Guido Segni, creator of Verba Volant Scripta Manent, a special project now to be seen on the Arshake banner, has just launched the online platform Greencube.gallery. This platform and its programme is currently managed by the TW1 collective (Matìas Ezequiel Reyes, Lorenzo Fiduccia, Giacomo Ghiri, Cesare Olivieri and Kevin Piccioli).
TW1 launched Your Content is Here on 1 November, a project and a Pavilion realized for The Wrong (Biennale), a biennale entirely dedicated to digital culture, a decentralised art biennale organised since 2013 by its founder, David Quiles Guilló, governed by The Wrong Council, and divided into online and offline locations around the world. The TW1 Pavilion plays with the deconstruction of meaning in the digital era, moving between the real and the virtual.
A protest without any clear objective organised through a series of short videoclips with which different authors, including Marco Cadioli and Luca Leggero, reflect on art and communication. This consists of taking up traditional symbolic systems, transforming them into code and, by hybridising their meaning, diluting them with a green background – a colour used in cinema and video to simulate ‘other realities’. The project is designed with great coherence, giving voice to diverse artists, each revealing one of the many facets of today’s digital culture.
Each work is rich with meaning, allusions and references, starting with the project’s overall title. The Pavilion and project Your Content is Here has been designed to be simple and accessible – a must-see Pavilion in a richly constructed Biennale which has to be patiently visited, even requiring several days. Each Pavillon of the Biennale delves into the different facets of digital culture, the fusion of real and virtual, the ubiquity of digital technologies (Moving Sensing) moving between art and celebrity in the era of social networks.
With this in mind, Internet Fame, the Pavilion curated by the Clusterduck collective (Aria Mag, Franziska von Guten & Noel Nicolaus), “intends to explore these complex interconnections, following the questions raised by the shifting relationship between establishment and subcultures, new and old hierarchies, declining and emerging forms of power and counter-power”. Guido Segni can also be seen in this Pavilion as part of the historic duo Les Liens Invisibile (Clemente Pestelli, alias Guido Segni, and Jonatan Quintini) here engaged in satirising the competition for popularity on Instagram with the imaginary app Inflagram.
The conceptual pioneer Gregory Chatonsky can be found here with his work Perfect Skin II, an extension of skin, a metaphorical representation of the real foil that takes shape only on the surface, in that which appears. Pavilions specifically orientated towards online art have not been neglected, such as the Pavilion FFF, curated by the U-rss Team (Marc Veyrat & Franck Soudan), conceived as social sculpture (taking form through activity on Facebook). The Off Site Project (Pita Arreola and Elliott Burns) takes us, on the other hand, inside the studio of an artist, playing on the aesthetics of the Apple interface with an exhibition that appears as one screen inside another screen.
After this there is a single project, the Pavilion After On Kawara, a work-web by the artist and theorist Patrich Lichty reflecting on the ephemeral nature of the Internet. On Kawara is a conceptual artist known for his Date Paintings who, in the course of 50 years, produced over 3,000 paintings. After On Kawara can only be found online to underline the ephemeral nature of the Internet. The Pavilion Net Art for Storage also shows Lichty’s work, curated by Ben Grosser, where several digital works are closed in a virtual warehouse, a zip file which only The Wrong archive manager and director can access.
The convergence of art, science, technology and politics returns to the Pavilion Homeostase, hosted in a physical location at the São Paulo Cultural Centre in Brazil with the participation of several artists, such as the pioneer of Internet culture Yoshi Sodeoka and Lorna Mills. There is also the Italian Salvatore Iaconesi who, with Oriana Persico and in the name of the project Art is Open Source, has created revolutionary works and theories, often revealed as possible approaches to urban developments. Lastly, there is an artist from the artistic mainstream, Olafur Eliasson, who has always been engaged in experimental and interdisciplinary research. In the Pavilion Empty Vessels, Vulnerable Bodies, various body representations and corporeal embodiments can be found, such as Gonzo, the protagonist of the 4 Gif by BodySnatchers, a digital avatar in which the artist (Gabriele Maruotti) expresses his approach to dreams and nightmares of modern alienation. Gonzo’s profile represents the artist’s vision (and the emotive atmosphere) of a future humanity, where the organic and inorganic merge into one.
To conclude, there is a lot to discover and many more Pavilions to see. Once the feeling of overcrowding produced by the interface text subsides – a very neat and linear graphic layout that acts as guidance to each Pavilion through short abstracts which never lose sight of the larger overview – the cancelled words can be explored. This is the materialisation of the hyper-textual content that the contemporary thinker Timothy Morton (Ecology without Nature) compares to the effect of shadow in art and silence in music.
The Wrong (Biennale), 2017 | November 1, 2017 – January 31, 2018
images: (cover 1) Marco Cadioli, «Accelerate», 2017, online project for the Pavilion «Your Content Is Here», The Wrong Biennale, 2017-2018 (2) Pavilion «your contenti s here», curated by TW1 hosted by Green.cube, screen shot, The Wrong Biennale, 2017-2018 (3) Luca Leggero, «Your Protest Is My Propriety, online project for the Pavilion «Your Content Is Here», The Wrong Biennale, 2017-2018 (4) Giacomo Verde, «Art is Useless», online project for the Pavilion «Your Content Is Here», The Wrong Biennale, 2017-2018 (5) Pauline Rogues, online project for the Pavilion «Internet Fame», The Wrong Biennale, 2017-2018 (6) Gregory Chatonsky, «Perfect Skin II», online project for the Pavilion «Internet Fame», The Wrong Biennale, 2017-2018 (7) «Homeostase», Pavilion realized for The Wrong Biennale, 2017-2018, exhibition view (8) Bodysnatcher, one of four gifs realized for the Pavilion «Empty Vessels, Vulnerable Bodies», The Wrong Biennale, 2017-2018.
