“We’re becoming uncomfortably intimate with loss, and even death, through our screens – but this time, it’s real.” Timely piece by Tina Rivers Ryan on today’s Artforum.
No Fun on Artforum
March 31st, 2020
Vid of “What Has Been Seen” at Fondation Phi
March 15th, 2020
Today is the last day of our solo at Fondation Phi pour l’art contemporain, in Montreal. To fight sadness here’s a video in which curator Erandy Vergara (shout-out!) talks about the show.
Pics of “What Has Been Seen” at Fondation Phi
December 19th, 2019
Just posted the documentation of our solo at the Fondation Phi pour l’art contemporain, in Montreal, curated by Erandy Vergara. It’s our largest show ever, with works made in the last 10 years. The title refers to the “What Has Been Seen Cannot Be Unseen” meme, an internet axiom which states that repulsive, disturbing, or horrific sights can never be erased from memory once they have been seen…
In the 90s we were obsessed with visibility, traffic logs, reaching an ever larger audience, but with the passing of time, and the advent of internet 2.0, we became more and more interested in the opposite: invisibility and disappearance, erasing data, staying anonymous, ‘unseeing’, microwaving hard-drives…
Up till March 15, 2020!
Pics by Melania Dalle Grave for DSL Studio
“Personal Photographs October 2016” at Careof, Milan
November 2nd, 2019
“Personal Photographs October 2016” (2019) is a network of cable trays around and throughout the exhibition site of Careof, Milan, part of our ongoing show “My Little Big Data”. All the photos we shot in October 2016 – 145 files – are in constant circulation within the cables. Images without viewers, yet always there. Like most images nowadays. These cable trays, extending for 50 meters and holding 500 meters of cables, represent an infrastructure disposed toward invisibility, made conspicuously present within this former industrial site. In navigating real space and contending with pre-existing structures, they mirror the assimilation of the internet’s operations into everyday life.
Pics by Delfino Sisto Legnani and Melania Dalle Grave.
“My Little Big Data” video essay
October 20th, 2019
“My Little Big Data” is a video essay, part of our ongoing show at Careof, Milan. This 24 mins video is the result of a year long collaboration with data investigator Vladan Joler, to whom we gave 13 years of our private email matadata and several months of browsing history. Like most people, we use the Internet in nearly every aspect or our lives, so to see these data is to experience what Internet Service Providers, government agencies, internet giants and data dealers are seeing. This is the point of view from the Panopticon tower, where a centralized hub of information maintains records of our every move. Like the famous portal in Spike Jonze’s movie led to John Malkovich’s head, this video is a portal into our minds.
Pics by Delfino Sisto Legnani and Melania Dalle Grave.
“My Little Big Data” at Careof, Milan
September 28th, 2019
“My Little Big Data”, our ongoing show at Careof, Milan, is a DIY investigation into personal data analysis to create our “portrait” with metadata extracted from 70,000 emails and several months of our browsing history. The result forms a large installation comprised of 500 meters of colored cables, “psychographics” printed inside home office furniture, a carpet and a video essay. Till Nov 10, come visit!
Curated by Martina Angelotti and Stefano Raimondi and promoted by The Blank Contemporary Art and Italian Council.
Pics by Delfino Sisto Legnani and Melania Dalle Grave.
“Freedom” at MAAT museum
September 20th, 2019
Our work Freedom – bottom right – installed in Lisbon’s MAAT museum. Especially proud of the position as it’s right by Harun Farocki’s Serious Games – top left in the photo – one of our all time favorite works.
Code of “Personal Photographs” piece
June 20th, 2019
The code that makes our piece “Personal Photographs” run was written with our amazing collaborator David Huerta. It’s a self-contained network between two Raspberry Pis, which copy images to each other, forever. The code is available here: https://github.com/huertanix/pi2pi
“Ceiling Cat” at Team Gallery
June 11th, 2019
Somewhere in “Data Doubles”, our ongoing exhibition at Team Gallery, “Ceiling Cat” is watching you. This tiny sculpture is a taxidermy cat peeking through a hole in the ceiling, a direct interpretation of the meme “Ceiling Cat”, which surged in popularity from 2006 onwards concomitant with the #lolcat phenomena. The all-seeing feline had many online lives as an internet meme, but here the image assumes a life of its own; a copy of a copy that reifies themes of surveillance and control in a form equal parts cute and creepy. What the sculpture hints at, with disquieting absurdity, is the relationship between source, double, and an emergent third phase whose origin is a thicket of copies.
“Riccardo Uncut” at Team Gallery
June 5th, 2019
For “Data Doubles” on view Team Gallery, Los Angeles, we are showing for the fist time “Riccardo Uncut”. In October 2017, we posted an open call online: individuals could apply to sell their entire personal archive of smartphone photos for $1,000. The resulting work is a 87 minutes slideshow comprising some 3,000 images and videos; cumulatively, the photos describe the shift accelerated by the mass diffusion of social media and smartphones that fundamentally changed how images are made, shared, and consumed, and by extension the nature of the images themselves.
“Riccardo Uncut” has been commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art and can be seen in its entirety on the museum’s website.