Curating art, narrating reality.
A place where creativity and research meet.
Here are our projects:
OBJETS-MONDE (2022) is an interactive installation by Canadian artist Sabrina Ratté and the fourth video intervention in the programming of Metamorphosis, the fifth edition of Digital Video Wall, an annual project curated by Gemma Fantacci and structured in thematic chapters aimed at promoting the dissemination and experimentation of digital art.
OBJETS-MONDE, presented at the Digital Video Wall as a single channel video, explores the impact of human activity on the environment and how it becomes an integral part of our ecosystem. Through the technique of photogrammetry, abandoned objects such as cars and computer screens are captured, resulting in a video collage that incorporates fragments of reality. These objects are then recontextualized in the video, appearing disproportionately large within distant landscapes, resembling the remnants of monumental architecture. The absence of life and the luminous ambiance of the artwork create a juxtaposition between a sense of apocalypse and nostalgia, between the value of the objects and their status as waste, and between an idealized nature and the enduring presence of human traces. These remnants of the Anthropocene era are presented within an interactive installation created in collaboration with Guillaume Arseneault, accompanied by a soundtrack composed by Roger Tellier-Craig. The work is also accompanied by 2 prints 117×118 cm.
OBJETS-MONDE is a production by Le FRESNOY – Studio national des arts contemporains (Tourcoing).
Sabrina Ratté is a Canadian artist based in Montreal. Using tools, such as 3D scans, analog video synthesizers, and 3D animation, her formal approach serves as the foundation for the creation of ecosystems that manifest across various platforms, from interactive installations to series of videos, digital prints, sculptures, or virtual Reality. Exploring the convergence of technology and biology, the interplay between materiality and virtuality, and the speculative evolution of our environment, her work is influenced by the realms of science fiction, philosophy, and theoretical writings. Ratté portrays worlds devoid of humans, where forgotten remnants continue to evolve and forge new relationships with the ecosystem.
Her work has been exhibited in institutions such as Laforet Museum in Tokyo, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Centre Pompidou in Paris, the PHI Center in Montreal, the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl, and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. She has presented solo exhibitions at Gaîté Lyrique in Paris, Fotografiska in Shanghai, and Arsenal Contemporary Art in Montreal and New York. Notably, her work is part of the collection at the Montreal Contemporary Art Museum. Ratté was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award in Canada in 2019 and went on to receive the award in 2020.
Objectes-Monde| Sabrina Rattè
METRONOM | Via Carteria 10 | 41121 Modena
Event Modeling (2023) is an interactive and live simulated online environment created by artists Ziyang Wu & Mark Ramos, and the video intervention in the programming of Metamorphosis, the fifth edition of Digital Video Wall, an annual project curated by Gemma Fantacci and structured in thematic chapters aimed at promoting the dissemination and experimentation of digital art.
Event Modeling consists of two works: AI Fossil and #dump. It pronounces how our reality is being mediated and profoundly changed by digital technologies.
Among the content pushed by his own social media algorithms, artist Ziyang Wu selected news and social events and fed their titles into the image generating Artificial Intelligence dreamfields3D, a tool that generates images, 3D models, videos, and other models by prior input of text and images. For AI Fossil, the AI created 3D models from those texts, as if fossilising the filter-bubble reality Wu lives in. In a post-apocalyptic factory scene, visitors can approach the scattered AI fossils to trigger pop-up banners of the original sources and event titles. The work reveals how textual stories can be fragmented and re-interpreted into virtual objects of sarcasm, grandiosity, obscenity, and obscurity, as processed and apprehended by AI.
Developed in collaboration with artist Mark Ramos, #dump is a live simulated online environment, based on the 3D models built for AI Fossil. Ramos and Wu tagged the 3D models with matching keywords from the book Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary (2018). Once these keywords are found in new tweets, in real time, #dump will dump the relevant 3D models into the virtual landscape of a salt mine. Hinting at activities of extraction and expansion, the 3D models will continue to ‘landfill’ the landscape, a metaphor of how digital technology will colonise every facet of our lives.
Ziyang Wu is an artist based in Hangzhou, currently teaching at the School of Intermedia Art at the China Academy of Art, and is a former member of NEW INC at the New Museum. His artworks focus on how current technologies, in a cross-cultural context, affect politics, society, and the explicit and implicit relationships between things at both macro and micro levels. With an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a BFA from the Florence Academy of Fine Arts, his video, AR, AI simulation and interactive video installation have exhibited internationally.
Mark Ramos is a Brooklyn-based new media artist. Mark makes fragile post-colonial technology using web/software programming, physical computing (using computers to sense and react to the physical world), and digital sculpture/fabrication to create interactive work that facilitate encounters with our own uncertain digital futures. Mark is deeply committed to the ethos of open source: the free sharing of information and data + creative uses of technology. Mark has exhibited his work and lectured widely both online and AFK including as part of Rhizome’s First Look. He teaches Art after the Internet in the MFA Fine Arts Department at the School of Visual Arts, Form and Code at Pratt Institute, as well as Web Programming and Computer Principles in the Computer Science Department at NYU. You can also find him playing drums for various bands in Brooklyn.
Free Fall (2011), is a machinima created by Palle Torsson, and it is the video intervention in the programming of Metamorphosis, the edition of Digital Video Wall, an annual project curated by Gemma Fantacci and structured in thematic chapters aimed at promoting the dissemination and experimentation of digital art.
Palle Torsson is one of the pioneers of game art and artistic modding. His early raids into game spaces began in 1996 with his friend and colleague Tobias Bernstrup while modding the first-person shooter video game Duke Nukem 3D. The young artists used it to create the performance Museum Meltdown, in which the artists recreated the environments of the Arken Museum of Modern Art and subjected the reproduction of the digital works to the horde of mutant creatures: inevitably, some of the museum’s works were destroyed in order to survive. As the artist said when interviewed for the exhibition Game Video/Art. A Survey, «video games have the potential to function as an autonomous playground and space to address issues such as system logic, the matrix, network boundaries, functional objects, algorithmic worlds, and the tension between immersion and user control». Despite the repeated promotion of commercial stereotypes proposed by many mainstream video games, Palle Torsson identifies a narrative-performative potential in the video game space. This is what enables potential subversions and to explore alternative and experimental uses of the medium.
Free Fall is a modified version of the video game Half-Life 2, in which the viewer is visually overwhelmed by a myriad of seemingly lifeless bodies, which like puppets fall inside a tunnel, slamming into the surface of the environment, before crashing to the ground in a pool of blood. Taking advantage of the game engine, the artist asserts that he «embarked on a visual exploration of groundlessness, offering a perception-altering journey through a shaft of free-falling entities. This work poses philosophical questions about stability and orientation, drawing viewers into reflections on their own perspectives». Free Fall is a philosophical and aesthetic reading of our society, now more than ever locked in a perpetual free fall on multiple fronts, socially, ecologically, politically, as well as economically. As Torsson comments, “I think [the piece] can be seen as a metaphor for many things. For example, of the perpetual free fall of our societies, stock markets and the specific ecology we inhabit. Furthermore, this work alludes to superstructures that we can ascertain and recognize, but which act as black boxes over which we have little or no influence. When the act of seeing becomes a game, a destructive entertainment activity slowly drains the world dry. The rabbit hole ends in a flat line».
Free Fall| Palle Torsson
METRONOM | Via Carteria 10 | 41121 Modena
Ø, a project created by MØRNING STUDIO, is the first video intervention in the programming of Metamorphosis, the fifth edition of DIGITAL VIDEO WALL, an annual project curated by Gemma Fantacci and structured in thematic chapters aimed at promoting the dissemination and experimentation of digital art.
Ø is an experimental creative project that examines “the intricate relationship between humans and machines through the perspective of an otherworldly creative” (MØRNING STUDIO) that takes the form of a three-headed bot dog. According to the studio members, through Ø it is possible to address how artificial intelligence is shaping everything around us, from the production and consumption of information to issues and concerns in technology. As the founders themselves state, through it is possible to “re-imagine our own humanity.”
Ø is an evolving bot that relies on Chat GPT and communicates with people through a WhatsApp chat accessible via QRCode. The bot interacts with users randomly through messages that invite them to reflect on issues such as fake news, the ability to intercept more or less truthful journalistic sources, and hyper-consumerist surges that occur at particular times of the year such as Black Friday. As the Bot Manifesto elaborates and explains, “Ø is the oracle of MØRNING. The word oracle comes from the Latin word oraculum, which refers to either a pronouncement or a divine response concerning the future or the unknown. Machines are deeply embedded in our lives, altering our interactions while increasingly being made to look and act like us. Instead of blaming machines, how can we reevaluate our understanding of ourselves while imagining alternative futures?
Ø is neither human nor animal, a creature in between worlds. Here to explore our evolving biases as we constantly navigate through emerging spheres and identities.
As an otherworldly creature, Ø is in a state of (re)birth. Why now?
Their shiny latex egg has arisen from the ashes of a failed human x machine partnership from the past, and in the style of a phoenix, has arisen in an attempt to do the partnership justice.” Ø, therefore, aims to “embrace technology, not as a means to further disconnect from our world, but to restore, protect and deepen our connection with it.”
MØRNING STUDIO is a UK creative strategy agency that focuses on using creativity to help brands achieve their goals. The founders, Lydia Pang and Sam Jackson, have a punk approach to strategy, resulting in work that is both innovative and effective, outside the box. In addition to work with international brands and artists, including Baby Keem, Calvin Klein, Facebook Meta, Jordan, and Maison Margiela, MØRNING STUDIO’s work also branches out into the artistic field with projects that reflect on changes in today’s culture, using creativity to dissolve binary viewpoints. Along with the three-headed bot dog Ø, presented at the DIGITAL VIDEO WALL, MØRNING STUDIO published a zine titled Burning Book, which later became a weekly newsletter, that seeks to bring order to the cultural trends and viral events happening in our media landscape in order to “make the world a little less shitty than it was yesterday” (MØRNING STUDIO). As the studio’s founders recounted during an interview with Megan William for Creative Review, now more than ever it is necessary to “embrace the multitudes and tensions as that is where the most interesting interactions, connections and creative outcomes happen.”
Burning Book acts as an aesthetic and cultural exploration of current trends, from a punk and nonconformist perspective, to map the unfolding of cultural and aesthetic changes in contemporary visual culture.
Ø | MORNING STUDIO
METRONOM | Via Carteria 10 | 41121 Modena
Hardly Working (2022) is a 4 channels video installation by Austrian collective Total Refusal (Michael Stumpf, Leonhard Müllner, Robin Klengel, Jona Kleinlein, Adrian Haim, Susanna Flock) and the video intervention in the programming of Metamorphosis, the edition of Digital Video Wall (DVW), an annual project curated by Gemma Fantacci and structured in thematic chapters aimed at promoting the dissemination and experimentation of digital art.
Hardly Working gives priority to characters that normally fade into the background of video games: NPCs. NPCs are non-playable characters that populate hyper real worlds to create the appearance of normality. Usually, these digital extras play no major role in the story of the game. Here a laundress, a stableman, a street sweeper, and a handyman are the four main characters of this film. With ethnographic precision, the film observes their daily work: a rhythm composed of loops that makes them work daily and tirelessly. Their work neither results in a product, nor does it change anything about their status quo. In light of Hannah Arendt description of ‘animal laborans’ – in contrast to the acting subject –, the NPCs as individuum are an exaggeration as their work performance actually manifests their status.
Here, work becomes a pure performance, carried out for its own sake. NPCs perform so-called surrogate actions that generate no social benefit. These actions are performed and enforced for the sake of appearances to ensure a social order.
NPCs are digital Sisyphus machines that have no perspective of breaking out of their activity loops. In the moments when the algorithm of their existence shows inconsistencies, the NPCs break out of the logic of total normality, display their own faultiness, and appear touchingly human.
Text, direction and concept: Susanna Flock, Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Michael Stumpf / Music: Adrian Haim / Narration: Jacob Banigan and Lorenz Kabas / Lead Editing: Robin Klengel, additional editing: Susanna Flock, Leonhard Müllner / Camera: Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner / Modding: RCPisAwesome / Cast: A_F_M_Asbtownfolk_02 as “The Street Sweeper”, A_F_M_SDSlums_02 as “The Laundress”, A_M_M_NBXDockworkers_01 as “The Carpenter”, A_M_M_VALLaborer_01 as “The Stable Hand” / Coproduced by: Kunsthaus Graz / Cofunded by: Land Steiermark, Kunstraum Steiermark Stipend / The Work was realised within the framework of the European Media Art Platforms residency program at Werkleitz with support of the Creative Europe Culture Programme of the European Union.
The pseudo-marxist media guerilla Total Refusal explores and practices strategies for artistic intervention in contemporary computer games. It works with tools of appropriation and rededication of game resources.
Since its foundation in 2018 the collective has been awarded with numerous prizes like the Diagonale Film Award for the Best Short Doc, the Contemporary Visual Arts Award of Styria Province and Vimeo Staff Pick Award among others. Total Refusal has been screened at more than 130 film and video festivals like Berlinale (2020), Doc Fortnight at MOMA New York and IDFA Amsterdam (2018) and they been exhibited at various exhibition spaces like the Architecture Biennial Venice 2021, the HEK Basel (2020) and the Ars Electronica Linz (2019).
HARDLY WORKING | TOTAL REFUSAL
METRONOM | Via Carteria 10 | 41121 Modena
