Chiara Passa. «Liquid Architecture» and Live Architecture
Elena Giulia Rossi
Fourth Dimension banner is the project that Italian artist Chiara Passa has conceived as a site-specific for the Arshake banner, a continuation of Live Architectures series of digital and interactive installations created over time in a multi-faceted production developed to «reconsider the architecture of outer and indoor areas as an alive and vibrant entity». This is one of the many forms in which takes shape the «Liquid Architecture» of cyberspace, as Marcos Novak had anticipated in the early 1990s; «metamorphic» architecture made up of «fluctuating relations of abstract elements»[1], architecture which tends towards music.
Chiara Passa has always analysed changes in liquid space through a variety of techniques, technologies and devices. Animation, video, installations, net art, interactive projects and video-mapping all become instruments of research targeted at the different ways space is configured and how it is generated from electronic language, from the interaction with humans to the way they blend and melt together at a given point.
Widget Art Gallery (2009-ongoing) displays how her research has recently come to the point of compressing virtual and physical space into a single creative and expositional environment located in portable devices «situated» in the same «widget» application with which it has been programmed. Software language becomes structure while the figure of the author dissolves into the ubiquitous identity of artist, curator and collector. A «new way to make space and place the work in the environment»[2] is working within the portable device and supervised by the artist and this time also coinciding with the work itself.
Her Live Architectures act as if they were «alive»; «..they move beyond their own functionality», conditioned by human intervention called to determine the different geometric configuration and structure. An example of this is the voice of the spectators which alters the architecture in Speaking at the Wall (2008) and the movement of these elements which are recorded and translated into the geometric coordinates that determine the space of Meta Motus (2010). We are referring to «super places», a definition that had made its way into Chiara Passa’s vocabulary as far back as 2001, when a brief holographic animation project was titled Super Place Project. Her artistic pursuit has been evolving and maturing ever since through a series of transformations that alternate among different types of videos: generative, video-mapping, interactive and performative installations. Humans are always present – even when they do not appear. The body is a single entity with space, complementing it «with its habits, expectations and emotions» [3]
Fourth Dimension Banner penetrates the architecture of the liminal area of the interface, a thin film or technological skin that (like natural skin) has surpassed its role as boundary between the inner and outer world. Now, «the technological and virtual imaginary is no longer produced within the psyche but from the outside, above and inside the screen.» [4]
We are entering the interface to begin a voyage that is as dreamy as it is real – where worlds open the doors to other worlds and where «synthetic shapes become design, structure, architecture and reality» (C.Passa).
One’s gaze is now directed to the interior of metaphoric architecture and to the threshold leading to the virtual – nowadays anything but clearly distinct from reality if not on a representational level. The interface is revealed as a «functional and operative device with no residue, incrustation or noise».[5]
In the case of Chiara Passa, sound has often been a fundamental element for the «materialization» of her «super places». In Fourth Dimension Banner, the artist lets silence suggest the nature of the liminal zone being crossed – «a virtual window that changes the materiality of built space, adding new apertures that dramatically alter our conception of space and of time». [6]
Buon Voyage!
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[1] Marcos Novak, Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace, in Cyberspace First Steps, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991
[2] A. Tolve, Exposition of the Exposition, arshake publishing, e-book, 2013
[3] R. Diodato, Estetica del Virtuale, (Aesthetics of the Virtual)Bruno Mondadori Publishing, Milan 2005, page 129
[4] Derrick de Kerkhove, Dall’alfabeto ad Internet, L’homme «littéré»: alfabetizzazione, cultura, tecnologia, (From the Alphabet to Internet, L’homme “littéré”: literacy, culture, technology) Mimesis Publishing, Postumani Series, page167
[5] E. Quinz, Interface World. Mutazioni della scena: dal testo all’ambiente, (Interface World. Mutations of the Scene: from the text to the environment) in A. Menicacci, E. Quinz (edited by), La scena digitale (The Digital Scene) Marsilio Publishing, Venice 2001, pages 328-329 quoted in R. Diodato, Ibid., page 139.
[6] Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window. From Alberti to Microsoft, The MIT Press 2006, intro. page 1
