Curating art, narrating reality.
A place where creativity and research meet.
Here are our projects:
In the center of my flank lies my womb, an internal organ closely resembling an animal; as she moves back and forth on its own between my flanks, also upwards ins a straight line below my cartilage of my thorax, and also obliquely to the right or left, to the liver or spleen. My womb is sling down and, in other words, completely erratic.
Hysteria Narratives is an 8-minute video, part of an ongoing research, on the history of Western medicine that has focused on the study of women bodies, especially on the “theory of the wandering uterus” already discussed in the Corpus hippocraticum, the collection of essays about medicine attributed to Hippocrates.
Almost pretending to be a film for scientific use, the video is an immersion inside a dreamlike female human body, punctuated by the words of a hypothetical patient who complains of the symptoms of the disease described as hysteria. Four video reconstructions of explorations of female intestines with a tube retrace the history of hysteria and its exploitation to define the intellectual, physical and moral inferiority of women.
With Hysteria Narratives, Gremmen retraces the attempts of the scientific tradition to trace female biology to the notorious instability of her uterus, of her hormones. Defining a “hysterical” woman has always meant that her way of being in relation to the world is necessarily conditioned by her gender, unpredictability, and irrationality.
Hysteria Narratives is also in this way an alarm bell against sexist simplifications, the medical prejudices of gender that have their roots in classical medicine, but which still contribute today to the inexperience towards the specificities of the woman’s body.
Hysteria Narratives|Pleun Gremmen
METRONOM| Via Carteria 10 | 41121 Modena
Since the birth of the Internet, the network has been used as a catalyst for communities and as a place for personal fulfillment: Hannah Neckel’s research focuses on the ways in which technology shapes emotions and influences the manifestation of feelings. Neckel explores the interpersonal relationship between us, our phones and therefore our online lives, merging our IRL and URL experiences.
Since it is emotions that activate our perception of the world and the actions taken online have consequences on offline reality (and vice versa), an emotional practice and a daily experience of these two dimensions confuses the boundaries in our mind. The aesthetic experience linked to Neckel’s works is built on this double track that assembles a new, hybrid and symbiotic imaginary.
Auratic Sentiency builds a placid, moldable and fluid space in which real and virtual overflow on top of each other like an overflowing glass that spills and invades our perception. Neckel conceives her work as a further stage in the field of net art: a post virtual dimension in which IRL and URL objects are indistinguishable and have the same status, and in which safe space is granted to express oneself and connect.
Auratic Sentiency|Hannah Neckel
METRONOM| Via Carteria 10 | 41121 Modena
Ghostcoaster Reconstruction is a video work that uses found footage of the now destroyed Star Jet roller-coaster to digitally reconstruct an experience that is no longer available: Star Jet was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and thrown completely into the sea like all the surrounding built-up area. Star Jet was beloved by New Jersey citizens and many of them filmed themselves riding it and that archived it on YouTube prior to 2012.
The artist thus reconstructs a trip on Star Jet from this archival material in an atmosphere that closely resembles the settings of war videogames. Characteristic of videogames aesthetics is also the frontal view with which the space is shown, and the post natural disaster atmosphere created also by the absence of other characters or human figures.
This 360 ° navigation of a three-dimensional space is created by the artist Claire Hentschker using photogrammetry, a 3D modeling technique that uses images of real objects and spaces – in this case YouTube videos – to create dreamlike representations of reality: Hentschker’s roller-coaster does not exist (or, better, doesn’t exist anymore) but arises from the fragmented and distorted superimposition of pre-existing images. This shift form archive to re-writing is also made evident by the progressive loss of sharpness that underlines the beginning of the Reconstruction.
In Ghostcoaster Reconstruction Hentschker questions the concepts of realism and objectivity in photography by presenting a complex and articulated structure of meticulously unraveled and recomposed data, in an assembly that is not only made up of images but also of experiences and experiences that belong to those places, and where human intervention is limited to the collection and manipulation of data.
Claire Hentschker is a digital artist who considers the virtual and the physical to traditionally be in opposition to one another. Now more than ever, a real envy and power struggle between the two categories. Entities with power or that take up space in the virtual world seem to long for validation from the physical world, while those that are rooted more in the physical world seem alienated and drained by a virtual one.
Ghostcoaster Reconstruction|Claire Hentschker
METRONOM| Via Carteria 10 | 41121 Modena
Orb (2016) by Canadian artist Baron Lanteigne is a seamless loop that is closer to an animated digital painting than a video piece. This piece is created by morphing different cloud footage together using datamosh, a glitch technique which uses the motion of a clip to distort the texture of the previous one. Datamoshing is used by Lanteigne to reveal the structure of video production and the illusion of the screen as a neutral support by literally breaking the moving image. Datamoshing for the artist is a tool to interrupt reality and to analyze the image: it reveals how the pixels are driven by algorithms in blending different images together, through an image reworking process. Everything we see in this process is somehow related to the temporality of the video. This time-based medium, however, is not interesting as a narrative tool for Lanteigne, but in its intrinsic malleability and ductility.
The pace and the quality of the loop, in fact, on one hand enhance the apparent corporeality of the digital animation but at the same time underline how unstable is our 3D perception of it.
Orb is thus a reflection on the creation of digital images and their inner mechanisms.
Baron Lanteigne’s artistic practice analyzes our relationship with technology and its infrastructures through digital installations in which screens often act as portals connecting the real world and the virtual world. The essential core of his work derives from his involvement with many cyber-communities and from virtual collaborations that conceive the concept of connection as a real point of contact for relationships: the possibility of meeting and creating one’s own niche online is liberating to the extent in which it offers us an alternative to traditional culture. This allows cultural trends that would otherwise never find space to find themselves discussing very specific problems. The pseudo-anonymity of some platforms lets us forget the individual for a minute so we can witness the collective effort to “sort” everything and reveal the essence of their common interest.
ORB|Baron Lanteigne
METRONOM| Via Carteria 10 | 41121 Modena
Blurring Contour by Helen Anna Flanagan is an excerpt from a video work Flanagan shot in a nightclub in Essex, UK.
It is a synesthetic and paradoxical narration of clubbing in which the immersion in the atmosphere mediated by the video camera is total.
It is synesthetic because the different tactile and visual textures that follow one another in this very short work convey a syncopated alternation of hallucinogenic surfaces and perspectives; it is paradoxical, or at least apparently, because the most characteristic feature of the situation that the video displays is the sound, which in Blurring Contour is totally lacking. Perhaps, however, the absence of sound would not be necessary to define more clearly the contours of this experience that evidently must be accomplished alone, isolated, separated from one’s own context. For many reddit users, the practice of “alone clubbing” – attending music club nights alone – and thus indulging the sense of alienation derived from the frenzy of music and atmosphere, is the only way to enjoy the music to the full: in the moment of maximum involvement, maximum volume and silence coincide.
The method underlying Helen Anna Flanagan’s research consists of observing small fortuitous events in everyday life. These episodes become part of fictional narratives that take the form of installations, performances and video. By constructing and imagining scenarios – often absurd – the artist tries to investigate the social structures and the political subtext of everyday life, focusing on affects and emotions, work and body. The absurdity that is always inserted in every work often coincides with the narrative point of view and in itself therefore always becomes alienating: in Blurring Contour the fingers that touch the gel are of an elderly hand, it can be seen from the chipped polish on the long nails.
Blurring Contour|Helen Anna Flangen
METRONOM| Via Carteria 10 | 41121 Modena
