizontal and uncontrollable one, is, indeed, peculiar. First of all, this information, as I said in advance, is not necessarily true, nor scientific or systematic; second, since we are talking about an archive of metadata, and considering the fact this database is not storing any copy of any file, because the software creates an online soul from a local file, then the mythical monster, and the viral archive (which are the same thing), are a meta-archive and a pseudo-monster, a monster without soul whose body is a collection of souls, and an archive of information which talks about information that is not present.