SELECTED PROJECTS
AESTHETICS OF EXTINCTION
– infrastructures of contemporary capitalism –
Aesthetics of Extinction is a long-term art project on the infrastructures of contemporary capitalism. The project surveys key infrastructures that will define the 21st century.
For this project, infrastructures are characterized as the key technologies, systems and physical conditions that enable the circulation of meaning and power.
This expanded definition points to the fact that what infrastructures really do is to frame and enable what is possible. Infrastructures are the determinants of the conditions of possibility; are the enablers of meaning and as such, set the limits of our imaginations.
LAMB OF GOD
LAMB OF GOD consists of 1 video and 1 series of photographs.
“When science moves faster than moral understanding, as it does today, men and women struggle to articulate their unease. In liberal societies they reach first for the language of autonomy, fairness, and individual rights. But this part of our moral vocabulary is ill equipped to address the hardest questions posed by Genetic Engineering. The genomic revolution has induced a kind of moral vertigo. To grapple with the ethics of enhancement, we need to confront questions largely lost from view in the modern world – questions about the moral status of nature, and about the proper stance of human beings toward the given world.”
Michael J. Sandel – The Case against Perfection
PROVISIONAL CARTOGRAPHY
PROVISIONAL CARTOGRAPHY – interview with my mother – (TRAILER)
Provisional Cartography is the discussion of concepts and traits of a new era, that of the Aesthetics of Extinction. It is organized in eight chapters: Substrate of the Image; Materialism; Evolution; Virtual Reality; Construction of the Virtual; Technological Gaze; Image & Knowledge; and Infrastructures.
BLACK BOOK
BLACK BOOK consists of 1 video, 2 series of photographs and 1 installation
How are the levels of inequality determined in a capitalist society? Which are the mechanisms capitalism exploits to avoid a democratic discussion on equality? A purely abstract instrument, taxation will not only determine wealth re-distribution levels but the very nature of society in the 21st century.
WHITE NOISE
WHITE NOISE consists of 2 videos, 1 series of 20 photographs and 2 installations.
The consequences of a deteriorating environment together with the increasing conviction of human extinction as a probable outcome will be a defining condition of the 21st century. Perhaps its defining infrastructure. The tragedy could happen as a catastrophe in the form of a nuclear or biological collapse but also as a humble, quotidian event hiding its true nature until it’s too late.
A FOREST
A FOREST consists of 2 videos, 2 photography series and 12 drawings.
The exploration of the social values at stake due to the potential dominance of Artificial Intelligence and the ideology behind this digital infrastructure’s leading investors.
20 RED LIGHTS
20 RED LIGHTS consists of 1 video and 3 series of 20 photographs each. It also includes a book published by La Virreina/La Fabrica.
Finance is the key technology for the allocation of economic resources and as such, is the infrastructure that determines capitalism’s priorities. Deciding on the allocation of investment implies governing the frontiers of research and innovation, it means constructing the future. Financial Capitalism is the proper place to start any critical assessment of contemporaneity.
PROPOSITIONS
Technology is the key to understand photography and, more importantly, to understand the world in the 21st century. If art is to address the symbolic universe of its time, today technology has to be at its center. Photography’s stress is equivalent to the anxieties resulting from an abstract economy driven by digitalization. Intangible economy is today the most decisive, the one that ultimately influences the conditions of our existence.
What all the Propositions series have in common is the effort to critically assess contemporaneity through the exploration of technology and photography’s ability to renew its symbolic potency. Fighting for the renewal of photography’s iconic force is to fight against the temporality of a capitalist economy that hyper-accelerates the info-sphere and, by doing so, eliminates our ability for critique.
BINARY CODE
The substitution of the Fordist-industrial economy for a bio-cybernetic regime. Digitalization transforming nature and our relationship to the object. Materiality and the object in the age of abstraction; the connection between algorithms and reality, between mathematics and the real; the recreation of the object through digitalization; the paradoxical status of matter, the gesture, and the hand in a post-human society.
HEADS WILL ROLL
Its ultimate meaning: the impossibility to believe in hierarchical structures that stabilize the background and as a result the impossibility of constructing credible narratives.
TOUCH ME NOT
“Men become accustomed to listening to machines and talking to machines…no more face to face encounters, no more dialogue. In a perpetual monologue by which he escapes the anguish of silence and the inconvenience of neighbors, man finds refuge in the lap of technique, which envelops him in solitude and at the same time reassures him with all its hoaxes.”
Jacques Ellul. 1954
For the first time ever machines mediate human relationships and emotions. The digital-microelectronics is bridging the distance between the subject and the object, incorporating the machine into our body and our unconscious.
THE COLLECTION
“How can we understand this paradoxical privilege of speech over writing, of hearing over sight? What relationship thus exists between the power of speech and the power of the master?
Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 1981
“…we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”
Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, 1967
ONLY THE EPHEMERAL
Forensic testimonies of a past existence; vestiges of their inner structure as in decomposing organic bodies. While sophisticated and state-of-the-art not long ago, these machines evoke today a sense of fragility, archaism and trauma.
Rapid obsolescence in the working formats and techniques together with hugely superior access to archival resources is modifying the nature of artistic practice, accelerating its democratization and reinforcing its precarious nature.