A View from Above at OGR Torino
... and other things on the way
(⊙_⊙) Following my first collaboration with EXPOSED in November 2023, I had the honor to co-curate, with Salvatore Vitale and Samuele Piazza, a new group exhibition for the upcoming first edition of the festival, that will take place in Turin from May 2 to June 2, 2024. Titled A View from Above, the exhibition explores vertical perspective as a new scopic regime, through works by James Bridle, Laura Cinti, Mario Giacomelli (above: Paesaggi, anni ’60, Stampa ai sali d’argento, 38,7 x 29,4 cm, Courtesy Collezione Massimo Prelz Oltramonti © Eredi Mario Giacomelli), Mishka Henner, Hiwa K, Tabita Rezaire, Evan Roth, Susan Schuppli, Tomas Van Houtryve. Check it out at OGR Torino in the coming weeks!
In recent years the view from above, a once exceptional point of view reserved to people in power and inhuman agents like birds, angels and gods, has become widespread and accessible. In 2011, artist and writer Hito Steyerl introduced the concept of “vertical perspective” to address the “departure of a stable paradigm of orientation”, and to describe what can be seen, to all effects, as the emergence of a new scopic regime.
By replacing the stable horizon and the role played by linear perspective along modernity, vertical perspective established “a new visual normality”, firmly rooted in the tools of surveillance and warfare. First perceived as a liberation and a new way of seeing, vertical perspective loses its romantic grip to become identified with the point of view of the power that kills and controls when satellites and drones enter the equation. Always the outcome of a constructed, machine-aided experience of the world, the view from above delocalizes and ultimately de-humanizes the gaze, allowing a God’s eye view on reality not only in terms of position, but also in the way it captures additional information and data; it looks through reality instead of sticking to its surface, and generates “total images” that are both and neither images and maps, representations and visualizations blurring the difference between place and space.
By adopting vertical perspective as its main point of view, A View From Above is a group exhibition curated by Domenico Quaranta, Salvatore Vitale and Samuele Piazza for EXPOSED Torino Photo Festival. Presented at OGR Torino, the exhibition explores the way in which our look on landscapes through the camera eye has changed along the last decades, and how this shift in scopic regimes affected the way we control, design and shape the environment we live in.
༘˚⋆𐙚｡⋆𖦹.✧˚ Along 2023, I had the pleasure to collaborate with a brave new organization, on a mission to address the troubled relationship between humans and technologies. Fondazione Spazio Vitale opened in Verona in October 2023 with the solo show Theo Triantafyllidis: Sisyphean Cycles, and after a few months’ break, will reopen at the end of May with the spaces doubled and a group exhibition I am curating, labeled Per Speculum. Intelligence and its Double.
The show will remain on display until June 29 in the spaces of Via San Vitale 5 to offer a critical reflection on Artificial Intelligence (AI). With the help of a massive media hype, over the past year AI has taken center stage, arousing as much enthusiasm as fears. Both the enthusiasm and the fears have been skillfully fueled and driven by the AI’s makers, who on various occasions have intervened publicly to remark on the inevitability of its acceleration, the impossibility of controlling and harnessing its development, the impenetrability of its algorithms, the imminence of its evolution into a fully self-aware intelligence, and the risk that it may lead to the extinction of humankind. Are we to believe these monsters? Or rather, should we consider them a functional weapon of mass distraction to divert our gaze from the far more concrete and real limitations and risks of the current form of AI? Through a selection of works by Italian and international artists, Per Speculum. Intelligence and its Double counters these apocalyptic visions with a reflection on artificial intelligence as a mirror of humanity, an existential technology that brings us to focus on our own identity and limitations, to reflect on what defines intelligence and consciousness, to question our own anthropocentrism and peer into our own destiny.
‧₊˚✩彡 In my latest newsletter in January, I invited artists to submit images for a color ePaper screen I had the chance to have on my studio wall, in a peer-to-peer exchange in which I get a new visual companion and they get my crappy photo documentation of the picture on screen. 20 artists responded so far - 𖦹 𓆩♡𓆪 to Eva and Franco Mattes, Sophie Kahn, Romeo Traversa, Julieta Gil, Ronny Faber Dahl, Federica Di Pietrantonio, Pier Giorgio De Pinto, Stéphane Mroczkowski, Marco Cadioli, Alessandro Capozzo, Valerio Veneruso, Luca Napoli, Sabrina Melis, Koebane, Nicoleta Mures, Marco Curiale, Pier Alfeo, Marco Strappato, Emiliano Zucchini, Margherita Citi. Wanna be the next one? Please check out these specifications and drop me a line!
｡°(°.◜ᯅ◝°)°｡The cutie pictured above is the tiny catalogue of the great Malta Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, hosting a project by Matthew Attard. I had the pleasure to write a few lines for it, focusing on the limits of knowledge and on what navigation and technology have in common.
In other news, I contributed with a short comment on Casey Reas’ software work to the massive On NFTs, edited by Robert Alice and published by Taschen; and with a long essay on Ryder Ripps’ appropriation art to the upcoming NFTs, Creativity and the Law. Within and Beyond Copyright, published by Routledge.
🇮🇹 Il critico e curatore Alberto Fiz mi ha rivolto alcune domande su arte digitale e mercato per un’inchiesta poi pubblicata sul Giornale dell’arte. Qui trovate il dialogo integrale.