Curating art, narrating reality.
A place where creativity and research meet.
Here are our projects:
Camera Ludica, In-game photography between Simulation and Appropriation (2018), an artwork by Marco De Mutiis was presented on the Digital Video Wall on the occasion of Festivalfilosofia 2022.
Camera Ludica is a visual essay dedicated to in-game photography: through these visual sequences, De Mutiis explores the recent phenomenon including a series of operations such as the screenshot, photo simulations and game mods created by the players themselves. These practices reveal a new understanding of photography and its relationship to simulations and video games.
The artist studies the technical developments with which it is possible to produce images during the game phase or even give the characters the opportunity to take their own photographs. The analysis of this research has shown how these images are becoming increasingly photorealistic, going therefore to “gamify” the act of photographing. The practices of production and consume of images coming from the gaming environment, open up to reflections on our relationships with the representation and the overcoming of the paradigm of truthfulness. Online and offline life have less and less clear outlines, and while on one hand this exposes to risks of iconological distortion, on the other it opens to an sentimental dimension of narration.
Camera Ludica|Marco De Mutiis
METRONOM| Via Carteria 10 | 41121 Modena
Lend Me Your Face: Go FakeYourself!, 2021, is a net art intervention by Tamiko Thiel in collaboration with “/ p”, that evolves from the Artificial Intelligence intervention project commissioned in 2020 by The Photographers’ Gallery in London.
In Lend Me Your Face!, a deepfake and open source neural network framework animates photographs of the faces of ordinary people according to the facial movements and expressions of prominent international public figures. The visitor is confronted with how the most intimate and yet public part of himself, the face and the emotions it expresses, can be easily manipulated, and placed in contexts beyond his control.
The installation by Thiel and “/p” invites the public to directly experience the possibilities and risks of giving someone the control of their face, their image, their statements, losing for a few moments, in a controlled environment, their individuality and become part of a larger “collective body” that assumes, albeit in an awkward and imperfect way, the voice of a single character who can be identified as “positive” or “negative”. However, this is not a warning against absolute surveillance or an invitation to root for one or the other famous person, but also a reflection on the importance of being part of the chorus of activists who are fighting to change things in the world, under every flag: Lend Me Your Face is in fact a reinterpretation of a verse of Julius Caesar by Shakespeare pronounced by Mark Anthony “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!”, we are thus urged to become members of that political body which is active citizenship.
Lend Me Your Face |Tamiko Thiel
METRONOM| Via Carteria 10 | 41121 Modena
