The PhotoPhore confirms its long-lasting collaboration with ADAF – Athens Digital Art Festival, presenting the curated video-art selection “Digital Settlement: Light becomes Data“, included in the 2020 edition of the festival.
For its 16th edition of 2020 titled Technotribalism, ADAF has decided to present its program also online. One exclusively online edition, the first one in Greece, titled ADAF ONLINE | Technotribalism, will take place from the 10 of July till 10 of September and will be accessible to everyone through the internet at online.adaf.gr.
Included in the program, the video-art exhibition “Digital Settlement: Lights becomes Data” curated by The PhotoPhore, will present the works by Gloria López-Cleries & Sive Hamilton Helle, Estela Oliva, Mike Pelletier, Cornel Swoboda, Maxim Zhestkov.
EXHIBITION CONCEPT
We discovered a new World. A new Galaxy, a new Universe. Better: We invented it. And we are just starting to build it.
Unlike all the other lands, planets and galaxies that we have discovered, the digital world didn’t exist before the human being. The digital world was invented by us and now (and ever) needs to be constantly built and inhabited.
The “colonization” of the digital world is extremely different from the past ones. This time, we are not changing something that already existed before us; we are not stealing it from its indigenous inhabitants. The Digital Settlement takes place in a new land, it’s a new creation ex-abrupto. It doesn’t take anything away from anybody, rather it creates and produces something new.
This process of digital colonization started from the moment we invented the digital world, and it can go on forever. Everything is possible. But how?
We started moving the real world into the digital realm, converting pieces of reality to data. People became avatars and social profiles permanently connected; the space has been reinvented and the distance cancelled; pictures and sounds, translated into a new language, have been the bricks of this new universe. Even the light, one of the most immaterial elements, has been translated into data.
After an initial phase of mimesis and transfer, we started creating directly in the digital world. The acceleration of technological development discloses infinite possibilities. The digital is no more just a reflection of the real world. A new reality can exist behind the physical space. Today the digital world can also create itself and can evolve without human control.
The exhibition “Digital-Settlement: Light becomes Data” investigates two macro-elements recreated in the digital world: its space and how we inhabit it.
In the artwork “The Unreal” by Gloria López-Cleries and Sive Hamilton Helle, we are in a virtual landscape, “a representation of techno-romanticism and colonial ideals” that, with “a contradictory narrative, exalts the failure of techno-capitalism alternatives and the colonization of all imagined spaces”, according with the artists.
But the space in the digital world is not only just similar to the one of the real world. The possibilities here are potentially infinite and can be drastically different from what we are used to know. The experimental film “Optics” by Maxim Zhestkov gives us an example of this potentiality: analyzing the behavior of artificial light and color in digital environments, the video shows us refractions, chromatic aberrations, colourful reflection and other conditions which are impossible in reality, but more than possible in the new world.
And now, who are the inhabitants of the digital world? How the human beings enter this world? The answer to these questions have already produced a long lasting speculation and new aesthetics. Part of the image of the digital man, born with the cyberpunk in the 80s, is evoked in Cornel Swoboda’s “Oligarchs” video. In the work, we find human beings and animals enhanced into a retro-futuristic and digital version that recalls the cyber culture. In the middle between real world and digital one, they are the ancestors of pure digital creatures.
In “Performance Capture: Part 2” by Mike Pelletier, the facial expressions and related human emotions are transferred into the digital environments, becoming a sort of digital masks able to provoke feelings and evolve in brand new gestures.
The last step of this travel (for now) it suggests by the work “JANMAR B17” by Estela Oliva. Inspired by sci-fi narratives, the work reflects on the future of humanity through the digital, and not biological, awaking of a creature, a clone, ready to a new life in the digital world.
DIGITAL SETTLEMENT: LIGHT BECOMES DATA
Video-art Exhibition for ADAF ONLINE | Technotribalism
Curated by The PhotoPhore: Marica Denora & Domenico Fallacara
JULY 10 > SEPTEMBER 10, 2020
On view at online.adaf.gr
