-
HOME / PUBBLICAZIONI / COLLÒCULI > WE ARE ART
Gabriele Perretta
Art critic
BETWEEN CHIASMS [1]
AND OPTICAL SAMPLING
1.
In conversations with Gustav Janouch, Kafka says that “movement takes away our ability to look. Our consciousness shrinks and without our realizing it we lose our senses and we do not lose life.” Therefore, people are rather sleepwalkers than villains because they are not conscious of the effect of their representations and their actions to construct them[2].
The human eye has a camera as its normal touchstone. It, in fact, is formed roughly as follows: in the front it has a small black hole, called the pupil, which corresponds to the camera lens; in the inside and precisely in the back is the retina, a very sensitive membrane that, like photographic film, remains impressed by light. The retina connects to the optic nerve, which conducts images to the brain: without the activity of the latter, we would not be able to recognise what we observe, nor would we be able to remember the images we have captured.
However, the eye is far more complicated and delicate than a camera. One need only think that the pupil expands or shrinks depending on whether the light is more or less intense; also located in the interior of the eye is a transparent lens, called the crystalline lens, which regulates its curvature by itself, allowing us to see sharply, both distant targets and close objects.
But even the eye, precisely because of how precise and delicate its mechanism is, may present some imperfections, or even become diseased. It happens sometimes, that its conformation is not perfect, and then we cannot perceive images sharply: some individuals, for example, do not see distant objects well, and then they are said to be nearsighted; others, on the other hand, do not perceive near objects sharply, and then they are hypermetropes; still others see objects in a distorted way, and this defect of theirs is called astigmatism. All the above imperfections are rectified with eyeglasses fitted with the appropriate lenses. In some cases, our eyes can deceive us, delivering images that are not perfectly identical to reality, in other words, we are subject to the so-called optical illusions. To “see” the white colour is not a task performed by the eyes: they perceive light intensities that language assembles under the term “white”. As Bergson’s example testifies: white foil, whether illuminated by candles or obscured by shadows, we will continue out of habit to call it white, or conversely, Eskimos have nine different names for the colorlessness of white. We only see what is useful to our doing; or again, as Wittgenstein wrote, seeing something is always an interpretation, thus exchanging such a thing for something else[3]. Tints are not something we define, but names; and these names serve to communicate something, to designate more things in the reality that invest a particular action.
2.
To understand the living relationship between the eyes and the rest of the body, we have to look at the human evolution of art.
Starting with the primitive stage of the fish, we notice that the eyes, the nervous system and the digestive system are placed along the same fairly straight line, which shows that there is, between them, a definite connection. As for the digestive system, we will say that the eyes are the primary representation of the condition of the liver, which is why many inconveniences of this organ can be detected by simply observing them. Russian scholar Pavel Florensky is obsessed with the face and,
in particular, with the “ontological value of the gaze.”
Two pillars of significance stand out in front of us, to which we must appeal: the opening of the face (gaze) to the inner life, the path to mystery and contemplative wonder; or the outward and eager domination of the world and its creatures (a form of greed that changes the face into a mask). If, as Wittgenstein suggested, “the face is the soul of the body”, the royal door[4] opens like the flaps of an oyster, then humanity comes to a trembling halt before the infinite possibility of “manifesting or concealing its being”.
Fearful freedom can drown us in the experience of evil, before that semblance of being called the mask. Only its fall - a profound fracture - allows reunion with the ‘higher’ plane to which we yearn, permits us to surpass the abyss of emptiness to rediscover the original warmth of life. It is here that the gaze is drawn upward, aspiring to that native model that is the archetype of the universal-divine. “Within the face, the motion of life is mirrored internally, contrary to the rest of the body, where more exterior dynamic prevails. Therefore, to understand the nature of ideas, it is necessary to confront the expressiveness of the face,’ warns the Russian mystic, who finds in it the ontological and salvific foundation of the face-look. “Every condition of an individual, each stage of growth, and each action shines from the light of his gaze, of his species”. If we were to examine the theatrical, performative, as well as photographic and video spheres, pausing in the specifics of portraiture multimedia, we might note (and mutter) that the mastery of the artist, the one who infuses intensity into the life of the portrait, depends essentially on the stillness and breadth of the movement of the gaze that observes, cares for, lifts, defines, socializes.
3.
In deep space, every particle of light has a vision; The problem is communicating with them. Who has never said: “I would have liked to write, to tell, to film my thoughts, to find the right shots to tell about that nostalgia that lies down, deep inside I don’t know where? Maybe in the pupil of Collòculi!”. “Then all it took was a breath of simple words, a shot in sequence, to catch things that are not simple. With care, we polished them in the splendour of Neapolitan facts, lined them up like so many sketches and these sequences were born, these fragments, these lines of filmic writing that have secured, within an iconography, some glimmer of our blurred memories. They are short, microscopic photo-frames-of-life, still smelling of gravy, of gulf water, of wispy, disguised eyes, of new magic of the land.” They are small memories that emerge freely, void of any presumption but charged with a strong evocative power that engages us and, for once, unifies. “If there is anything that is not only ours, it is the most intimate photographic memory”. Collòculi>We Are Art is over-individual proof of this. Behind an apparent diversity, these images of young people enclose a profound resemblance, a harmonious continuity, a memory-making, of a spiel that we all know by hearsay: the depth of the inner scenario. There is no boundary between one recollection and the other as if it were a single subject telling us about his experience; rich, full of naive cunning, sophisticated imagery, esoteric symbols, and lost grace. In autobiographical recollection, pain is far from the wound, anger lasts the time of a yawn, and love does not hurt because it still has no name. Surprisingly, among these images, we who narrate are the ones in the middle, amid the voices of Larissa, Pino, Youssuf, Noemi, etc ..., unable not to see the white road, the vision leading to recognition. Reading Collòculi and We Are Art, one gets the feeling that the author proceeds towards an interrogation of the vision in an original way, as if all his previous works did not weigh on his gaze. Already from the title, Collòculi and We Are Art, we can identify the subject of the question and its medium: the spirit of the interview and the eye. The eye, in fact, is the gateway to the world, in which the new work on mediumship would like to relocate our spirit. This attempt is made possible by art and specifically by the convergence of old and new media (photography, 3D graphics, virtual and immersive reality), which draw on this layer of brute sense, i.e. our primordial historicity.
This meditation develops from a definite issue, of which the media architecture and the film speak from the very first pages: the manipulandum, whom people think they are and have become by entering a cultural regime where there is neither true nor false about themselves and history. They, therefore, live into a night of sleep or nightmare from which there is no awakening. These issues are not far from those affecting us most closely, though we are now at the point of no return in the process that M. Merleau-Ponty lived in his maturity. Now, «science manipulates things and renounces inhabiting them» and «occasionally confronts itself with the actual world», treating each being as a general object. Conversely, «classical science retained a sense of the opacity of the world, and it was the world it intended to reach with its constructions»[5]. In this sense, there is a need “ for scientific thought to re-relocate in a space, a field, a preliminary semantic territory, on the ground of the tangible and the worked world, just as exist in our lives”. It is a powerful statement because it does not only focus on the ultimate referent of science, the sensible world, but also on who operates in it: our body. Not that “possible body that one might call an information machine, but this effective body that I call mine”, “the sentinel that silently watches over under my words and my sensations”[6].
The installations and docu-films that follow, these discourses of ours, are the expression of that intent and develop, moreover, the interesting interweaving of science and art, where the latter relocates us back into the spaces from which the sophisms of reason have removed us. The media builder, by taking an interest (inter-being) in the world and lending his or her body, transforms it into dialogues between performances, actions and screens. To “understand such transubstantiations, one must rediscover the operating and affected body, which is not a portion of space, a bundle of functions,” but an interweaving of vision and movement. This movable body is part of the tangible world, which is why we place it in the visible. It is possible because “everything I see is, by principle, within my reach, marked on the map of the I can”[7]. Submerged by the perceivable “through his body, which is also visible, the viewer does not possess what he sees: he only approaches it with his eyes, opening onto the world”[8]. Therein springs the astonishment of whoever moves in the world with their body. Source of all knowledge that goes, at times, beyond the conceivable. The enigma of this world-body double entanglement lies in the body being both viewer and visible. We include it among things, “but because it can see and move, it holds things in a circle around itself”[9]. There is a re-crossing between the seeing and the visible, between the framer and the framed, when the spark of sensibility is ignited. The documentation on the screen illustrates the enigma of the body: ‘qualities, light, colour, depth, are there before us just to awaken an echo in our body, for it to welcome them”.[10]
And so the video-maker learns through seeing, for “he is impacted a certain way by the world, and he returns it to the visible”[11], giving existence to what ungodly vision believes to be invisible. The Collòculi “question aims at this secret and fabricated genesis of things in our bodies”.[12] We understand that the body is that medium, that middle way between the spirit and the world. Premise forgotten by vision in the profane sense. The vision, instead, is not the metamorphosis of things per se into the view we have of them but is thinking that rigorously deciphers the signals given into the body. This vision is the diorama that contains it, a lost secret until a new balance between science and art emerges. For this reason, the medical field searches for a thought on that creation of soul and body that we are, on that knowledge of position or situation, to reach an outcome that allows us to grasp a profound question: the enigma of exteriority. The attention given to mediality moves in this direction because that kind of vision is not a gaze on an outside, according to a physical-optical relationship with the world. The world is no longer ‘in front of him as representation: it is rather the painter born in things’[13] and, perforating the skin of the screen, shows how ‘figures’ are made as such. The consequence is that art can no longer be said to be a constructive, cluttering nature or an arduous relationship with an external space and world: the medial ‘would provide my eyes with more or less what is offered by actual movements’[14]. At the heart of that experience, one reaches when one defines the eye as a window to the soul, as it performs the prodigy of opening to it that which is not soul. Merleau-Ponty discovers the space in which criticism returns to questioning, the state of continuous astonishment, the particles of Being and that which is never wholly. In this perennial questioning, reason claims a validity to fill its void and our manipolandum is constituted on this unstable ground. If productions are not, however, “a given, it is not only because they pass away, like all things, but because they have almost their entire life ahead of them”.[15]
4.
The visual representation of blindness is known to most by its physical appearance, it is always arguable because the memory of the interpreter tends to overlap with the memory of the author, and this makes the itinerary difficult and tortuous, since multiple and simultaneous presences of signs, of significant elements must be synthesized and enclosed within a space and time, which are then partially recognizable. Some walking subjects, the topography of a space, a mountain, the church, the itinerary, the fall, a city, a country, an object are, on the temporal scale, stationary realities within a frame of stability, as our expectations and, above all, our perceptual abilities behave, in this case, with synchronic eyes that simplify and reduce complexity to visually classifiable behaviors and patterns... The human landscape, on the contrary, is more complex: think of it as a symbolic image, a reportage, yet without losing its fundamental characteristic, essential to be recognised. Pictorial reportage belongs, therefore, to a narrative genre that lies between drawing and illustration, between inside and outside. De Parabel der Blinden, is a tempera painting on canvas, 86x159 cm, by P. Brueghel the Elder, dated around 1568 and kept in the National Museum of Capodimonte[16]. In the case of the Parable of the Blind, as intended for popular media, it must go beyond the descriptive aspects to impress with an unforgettable mark: the user of images vs words and vice versa.
Was it really essential to lurk The Parable of the Blind among the images of Annalaura di Luggo’s docufilm? Don’t we already find enough of them, sneaking glances at the pen and camera of journalists and poets? Perhaps a good reason exists, and the answer lies in the image source of this installation and this documentary film. At the beginning of the 1960s, an iconographic repertoire demonstrating how eye, glance, sight and meatus had been, for so much of western culture, the opercula from which to spy the eyes of the world outside and inside the eyes of God, still represented a valid argument against sclerotic censorship, tormented by a frame of the unresolved and the obvious as by sickness of vision, tolerable at the limit but, in perspective, one to operate. Those were the days of Flemish studies, and it was necessary to look at the blind in order to rediscover enhanced sight. But is the sighted, or rather J. Derrida’s blind man, as excited about visuality as he was in the writing of deconstructionism? The blind man and the artist find themselves in a similar situation, hanging in the dark and the invisible, searching for a support that can provide them with a footprint or a path, an opening ‘into’ the world. Obviously, the limitation of this juxtaposition lies in the fact that the blind man cannot do otherwise, out of physiological necessity, while the artist is moved by another kind of need, which impels him to enter a territory in which sight abandons it and in which he must learn to orient himself by other means, to anticipate (ante-capĕre as a foresight) what comes to meet him. The world of the blind and the world of the artist - to paraphrase Wittgenstein - are the same world of the ordinary person. The difference is in the ways of accessibility to the world, which, in this synaesthetic case, are a metamorphosis of meaning, forcing us to rethink the metaphor of visibility in a paradoxical way, in which we are obliged to consider a ‘perspective’ of the blind that seems, at least at a naive level, an arcane figure. Like the prophet Tiresias who is blind only in appearance but can see far beyond ordinary mortals, the artist finds himself immersed in the invisible, in a context very similar to the lover educated by Eros. (No kidding, glasses and contact lenses are sold in shops and specialised clinics). Besides, the beauty of Brueghel the Elder is the Parable, his incorrigible point of reference of the verbal-visual culture, that attention moulded on the characters and circumstances of rapprochement, comparison, and explanation of an illustration or teaching.
The Parable has always accurately extracted the slightest weaknesses of the icon, sharpening the difficulty of visual metaphors and teaching new depth to the orthodoxy of sight. In this oscillating ambiguity between iconophilia and iconoclasm, he still founds his media fortunes, presenting himself in the guise of the blind. He prefers to keep his iconographic process constantly updated, departing from a frequent criterion of the gaze, which locates the impersonal sphere of the video, or the starting point on the constitution of the screen image. The media operator focuses his attention on the characteristic of the eye of others. Two meanings come together in the practice of Collòculi. Collòculi is the act of seeing with the other and in the other, and, at the same time, the reality that presents itself before my eyes. The present media experience reveals a spontaneous concordance between the subjective aspect, the social history of the eye, and the objective aspect of the phenomenon: the exploration shows me not a chaos, but an object sequence of the Parable of the Blind. This relationship between the Parable of the Blind and the seen world constitutes the structure of We Are Art. The ambiguous structure of the human body that has moved between the screens, seeing and visible, subject and at the same time potential object of perception, suggests that vision cannot only exist as an encounter between that which becomes life history and heterogeneous receptive ocularity. On the contrary, the sensory features and world experience have an internal equivalent in Pino, Youssuf, Larissa and Noemi, and I would not have an orderly perception if a connecting track in my path as a media practitioner did not prefigure the word. And the video screen, participatory and anonymous art, collective experience, and immersive practice in a shared production that best explores the social geography of the Collòculi is the application of We Are Art. The media operator tells other people how he saw, what he looked for, what he looked at, what he chased and what he interviewed to introduce the interactive structure, in iron, in recycled aluminum and the digital action of the gesturerecognition cameras, invites you to focus on the subjects that are positioned in front of the eye to legitimize one’s own image and that of others. In the visible eye of gesture recognition, each gaze can recognise the paths that lead from the eyes to the world and vice versa, to my eye, to the eyes of the person exposing his story.
By transferring what belongs to other sensory fields into the visual sphere, the media practitioner goes beyond visual data in the strict sense and expands the potential of vision, arriving, in fact, at Collòculi! This theory of the spiritual eye, of the eye between the material and the immaterial, the thread running through all installation and film complexity, shows the link between screens and lives, reproduction and humanisation. The critic is the one who reveals it, since the art of the media operator is transparent and fluctuating. He is not the person who tells the vision, but the sharing, the origin of the dialogue that shows the universe of suffering thrown into the world in which the Collòculi are built! When he becomes critical of his art, the media worker no longer finds what he spontaneously knows while thinking by doing. The media maker by doing believes, on the other hand, that our knowledge of The Parable of the Blind is the only method to get to the heart of things: to think the composite of soul and body without dissolving into abstract superimpositions; this is the fundamental task of the media installation. The eye and the collective spirit share a natural pact. In his letter on the blind, Diderot shows in the figure of the blindness of optics professor Saunderson the resources of an intellect that not only corrects the physical impairment, but turns it to the advantage of a deeper understanding of reality. Although this artistic-philosophical case seems to contradict what said about blindness and a hypothetical doing of the blind, we are, in truth, offered onother a chance to show that the portion of Being thematised by the artist is mere ob-jectum, only within the paradigm of vision.
If we are coherent with our premises instead, and we remember that the history of presence and representation as a place-before are only a partiality of a history made also in the invisible, then we understand how the perspective we have on the real can be expanded by keeping account of the experience and blind effort that accompanies the artist’s work. Through Collòculi this suspension of the vision on the threshold of the haptic is emphasized[17], to preserve itself in an opening to the event: to the still-to-touch, to the still-to-see that structures our kinesthetic experience of the world, our movement, our desire. In short: the transcendence that dwells in our immanence is analogous to invisibility complementary to visibility, and cannot be exhausted by any panoptic attempt, on pain of renouncing the vital tension that inhabits the observer, the curator and the artist and that prepares us for the surprise of the event. The exploration of Collòculi’s sphere, the comparison with the Parable of the Blind, is a “point of dullness”[18], also because an eye that wants to see itself as a sighter will find nothing but a reference to itself (solipsism and self-reference ). Thus we too, when looking at Collòculi, need an ‘external indication to understand that it is a self-projected WE’, otherwise it is left to the field of hypotheses, which, like that of memory, is a point of blindness relegated to the contingent and not really a ‘diaphanous’ and ‘pure’ intelligibility. In a conference in 2002, two years before his death, returning to the subject of the experience of vision, Derrida raised this very question again: “It is a question of knowing whether the sight is an experience of the first kind, that is to say, that it has to do, as is often believed, with what is in front [...], I see what is right in front of me, or whether vision has to do with invisibility or visibility that does not stand in objectivity or subjectivity [...] the essential possibility of the visible, is invisible”[19]. In conclusion, for Collòculi and for We Are Art (starting from his visual enunciations of stories and comparisons with Pino, Youssuf, Larissa and Noemi) all this helps us to understand how in reality the sphere of the sensible and the intelligible are not separate. If a part of art critique and semiotics has warned us against the senses, against the fact that they can deceive us, even though we can only build upon them the sense of a knowledge that rises to certainty, with medial experimentation we can see that even “artistic literature” does not belong only to the realm of the visible (thus intelligible), but shares to a large extent a similarly “ matrix” blindness, in the co-belonging of the literate (reader) with the world, to its affectivity, and not in a privileged position from which to observe it. No exasperated rationalism can, therefore, guarantee, in its monolithism, a made and finished system of reality. However easily one thinks to get rid of the dimensions orbiting around the logos and crossing the human being (sensibility, affectivity, corporeity, inspiration, drives), one cannot reduce “the being of fruition” to an asphyxiated monopoly, regardless of how much it improves and erases, in its metaphysics its metaphors of a perfect, transparent, pure vision/intelligibility. Language itself betrays this white mythology[20]. The experience (the artistic one as a way of accessing reality other than the sedimentations of philosophy) shows us the impossibility of configuring this space of transparency and invites us to re-enter “the senses of the world”[21], in its folds and blind spots, first and foremost those of aesthetics itself, discovering them along the course of its history and in its language. If the curatorial exercise oscillates between the position of the mole that digs blindly in the making of history and the panoptic gaze of Minerva’s owl that can embrace it in its flight over the twilight, we should say that it is nothing more than hindsight. and that, even when the critical gaze rests on the world, it cannot possess it sub specie aeternitatis: the literary-artistic effort, also a gesture of love as they say, cannot be exhausted. It is another infinite task: it is the groping of embodied bodies and reasons, to some extent blind, to some extent transported to a zone of non-visibility integral to our visibility, through lack, desire and absence. The semiologist and the curator not only cannot be transparency for themselves - the seeing eye does not see itself seeing, as in the Collòculi - but neither can they abstract from the world by denying their own constitutive limits (not to be confused with limitations). Every curatorial expression, every visit to the Parable of the Blind, constitutes a point of access on the world and, at the same time, carries with it a blind spot in a supplementarity[22] that precedes the activity of postponing and postponing as delay. Blindness, in fact, accompanies both the beginning of curatorship in its ascent beyond common sense, and the end of it in the difficulty of being able to readjust to the lack of light in the ocular cavity. Hence, this work carried out at the limits of art, artistic literature, curatorship and of the participating observer (the new media-watcher in possession of a smartphone) becomes useful for rethinking media itself: from its beginning, perhaps going beyond the abstractions of pure knowledge, re-evaluating its praxis, opening or renewing the association with other fields of human sensibility and experience, from rethinking the semantic structures that express our confrontation with the world, our inhabiting it through the language of old and new media.
1. Figure consisting of arranging in reverse order (crosswise) four elements, which correspond syntactically or semantically, and occur in two sentences, in successive members of a sentence, in one or two verses. For example: life and death, sorrows and joys; “women, knights, weapons, loves” (Ariosto).
2. Original edition of 1981, tr.it by E. Pocar, Confessioni e Diari, Milan, 1972, pp. 1112 and 1110.
3. Seeing something ‘as’ something does not pertain to perception but to thought, i.e. language.
4. With explicit reference to the work of Florensky, Le porte regali. Saggio sull’icona, edited by E. Zolla, Adelphi, Milan, 1977.
5. L’occhio e il Spirito, tr. it. and edited by A. Sordini, pref. by C. Lefort, Se, Milan, p. 13.
6. Ibid., p. 15.
7. Ibid., p. 17.
8. Ibid., p. 18.
9. Ibid., p. 19.
10. Ibid., p. 20.
11. Ibid., p. 23.
12. Ibid., p. 25.
13. Ibid., p. 49.
14. Ibid., p. 54.
15. Ibid., p.63.
16. Aldous Huxley and Jean Videpoche, The Elder Pieter Bruegel, Wiley Book, 1938; U. Bile and M. Confalone, Museo di Capodimonte, Electa Editore, Naples, 1999.
17. Haptic: tactile, relating to touch, based on touch; from English haptic, back-formed from the earlier haptics ‘study of the sense of touc’, coined and adapted from the Latin term haptice by Isaac Barrow (mid-seventeenth-century English mathematician) from the Greek verb hápto ‘to connect, to make contact, to touch.’ Example: ‘I turned off the haptic feedback on my keyboard, because those little vibrations under my finger make me furious.’ Hence a kind of installation of haptic media.
18. It follows that obtuse should be understood not in the sense of foolish, stupid, but about the angle greater than ninety degrees. The “obtuse sense” - Barthes writes - “is not structurally situated”: it is not found in the langue [...]; but it is not found in words either [...], it is a signifier without meaning": evaporation of meaning that, distancing itself from the referent, leaves it to be “only a thin cloud of the signifier”, see: R. Barthes, Il brusio della lingua. Saggi critici IV, it. tr. by B. Bellotto, Einaudi, Turin, 1988, p. 72.
19. J. Derrida, Pensare al non vedere. Scritti sulle arti del visibile (1979-2004), Jaca Book, Milan, 2016, pp. 91-92.
20. J. Derrida, Margini della filosofia, ed. it. edited by M. Iofrida, Einaudi, Turin, 1997, pp. 273-349.
21. M. Merleau-Ponty, Il visibile e l’invisibile, ed. it. edited by M. Carbone, Bompiani, Milan, 2003, p. 193.
22. That is, the media flow that goes from our observational instincts to new media topographies.
Collòculi - We Are Art
1.
Multimedia is one of the main substances of our imagination, a projective art par excellence: its frames, immersive environments and floating icons condense and represent social life issues and contemporary feelings giving visual efficacy to fundamental aspects of the media debate.
For a long time for this reason, the medial lab, has become a full-fledged part of scenario or vision exercises. In the contemporary world, the media lab plays both the role of reproducing the real and a role of fracture. In the second case, the digital media lab produces the estrangement and cleavage that are the terms of today’s art and the border crossing from which different virtual images and behaviours emerge.
The world, as seen through the eyes of digital artists, is an extraordinary web of linked and edited acts, media improvisation and visionary automatisms. The purely visual acts are scanned by the pace of research so that the aura of representation and dialogue with the various forms of artistic correspondence hovers around them. Art aims to give us a feeling of the recorded events, which has to be vision and not just recognition. To achieve this, the digital lab uses two processes: the alienation of things and the narration of lives and life documents.
Certainly today, the digital laboratory occupies, in cultural production, in the complication of form, in an even richer way, the role that other media or theatrical performance, music and melodrama played in the past.
Often filmmakers and multimedia artists attempting to unlock new horizons, or create original representations of events or musical themes, deliver imbalances of the future. Similarly to writers, although visual materials have such a format and appeal that they become a hugely important and rich support for those designing scenarios or fields of exposition.
The visual element (painting, drawing, photography, cinema, the web, etc.) is now, with full rights, not only a tool in the process of representing reality but also a fundamental element of support for the decision-making process in many creative and constructive spheres: from the remodelling of media formats to the construction of new architectures of vision. Film and media installation becomes an element of synthesis, helps to focus on the conflicts - in images - with the present, and provides supporting evidence for media education and codification.
“The media universe”, even in its diverse cultural roots, is a tool for approaching the Earth and its many worlds. The multifaceted character of the media universe allows allows a formal coupling of artistic languages through a work in progress. The methods used for this purpose vary: one more participatory and close to the constructive and explanatory relationality games style, the other on the “base map” between installation and film or documentary. The event of the media format is the emergence of a difference that stands out “in something else” in a “partial way” perspectively and, because it is part, poses the “problem of participation”. To participate means to take part, to be a part. What does it mean to participate in the world, in the world of the event? The pure immanence of the medial involves the difference of visual languages, without numerical distinction and separation, between the background of substantial variety and the “emergence of the format”. With the medial, the immanency of the format knows a turning point, taking on a critical significance, whereby artistic practice should not be judged from external technological exigencies.. Paraphrasing the poet, therefore, either one has to believe either the facts, or the interpretation wherein only ‘flashes of expression’ are found. The inadequacy in asking the conditions of possibility lies therefore, in the absence of an explanation other than installation and cinema, both of the exposed and the exposable. Here, the term life is the name of the exposed, but not as photography would have it, assumed pre-iconographically, outside the system and the rigour of the concept.
Understanding the meaning of the format of the technique and its exposure, understanding its experiential rootedness, is perhaps the crucial stake of Collòculi and We Are Art.
2.
The truth is that in academic visual art - that is, in the so-called classical visual construct -the eyes do not exist. Or rather: they must perform their task, often very important, but without being in any way conspicuous. Why? Because what matters in this kind of visuality is the line, the movement expressed as a whole: that of painting, graphics, or drawing, culminating on two- and three-dimensional surfaces. And anything breaking it - any quivering of an autonomous eye, so to speak, as opposed to movement (that, why not? of the soul) - was and is considered contradictory, external, unreasonable, post-fontanian, or perhaps post-spatialist. Except that of the face, boldly independent of the gaze, was and is a movement necessary to the two-dimensional visual synthesis and thus charged with a legible mirror message. The same thing somewhat also underlies the movement of other arts, in academic representation, for it too must be an integral part of the movement that stops in the mimetic specularity, of which the view is the structural element, with a relative necessity to flow in line, stretching the dimensions of the medium as much
as possible.
In short, the nineteenth-century classical image (that of the great classics) is the animated expression, the desire for action not actuated. If the painter deviates from the strict adherence to this unwritten visual law, the two-dimensional gesture immediately seems a leery flag gone wild and, moreover, heavy as stone.
Only in the twentieth century did a singular painter like Francis Bacon set out to recapture the hands, the movement of the eyes, even in an entirely abstract context. The eyes in the strokes to the painting, to Bacon’s painting, regain the license of disrespect, of drift, in sudden expressions of chromatics, whimsical, witty, even in total contrast to the direction of outline, of reproduction. Increasingly, the license of free expression accentuates in the creations of contemporary painting, especially on the horizon of figural.
The eyes, in multimedia, on the screens, and in formats of media production are, on the other hand, the element of strength in expressive multi-vision. For in this limb the narrative message -- and any linguistic-expressive value one recognizes -- is entrusted in large part precisely to the Collòculi, who imitate, explain, comment on, exit and enter the screens (or perhaps from the screens!).
By devoutedly looking at both of this arts - intending them as not strictly visual or verbal - one will see that it is precisely in the eye (in their verbal or nonverbal use, which is to say, in the use of movement that also involves the living body), that they differ. The difference is the following: in multi-vision (and in everyday life), the gesture, the movement of looks ends where the experience ends. In performance, on the other hand-an art in which the expressive message is entrusted to movement as a whole (and as it flows)-the movement of the eyes on the screen seems to come from the depths of the soul and continue beyond, that experience, forever. Even in everyday experience, eyes are important; because the technique and aesthetics of this transferred eye from two-dimensional to enhanced reality (in its various Collòculian approaches) are often totally multi-visual, i.e., medial: every engagement of the eyesight of people, in the media installation and in the documentary film narrates. And it tells with the eyes and (haptic) touch, mainly, and according to codes of an absolute social connotation: each eye of Noemi, Youssouf, Larissa and Pino, the life of a person, the dimension of a sharing, the recognition of a portrait, an identity, a story, a collective feeling. And any change, even the slightest, in those eye movements can change even its meaning altogether. The universe - an assortment of gestures, behaviours, life stories and related meanings[23] - is called by synthesis: Collòculi versus We Are Art. A fabric of mirrored eyes has been enveloping our world ever since we entered what Collòculi calls We Are Art, in a field of semiological formats in which it is easier to locate an icon than a discourse. The Collòculi devour us, harass us. We are immersed, plunged into the installation of a large eye and the equivalent of a film documenting the story of eight eyes for four expanded subjects. Screens embedded in smartphones have changed the use of photography, and reproduction cameras function to emanate mirrors of stories and tactility. Lives happen on the place where the screen is; too numerous to merit preservation, so numerous that soon all the facts of Collòculi and Are Art’s installation become the object of a collective poetic expression, like the typing of a simple purpose.
There is no symbol without inspiration, visible sphere without invisible, figuration without trans-figuration, sight without oversight, concentration without dispersion.
The concept of transfiguration, of plastic “arterity” of the visible datum, reinterpreted, resemantized, a theme marginalized by so many contemporary gazes, seems to be at the center of Annalaura di Luggo’s artistic investigation. It is an “installation,” set up and contemplated in the project of Collòculi, in an unprecedented alternation between “iconography of the sensitive eye” and “synaesthesia of interaction,” shaping the total language of the multisensory work. Collòculi is a log that tends to the visible, that tries to bring to manifestation what is perceived, what the individual perceives, managing to give it a universal character. Annalaura di Luggo produces feelings of herself, of “life boys,” but, at the same time, she manages to speak of the history of the eye. Annalaura di Luggo “makes feelings” in a different way than we experience them, meaning that she produces them in a new way, not just re-produces, but produces something in which everyone can recognize themselves: “views” in which everyone can inhabit. Sight cannot live without art, for the simple reason that art cultivates the feeling of the eye--part to which it is attached--in the lives of others, in the colours of others, in the “life experiences of common sense.”
OCOLLŎQUĬUM [COLLOQUIUM], COLLOQUII
CONVERSATION, DIALOGUE, MEETING
ŎCŬLUS [OCULUS], OCULI
EYE, ORGAN OF SIGHT
Collòculi derives from the fusion of two lemmas, and in combining grammatical and artistic meaning, it becomes a circular form, taking as its “essential geometry” and as its “conceptual structure of sustainability” the link between person, work and environment. Sculptural project, media image and “multisensory” remediation, Annalaura di Luggo’s Collòculi, while modifying the context in which it is inserted, enables the activation of a mechanism of renewed awareness towards the installation, no longer or not only a surrogate of monumentality, but an opportunity to reread human dimensions transfigured in changing contexts. Form does not resolve in itself: it is effective and corporeal force and requires physical involvement to be “seen”, fruited and experienced. Plasticity, determined by the accumulation of recycled aluminum filaments, is the nest of internal movement (renewable and interchangeable) offered by a screen which, through a camera system (gesture recognition), makes the user an integral part of the action.
In the European aesthetic and late Romantic reflection of the late 19th and 20th century, provoked by W. Worringer, the avant-garde “is in reality nothing but memory and tradition, historical inversion and citation of the past”[24], there is the new wind of a freer expression of feelings and emotions, the rediscovery of nature, of the aspiration to escape from one expressive technique to another, to flight, to transcending the harsh laws of gravity, and sight, the conversation of glances, in a special and unique way, embodies this intermittence, this fixity in the crossing of artistic correspondences. In modern art, on the other hand, the strength and nobility of the living creature seems to be centred in a stylised interiority, seemingly able to hold fast to the screens. The special or specious effects, which had made people believe in miraculous apparitions and the photography of spirits, have become the daily fare of the media and clip makers, who create them with a flick of the thumb (with a haptic stroke). Little by little, the space left between the image and its representation becomes thinner. Would a young man, who tells his story in We Are Art through the screens of a console and who cries when the story itself asks him to release himself, be nothing more than an image? The digital faces of Pino, Noemi, Youssouf and Larissa, whose enigmatic eyes follow the camera movements, even involuntary, of the fascinated spectators, strike us. Are they duplicates, or other us-selves asking us to participate in the Collòculi? Are we not by any chance sinking into a world of other Eyes?
It is not a vain fear. The Collòculi techniques bring our eyes closer to their model of representation. Other symptoms are added, such as the media art’s taste for the post-ready-made, which transforms ordinary stories of four difficult boys and turns a life into a living sculpture. Even the role-playing exchanges between the theatre and the four boys lives, or the cult for their existential experimentation, where every dialogue, every iris, can suddenly take on a symbolic value which transforms it into the image of what comes close to salvation.
Collòculi > We Are Art is perhaps more than a representation: is it already an act or an act in potency? This relationship between image and life with its object intrigues and awakens the old controversy of catharsis, the power of a story to replace the real image of a spectator, to produce considerations, provocations, questions, emotions, substitutions. This is how the theophany is fulfilled in the symbols of transfigured and interactive sight: stories that are paths of affirmation of the individual and that nourish the meaning of a research; artistic and human interaction, oriented towards inclusive and comprehensive horizons. The starting point is about the eyes of four boys, victims of bullying, discrimination, alcohol and crime, who through the languages of video art and immersive reality, open wide a human and poetic universe, involving the viewer in a confrontation that cannot be without consequences, because “looking into each other’s eyes” means predisposing to dialogue, to encounter. Thus, in the soliciting and free practice of dialogue, the value of each individual in society is affirmed, stimulating our point of observation of the world. Resuming the observations conducted by Annalaura di Luggo, we are now called to see this transmutation-from sight and lives of others, to self-sight and life-through the singular process of Collòculi. Says the artist: “I see through people’s eyes and beyond the common vision. I see the eyes that confront suffering, to give meaning to what they express. In the eyes I see diversity and uniqueness. Through the eyes, my ‘protagonists’ strip themselves of prejudice and conditioning, exploring invisible spaces So they tell things that no one wants to hear, things that no one wants to see. Things that others often prefer to close their eyes to! I chose to explore the human, to see new eyes. So I try to return images in search of the singularity of the gaze. I like to enter into symbiosis with the depth of each one: by crumbling the traditional image of eyes I recompose it in a dynamism of freedom, movement and spiritual transfiguration. This is why I need to provoke the viewer, giving back images that are neither conventional nor reassuring: because they are images of experience, metaphors of life... For We Are Art, I chose stories of young people on the margins of society: through a path of transversal inclusion, I dealt with young people with different difficulties; I looked in their eyes for the ability to get up again, the desire to start over. I hope, among other things, that I succeeded in stimulating the idea of sharing, the strength to build certainties. Ultimately capable of looking far ahead! In this search for lives and stories of survival and redemption, I find inspiration for my research and attempt to make sense of my work as an artist. My work always aims to become collective works with a social and socialising function. Without leaving room for discrimination.”
Behind the right to be able to freely manifest one’s seeing, it is clear that there is the fact that everyone must have the possibility to do so, but at the same time, everyone must have the awareness of what they can see. Annalaura di Luggo adds: “We Are Art was created to stimulate a spiritual awareness of the value of every human being... because we are all works of art: We Are Art! It is a journey from darkness to light ... As in all my projects, I need to use energies made of life, to which I combine manual skills and technology so that the viewer becomes the protagonist of the scene, identifying with the lives of others. Collòculi>We Are Art is both a multimedia work and an evocative container, with not only an aesthetic function but also an ethical and social stimulus. Through this work, I invite the public to an immersive and multi-sensory, digital and interactive experience, with a strong propensity for emotional involvement. The work leads towards a visual transfiguration that tells an evolution of history, stimulating awareness of inclusion. It is because of this, or even because of this, that the intimately personal stories of four young people embarking on a path from darkness to light are documented...” In the We Are Art experience, the artist finds con-sentiment with his neighbour and realises con-sentiment with the recipients of his work. “The aural experimentation of sound design makes the project usable even in the absence of visual capacity. The sound design, which brings back the real noises of the scene, becomes inclusive to the different visual ability as well. We Are Art is not only social and artistic research on human perception, but also an affirmation of the value of the individual as an active part of society. Here are the eyes of the four protagonists I have chosen, revealing as many singular stories of survival and redemption.[...] Collòculi has the shape of a giant iris and is made of recycled aluminium; I like to imagine it as a representation of our planet and as a symbol of circular economy and environmental sustainability.”
The intent is, therefore, to help subjects recover their identity, starting from the rediscovery and custody of the ‘autopoietic’ sense. This is possible by opening up to the metaphor of sight (realm of intimate values and feelings), of the person and of self-reflection: “The work summarizes the intimate and inner evolution of Noemi, Youssouf, Larissa and Pino. Those who are redeemed from their past and transfigured into artistic images. There, where the iris invades the human silhouette, with an inversion of perspective in which it is the body that is enclosed in the metaphor of a soul, an expression of the beauty of divine creation, which leaves no room for discrimination. We are all God’s children and we tread the same earth. In His eyes are we not all equal?”
Simone Weil wrote: artistic practice ‘is generally regarded as a particular form, whereas instead, it is the key to supernatural truths’[25].
In our virtual culture, however, there is something very similar to Collòculi’s code and which does not only concern cinema: it is the alphabet of the installation which, synthesized and simplified, is analogous to the alphabet of the relational condition. Algorithms make it possible to smooth and unfold surfaces, imitate the structure of the most diverse materials, vary movements and expressions with light and shadow, rotate objects, and place them in the centre or in a dynamic perspective, to give the illusion of the third dimension. What happens when stories become image gestures, losing their support (picture) and turning into algorithms? The propensity of the image is to integrate itself into things. Well, in We Are Art - the correspondence between Collòculi and the docufilm directed by Annalaura di Luggo - this did not escape. And the pleasure we were talking about a little while ago has not escaped the notice: the pleasure that the moment of a dry gestural or visual sequence gives to the public, in which the documentary acts according to obscure codes - not immediately legible - and yet in their entirety intensive, ambiguous, dramatic. Perhaps it all began with a testimony of existences, the four boys of life (the eight eyes of character), differently abled and ‘differently different’ who really, in their past and present, dealt with re-education and therefore knew their condition well. The Collòculi model, where it recognizes itself as a social work of art, always and has always stimulated in its artists extraordinary autobiographical improvisations, on which history, exhibition and representation elaborate their own precise choreography (very original, truly his, and which, however, also belongs to the individual subjects who participated in it, including the writer who followed the development and treatment). Well, the group of difficult children are asked to perform themselves, to relate their selves to the collective narrative of We Are Art, using a Sound Alphabet and the lyrics of a self-valorizing song. When the image is branded or etched into the skin of the installation and docu-film it becomes scarification, a scar. Its internalisation can become perceptive. The identification of Collòculi with its model functions as a treasure chest, like a box of introspective tools.
23. And together, each of these gestures and the art of using them in the manner of Art.comm, by Gabriele Perretta, Castelvecchi, Rome, 2002.
24. W. Worringer, Problemi formali del gotico, edited by G. Frank and G. Gurisatti, tr.it. Venice, 1985; Astrazione e Empatia, Einaudi, Turin, 1975.
25. S. Weil, Quaderni III, edited by G. Gaeta, Adelphi, Milan, 1988, p.364.