Curating art, narrating reality.
A place where creativity and research meet.
Here are our projects:
Overpopulation is the video presented within the program RABBIT HOLE,edition of DIGITAL VIDEO WALL, an annual project structured in thematic chapters, aimed at promoting the dissemination and experimentation of digital art.
Overpopulation is part of a larger ever-expanding corpus entitled SND. An Interactive Story Game (2020-ongoing). It consists of the homepage, titled You Are Here, which depicts various apocalyptic scenarios, and multiple still growing subpages, which show what could come after the end of the world. The work selected for the Digital Video Wall fits into this body of work by depicting a dystopian future in which the constant growth of the Earth’s population has inevitably led to its gradual extinction. The HTML page on which the work is hosted opens with a series of images depicting beaches in different parts of the world packed with people, almost as if to create a single organic mass moving in synchrony, like thousands of ants in an anthill. As we scroll through the page, the marine setting gives way to images depicting different types of demonstrations, from religious ones taking place in India, to protests, to sporting events taking place in stadiums. The focus shifts from population to cities, architectural organisms at the point of collapse, which can no longer accommodate their citizens, who are crammed into dwellings reminiscent of the anthill houses of Hong Kong, and finally to a future in which food resources will also become scarce, both because of the huge quantity of waste produced and because of the impossibility of sustaining a production that would feed billions and billions of people on earth. Overpopulation is a photographic and filmic collage in which images alternate with extracts from some of the most popular films released in recent years, such as Ready Player One (2018), through science fiction classics like The Fifth Element (1997), to cult series like South Park (1998-2022).
Sara Bezovšek’s works are like a series of matryoshkas: images, words, videos, links, can lead to as many pages or online contents, to the extent that her works can literally be defined as a rabbit hole, a deep dive into the innermost meanders of the Internet and pop culture. In this layering of different media and languages, numerous narrative lines branch off, allowing the viewer to freely follow them to create a variety of associations, either related to the acknowledgement of each individual content, or in relation to the overall story. The focus of her raids on pop culture is to be found in an apocalyptic vision regarding humanity’s fate. Sara Bezovšek imagines disastrous situations in the style of The Day After Tomorrow by organizing the material collected online, both visually and thematically, into a series of freely explorable possible futures.
Sara Bezovšek is a visual artist working in new media, experimental film and graphic design. Her artistic practice involves a meticulous research and archiving process, which she then collapses into interactive visual experiences through specially created Internet pages. Sara intercepts the content of mainstream culture that populates our visual landscape, such as advertisements, TV programmes, films, TV series, internet memes, GIFs, music videos, posts, and much more, to build digital collages that can be navigated over and over again: her interactive web pages are endless scrolls in which the artist depicts a contemporary horror show, in which climate change, overpopulation, and global crises threaten the future of humanity.
Overpopulation| SARA BEZOVSEK
METRONOM | Via Carteria 10 | 41121 Modena
Stealing Ur Feelings is the video presented within the program RABBIT HOLE,edition of DIGITAL VIDEO WALL, an annual project structured in thematic chapters, aimed at promoting the dissemination and experimentation of digital art.
In 2019, Noah Levenson made Stealing Ur Feelings, described by the artist as «a deep learning-based AR experience that analyzes facial reactions to reveal the dangers of Big Tech’s emotional surveillance programs», with support from the Mozilla Foundation. The video work, which is about 6 minutes long, was awarded at the Tribeca Film Festival and exhibited at the Tate Modern, as well as being further discussed in several other contexts, such as at MIT and the Museum of the Moving Image. Levenson shows how companies are using increasingly refined technologies to decode users’ emotional states, what they feel disdain for or interest in, and use those indicators to create an emotional profile of people. Using technologies related to face tracking, combined with those related to eye tracking and mouth tracking to pick up microexpressions on our faces, it is possible to create databases dedicated to profiling users to figure out what content they are most interested in and train algorithms to feed users the same kind of information or entertainment content. A constant loop of the same content over and over. Companies such as Snapchat and Instagram, which make extensive use of facial filters to allow users to share their emotions and feelings, use such information and exploit (legally) technologies that are able to access users’ cameras (used to apply facial filters) to track their behaviors and interests.
Levenson is an American programmer and artist whose work particularly focuses on the study of artificial intelligence and the role AI has on everyday life, from facial recognition technologies to its use to target and monitor online consumer activities. Levenson’s latest research revolves around the problem of “decentralization,” or, as he puts it, “the challenge of efficiently connecting users to resources when they don’t quite know what they are looking for.” Noah Levenson’s field of research is decidedly heterogeneous: in addition to the project Stealing Ur Feelings, he has also worked in the video game industry, specifically with Nintendo, taking part in the development of collision dynamics for Mario Kart Live, made an interactive film titled Weird Box, which magically transforms any public Instagram account into the reason for a couple’s bizarre breakup, developed a fake app to poke fun at “bro culture,” as well as addressed technology at various levels for several news outlets and as a guest lecturer at universities such as NYU.
Stealing Ur Feelings| Noah Levenson
METRONOM | Via Carteria 10 | 41121 Modena
Ekpyrosís is the video featured in RABBIT HOLE, edition of DIGITAL VIDEO WALL, an annual project divided into thematic chapters, aimed at promoting the dissemination and experimentation of digital art.
For the Digital Video Wall, Léa Porré presents Ekpyrosís, also related to her worldbuilding practice. The artist uses the technique of reenactment to stage historical events and rituals that may or may not have happened, using computer-generated sets. The work offers a critical reinterpretation of the French monarchy through a cyclical vision of History, “where its impossible and transhistorical encounters collapse human and deep time,” as the artist herself states. The title of the work comes from the Greek word ekpýrosis, from ek “out” + pýros, “fire,” i.e., “[exited] out of the fire“), which in Greek philosophy indicates a cyclical destruction of the universe due to a great fire, a cosmic fire, from which subsequently everything should be reborn. The term, therefore, indicates a process of renewal following an act of destruction.
The fifth screening will feature the work of Léa Porré, Ekpyrosís (2021, VIDEO, MP4). Porré’s artistic practice is rooted in the concept of world-building, which involves the construction of virtual worlds that are more or less fictitious and close to our reality thanks to different types of digital technologies, especially game engines, i.e. graphic engines usually used to make video games. In his case, Porré builds 3D worlds through which she “delves into her ancestral memories,” interweaving micro narrative stories and mythological motifs. Her works constitute “memory palaces,” as the artist herself calls them, through which she analyzes the past and present, and tries to predict the future. Léa Porré makes extensive use of symbols and archetypes to dispel the boundaries that divide reality from fiction in search of alternative narrative outlines. Through her works, Léa Porré imagines alternative scenarios through which she envisions rewriting the historical process of events that really happened, such as the French Revolution, and makes extensive use of imagery related to “ruin porn,” very popular on platforms such as Instagram, which favours images depicting ruined buildings, decaying landscapes, resulting on one hand in a sense of sadness and melancholy for a time now past, and on the other in fascination with a past that we attempt to travel through from the fragments left behind. Lea Porré conceives of her role as an artist as that of an archaeologist who “re-enacts artifacts and rituals, lost or imagined, in which to recreate alternative realities,” as she explains during an interview for ITSLIQUID, and continues, “my artistic practice is based on an investigation of our collective conscious and unconscious, which aims to go beyond the dichotomies of Good and Evil, Sacred and Profane.”
Ekpyrosis| Léa Porré
METRONOM | Via Carteria 10 | 41121 Modena
@RealSelfCindy is the video presented within the program RABBIT HOLE,edition of DIGITAL VIDEO WALL, an annual project structured in thematic chapters, aimed at promoting the dissemination and experimentation of digital art.
Will be featured the work of Katie Torn,@RealSelfCindy (2016, VIDEO, MP4). Torn’s practice can be described as an assemblage of elements available online and digital waste material that, in her works, are transformed into virtually simulated scenes from the debris of the internet and consumer culture. The artist uses computer graphics and 3D videos to shape visual patchworks that encapsulate glimpses of Internet culture. Her visual collages recall surrealist oneiric imagery, in which organic and synthetic matter, human, plants and animal bodies combine to create new realities and new individual subjects. In her works we find mini horses from My Little Pony, Barbies and varied dolls, illustrations reminiscent of Fornasetti’s faces, all mixed and mingled with digital assets and animations that make Katie Torn’s works a milieu of media and subjects. As the artist herself states about her practice, «My work offers a vision of a new kind of ‘natural’ substance that originates in the virtual and blends organic and synthetic materials». Her imaginary landscapes open the doors to a new kind of individuality, which unfolds in the depths of the many digital platforms we inhabit. Her artistic investigation reflects on the concept of digital identity, and her personal portraits apply Instagram-like filters to her face and body, generating a thousand ever-changing faces, with eyes, mouths noses, breasts, hair, originating from an identity jigsaw puzzle.
Katie Torn also reflects on contemporary capitalist culture by including in her installations “leftovers of the capitalist world,” garbage, plumbing pipes, fragments of advertisements, and technological waste in a visual chaos that investigates the environmental drift we have arrived at but also the human impulse to accumulate, inside and outside our digital worlds.
@RealSelfCindy is a series of 6 videos commissioned by DAATA Editions in 2016 in which the artist examines her body and persona through a series of filters that deform her face and body by adding plant details such as flowers, plants, wings, exotic fruits, in an almost carnivalesque portrait that is very reminiscent of the decompositions of cubist subjects. Katie Torn experiments with her different personalities in front of the camera, just like when we play with Instagram filters to change our features. In this enchanting universe where reality and virtuality meet, the human subject and their avatar immerse themselves in a visual space-time continuum to trace the boundaries of a personality spread across different but at the same time complementary digital platforms. The facial filters Katie Torn applies to herself underscore the potential of the self to multiply without limits to “play with one’s identity and try on new ones,” as Sherry Turkle puts it.
@Realselfcindy| Katie Torn
METRONOM | Via Carteria 10 | 41121 Modena
Sleep Made Simple (2019) is the video presented within the program RABBIT HOLE curate by Gemma Fantacci. DIGITAL VIDEO WALL is an annual project structured in thematic chapters, aimed at promoting the dissemination and experimentation of digital art, visible at METRONOM, Modena (IT).
Sleep Made Simple consists of a series of seven individual videos that, as the artist himself explains, «function as a succession of adverts for a fictitious unnamed company that promotes wellness and meditation, forewarning of the future of capitalism, digital healthcare and surveillance». The work appropriates the distinctive imagery of Instagram and its stories, as well as the isometric aesthetic of infographics and the lateral scrolling common to the live news feeds. Given the nature of the Digital Video Wall, the work is soundless, but in its original conception, it features an audio track reminiscent of the relaxation videos popular on YouTube and, at the same time, a male voice reads a series of overlay texts in a tone that resembles that of guided meditation apps. Bob Bicknell-Knight creates a series of fictitious advertisements in which the viewer is invited to be guided by the services offered by this fictitious company for the improvement of one’s body and mental health. The work reflects on the growing influence that apps, digital services and smartwatches designed to monitor an individual’s mental and physical health have on our society and how companies use our data for the development of increasingly targeted advertisements and services. Our well-being has now become a commodity subject to capitalist logics, broken down into a series of tasks and activities (such as taking a certain number of steps per day) that can be tracked to quantify our level of physical and mental well-being. Each individual is thus transformed into a fistful of data at the service of big tech companies as they develop new and increasingly sophisticated services to maximize their profits. Sleep Made Simple was commissioned by Daata Edition for the Bass Art Museum in Miami.
The second screening features the work of Bob Bicknell-Knight, Sleep Made Simple (2019, VIDEO, MP4). Bicknell-Night is a British multidisciplinary artist who works with a plethora of different media, ranging from video games, video, and painting, to name a few, and his artistic practice extends through writing and curating as well. His area of inquiry focuses on the critical examination of contemporary technologies, their use in today’s society and the effects they have on it.
Sleep Made Simple| BOB BICKNELL-KNIGHT
METRONOM|Via Carteria 10 | 41121 Modena
Just Another Day at the Office (2021) is the video presented within the program RABBIT HOLE curate by Gemma Fantacci. DIGITAL VIDEO WALL is an annual project structured in thematic chapters, aimed at promoting the dissemination and experimentation of digital art.
Just Another Day at the Office is a “rotating window on the modern workplace,” as the artist himself calls it, created as an NFT and running for two minutes, the time it takes, according to DenBoer, to appreciate all the details in the scene. In this loop, the viewer’s gaze is catalyzed at the intersection of four cubicles – those micro spaces typical of American offices and often recurring in movies and TV series in which the office or the corporate life is the main setting, and each of them is inhabited by a character totally out of his or her mind, a stereotype of the “office life” taken to the extreme. In Just Another Day at the Office, chaos prevails: in one cubicle there is the stereotypical office creep, almost totally naked, using the photocopier to morbidly photocopy his private parts; in another there seems to be a security manager, or a wild gamer wearing a virtual reality visor, dancing on the DANCE DANCE video game platform and plugged into a gaming PC; there is also the neat freak, perhaps a typical Karen, with a neat, strictly pink desk, post-it notes everywhere so she doesn’t forget the slightest detail, who cares about being celebrated by the entire office on her birthday but at the same time smashes her face against the birthday cake. Perhaps an attack of office burnout? Finally, the absurd of the absurd: a cubicle inhabited by a toilet with an alien-like tentacle emerging from the bottom and lots of toilet paper rolls scattered around it. These 4 microcosms are surrounded by boxes, a dead mouse, golf clubs, crumpled cups, a keg of beer, all those clichés that are part of the office life – the show The Office is a striking example – and its stereotypes, and that in DenBoer’s work are merged together in a grotesque, hilarious, extreme abyss that is endlessly repeated. Even the soundtrack that accompanies the work is an electronic loop that enhances the irreverence of a narrative that mirrors an everyday life that seems to have no way out: the theme of office life has spawned a multitude of memes that, especially after the pandemic, have underscored the problematic nature of toxic, harassing, even exasperating dynamics. A well-established vicious cycle from which we attempt to escape.
The first screening features the work of Nick DenBoer, Just Another Day at the Office (2021, VIDEO, MP4). DenBoer is a Canadian video artist, director, editor, VFX artist, remixer, and music producer, with a unique, often irreverent and grotesque visual style, who uses both video and a vast plethora of visual effects to create audiovisual contents that employ remix and appropriation techniques to create surreal, absurd, off-kilter scenes. The aesthetic of Nick DenBoer, aka Smearballs, draws from numerous influences, primarily the remix culture specific to the Internet, but also pop and video game culture, and is marked by a scratchy, acidic, strange, even puzzling style. DenBoer’s artistic production throws in the face of the viewer the distortions of contemporary society and the exaggerated modes of media consumption in an utterly ironic, twisted, strange, uncanny key, as Mark Tribe would say. His videos are Frankensteinian creatures, a complex assemblage of found footage, video, photography, 3D models, textures, music, and sound fx, wherewith he maps how popular culture moves between memes, shorts, trends, Internet phenomena, and clichés, in a surgically perfect manner.
Just Another Day At The Office| Nick Denboer
METRONOM| Via Carteria 10 | 41121 Modena
