Pratt Digital Arts Mfa Students, E.V.O.D.E.V.O.R.E.V.O.
CYFEST-12: ID premieres December 13th at the renowned Made in NY Media Center BY IFP. The inaugural event will set in motion it’s year-long, multi-city festival; geared towards exhibiting new media work which explores the dynamics of identity in our ever-expanding digital culture; focusing on levels of tech:intimacy, self augmentation, identity health, and technological personas at large.
CYFEST has joined forces with Rome-based curator Valentino Catricalà, of Rome Media Art Festival (MAXXI Museum), and Carla Gannis, Assistant Chairperson of Digital Arts at Pratt, to bring a thematic three-part video program to IFP. The video art program will include a video screening organized by Cyland’s video curator, Victoria Ilyushkina, a large scale multi-channel video installation by esteemed video artist, Daniele Puppi, and a video installation created by Pratt Digital Arts MFA students.
The technological progress of recent years has strengthened the ties between humanity and technology, machines and artificial intellect, and made the interaction between organic and synthetic life more intimate.
People and machines learn from each other with the help of neural networks. People’s consciousness undergoes certain changes. They develop a different outlook on the notions of life and death, moral problems of scientific experiments, territorial and virtual boundaries, tracking sysscsctems and total digital control. Personalities surrounded by a mirror cube of social networks hide behind their avatars and continue to exist in their accounts even after death. If you are absent from social networks, does it mean that no one knows about your existence, or is it a way of avoiding media control? The preservation of memory and transfer of information onto a digital database, and the fast development of artificial intellect and its humanization makes us face the inevitable question of personality identification. Who are we What is our future going to be like? This program is dedicated to a contemplation of these problems by contemporary artists.
Designed to explore the genetic and memetic evolution, devolution, and re-evolution of the human consciousness. These topics, represented by three interconnecting 45-second animated loops, combine to tell a story about our collective personhood.
Our personal identities are predicated not only on our biological origins but also on the stories we tell about them. This fact forms the intellectual basis of this piece – telling the story of life on earth from primordial soup to the first hominid. This is an origin story, represented in a 45-second hand drawn animation in black and white. Through surrealistic interpretations of an evolutionary cycle the artists seek to provide perspective on the atavistic tendencies encoded in many forms of contemporary culture.
The body, which is the very basic element of recognition, is now going through processes of deformation and re-assemblage. This is an effort to implement a new definition for human identity, concentrating on the eagerness of human beings to differentiate themselves from nature and thus denying the process of evolution, and at times deconstructing systems that have been in place for millennia.
With current limitations to the ways we can augment ourselves in reality, we see people’s online identities become a space for manifesting the wilder sides of their optimal identity. But in a tangible future, we will be able to manifest these extensions, pulling our idealistic identities from nature, technology, and other humans in order to create ideal forms. An unrestrained evolution from individual free will can overtake natural selection, as we rapidly prototype and iterate our own identities constantly re-evolving in the process.
Two enjoined led monitors appear in a space defined by two angular walls.
An image is passed instantly from one monitor to the other accompanied by a forceful rhythmic sound both sustained and hypnotic.
In the passage from one dimension to the other the image projected acquires a double physicality, thus defining the very space between the two dimensions – the architectural (physical) and the extreme limitations of movement.
In the juncture between the two monitors, passing from one temporal dimension to another, a new image, a new space for perception is created establishing a relationship between two distant realities.
A sort of “door” which offers similar stories of two diverse periods in time to coexist.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Daniele Puppi has been defined by some critics as an artist outside the canon, and most of all outside the language and formula of contemporary art, since his debut in 1996 with Fatica no.1, a site-specific audiovisual installation, he has been working to unhinge the idea of space that is still perceived and revolves around Euclidean parameters.
With an emphasis on video installation, he has manifested a new attitude towards this medium, emphasizing and radically subverting the use of sound and visual-architectonic reconfigurations that always reinvents itself. A totally new, alien perspective.
Puppi conceives of his work as authentic “works in regress”, which come into being after a long period of gestation spent inside the spaces. The artist experiences the environment and establishes an almost carnal relationship with it, assessing its limits and its potential.
The technologies used – video projectors, synchronizers, amplifiers, subwoofers, speakers and microphones – serve to activate and amplify our powers of perception, especially our visual and auditory ones. An integral part of the work, the viewer is called upon to enter a new and de-familiarized spatial and sensory dimension.
His most important solo exhibitions include: Respira (Galleria Borghese, Rome 2017); Gotham Prize (Italian Cultural Institute, New York, 2015); 432 Hertz (Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, 2013); Happy Moms (MAXXI, Rome, 2013); Bast (MAGAZZINO, Rome, 2013); Fatica n. 23 (Galleria Nazionale, Rome, 2010); Fatica n. 16 (HangarBicocca, Milan, 2008).
ABOUT THE CURATOR: Valentino Catricalà (Ph.D) is a scholar and contemporary art curator specialised in the analysis of the relationship of artists with new technologies and media. He is currently the artistic director of the Rome Media Art Festival (MAXXI Museum), Art Project coordinator at Fondazione Mondo Digitale and curator of the Kunstraum Goethe (the art space of the Goethe institut Rom). Valentino is currently teaching at Rome Fine Arts Academy.
CYFEST is one of the largest international media art festivals, it was founded in St. Petersburg in 2007 by independent artists and curators. The festival promotes the emergence of new forms of art and high technology interactions, developing professional connections between artists, curators, engineers and programmers around the world and exposing wide audiences to the works in the field of robotics, video art, sound art and net art.