In an essay published in 1925 in the third issue of “The Surrealist Revolution”, official organ of said movement, Louis Aragon, in exploring photography and cinema, claimed that those techniques, which were modern at the time, were also the best for expressing contemporary sensibility. We can agree that while today’s new technologies have transformed our way of life as well as our way of seeing and communicating, artistic creations have transformed the deluge of images and information to reconstruct perceptible universes in our era.
From the very get-go, Marina Abramović opted to use her own body as the object of her art, testing the limits of mental and physical endurance. Her performances and video installations aim at exploring the capabilities and boundaries of resistance: the body is the object and subject of her studies, it’s used as a tool to convey a message to the viewers, to communicate and absorb energy. Thus, the artist’s body is a metaphor and symbol of various realities and ethics.
Marina Abramović, recognized as one of the leading international practitioners of performance art, has always documented her performances throughout the years via videos and photographs. For Digital Life 2, Abramović will present a photo mural from her 2004 performance in Rome, The Biography.
Winner of the Ars Electronica Golden Nica award for Digital Music and Sound Art, the installation rheo: 5 horizons by Ryoichi Kurokawa could be defined as a temporal audiovisual sculpture which runs on an 8-minute loop. Composed of five vertical monitors and five speakers, rheo: 5 horizons fuses HD video footage of landscapes and digitally generated materials. Kurokawa’s distinctive feature is the transfiguration and fusion of images and real sounds, which act a representation of how the brain and man’s memory reconstruct sensory perceptions. Hence the title Rheo, inspired by the words Panta Rei or Rhei (everything flows) of Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus who claimed you can never step into the same river twice: like a perceptive flow, the chaotic flow of Rheo’s images and sounds merge into an ambiguous and mutable experience from which “more realistic” images emerge, as if from an unconscious memory.
Visual artist, photographer, and designer, Giuseppe La Spada organized a flash mob this year in Milan with 600 people who gave shape to an enormous human tree, clear confirmation of the artist’s commitment to environmental causes. He was born in Sicily but has long resided in Lombardy’s capital city. He entered the artistic spotlight thanks to his collaborations with Sakamoto and still today, he’s the only Italian who has won a Webby Awards, the Internet's highest honor. Afleur, a video installation which also became a photo book, touches on a taboo topic in contemporary art: Love, with a capital L. As La Spada himself says: «If love were a flower, would it be made of paper or cloth? These are the questions Afleur raises». Nevertheless, no story unravels on the screen.