Maetin Verdross – status novembre 2015 update x Gaetano Mainenti
gratwandern SMACH 2015
gratwandern SMACH 2015
I Walk Straight Ahead performative exercise, tracked on a map; Florence; 5.5km, 1h 20min; 2014 / Rome; 6km, 1h 25min; 2013
I Walk Straight Ahead performative exercise, tracked on a map; London; 11km, 2h 20min; 2014
Declaration of performance printed A4 document; 2015
I have never experieced war. I am not directly, personally, physically traumatized by anything. I am traumatized by the lack of trauma. I cannot express my trauma, or non-trauma, other than by this. If other artists’ work is about war, describing it as they have experienced it, as personal, fractured, subjective, individual microcosmic stories, my work is war, as I am experiencing it: neutral, emotionless, aparently objective, rational or rationalized, all-encompassing, the macro-story; told from a desktop, black letters on white paper, no blood, no dirt, a document, archivable.
I History is not so much about facts as it is about storytelling. We have a preset manner of perceiving, understanding, processing, interpreting and emotively responding to historical phenomena, all of which are defined by the way they are being reported to us by different media, taught to us at home and at school, and by the moral setup and keys that are being installed in our minds. Terms like World War II, Iraq War or Arab Spring elicit a series of concrete images, emotive atmospheres and personal as well as social standpoints or positions in our head, together with a judgment and categorization that is not product of a reflection but a recalling of a preexisting model correspondent to the respective phenomenon ready in our memory. Declaring these events acts of performative art means shifting them from their natural field of action to another, which is the world of art, a pedestal. As a spectator, I am forced to see the phenomenon under a new light, through a different filter, as something that it is not, forced to abandon the frame that I have grown accustomed to seeing it in, the frame that carries the load of connotations I usually fetch when confronted with the phenomenon, forced to look at it framed differently, framed in a way that appears odd, surprising, unusual, disturbing to me. This radical change of context annihilates my previous approach to the phenomenon, and in order to establish a new opinion and relationship to the event as a piece of art rather than an episode out of history, I must look at it anew, as if I had never seen or heard of it before and I didn’t know what it is. This return to a neutral position before the phenomenon means the abolition of judgment, of classifying the phenomenon as good and bad: the event is simply and solely what it is, primarily, in the first instance, and only after that comes the attribution of positive or negative value. A war is not bad, a war is a war. An invention is not good, an invention is an invention. A crisis is not bad, a crisis is a crisis. Progress is not good, progress is progress. Regression is not bad, regression is regression.
II The declarations have two functions. first: they are a translation of a historical event to an act of performative art, and in so far represent a momentum of disorientation, inviting, maybe forcing, the spectator to question and renew his perspective of the relative historical event. second: they are isolating, reporting (as in “quoting”) and insofar affirming in a non-valuing manner episodes of the history of mankind as appellative with reference to the history of mankind itself; they are denominating phenomena of the history of mankind that exemplarily characterize the nature of mankind and the dynamics that naturally and inevitably occur during the unreeling of history of mankind. They are declaring these phenomena pieces of performative art, in as they could be taken as archetypal models for the representation of the history of mankind, and therefore already are, themselves and in the first place, if shifted/(repositioned) from the history book to the art pedestal, the artwork in question. N.B.: The declarations are neither odes nor denunciations to the events they are concerning; they have no kind of valuating character, positive or negative.
Declaration of performance printed and signed A4 document, declaration No. 01; 2015
Still Life videographed long term performance, site specific; 2015
Still Life videographed long term performance, site specific; 2015
Burning Status Quo (No Evidence) (physical session) performative act; 2015
Burning Status Quo (No Evidence) (digital session) performative act; 2015
Countdown to the end of Contemporary online / installation; 2015
“Art is, maybe today more than ever, an imprint of the clinical record of the world that produces it. If art is going through a phase of manierism, it means that the world is going through a phase of manierism.” the artist on the Abolition Art series “Oh well yes, art! If only one was able to set it free... I’d love to set it free.” Eva Kaufmann; private mail, Feb. 20th 2015 “Non c’é più nessun Borghese da traumatizzare; [...] forse alle porte c’è un nuovo Rinascimento” Gloria Vallese; testo introduttivo alla mostra “At Home”, 2011 “Secondo me l’arte contemporanea ha finito il suo ciclo, e adesso si ricomincia da capo. Non so da dove, non so se dai graffiti delle caverne...” Francesco Bonami; Il Testimone S05E01 (MTV)
Countdown to the end of Contemporary online / installation; 2015
Autotyping automatically generated text; 2014
The project features five poem-length excerpts chosen and isolated from a pool of approximately 5400 words generated on various smartphones owned by different people by randomly choosing one of the words suggested by the device. Passages that had not been composed in English were translated. Where necessary, the grammar was corrected. No further modifications were taken.
According to The Telegraph¹, the number of people worldwide owning and using a smartphone will surpass 2 billion in 2016. The United Nations estimate world population 7.4 billion² for that same year. American anthropologist Amber Case defines the smartphone as a body appendage. If we take a closer look at the role this device plays in our lives, we will find that, more than an appendage of the body, it is an appendage of the mind. If we then take a closer look at the role our lives play for the device, we will find that the relationship we share with it is not so much of parasitic nature in our favor as it is a form of symbiosis. It is a giving and taking of information, it is trading data with data. We feed our everyday biographies into the device that is eager to learn because it was designed that way. It starts out as a blank paper, an empty black box entirely lacking personality, and it becomes, over time and more with every piece of information we provide, a mould of ourselves, the container of a distorted portrait, a smudged finger print. [Browser histories, passwords, GPS locations, favorite shops and bars and restaurants, books we read, music we play, faces we photograph, places we work at, schools we went to, numbers we call, our jogging routes, blood pressure, finger prints, holiday destinations, shopping lists, Facebook likes, our most appreciated porn sites and newspaper articles, medications ordered online, weight and shoe size, political parties we support, toothpaste brands we favor – it all sediments on the ground of the black box.] This matrix of information lies hidden in the depths of the device’s memory as a sediment. If the system is stimulated, it would reproduce it following the algorithms it was programmed to execute. For instance, every word of written text we supply is stored and classified by the operating system so as to create a personalized dictionary enabling the machine to anticipate, suggest and correct passages of text while we compose it. If now we cease our part of the process letting the software compose text fully on its own by simply accepting every single one of its suggestion one after the next, the smartphone produces an output single-handedly which is a blend of the preinstalled thesaurus, vocabulary the user has added and affirmed and a dynamic system of syntactic rules used by the device as a grid to arrange the content. The product is, of course, casual and free of contextual meaning or relevance beyond merely being the overlapping of mechanical text composition and autobiographical fragments. It is only in the eye of the reader (be it the owner of the device or somebody close, be it a complete stranger) where the generated text assumes a strange kind of poetry, where it is attributed a significance that cannot have been intended by the machine in its recount, where structures of the life it unavoidably quotes are being identified and interpreted. It so becomes a perverse biography written by a machine – both highly subjective and highly objective at the same time – that, digging deep into our virtual subconscious, mercilessly throws the facts of our own lives into our faces, wrapped into a code that has no key. Like a caricature, the product of this automatic typing must be approached with caution. Almost as if it was an ancient legend, the plot is fiction and contains but a spark of truth.
— ¹ “Quarter of the world will be using smartphones in 2016”; Sophie Curtis on The Telegraph UK Online, 11 Dec 2014 ² World Population Prospects, United Nations Secretariat
Autotyping automatically generated text; 2014
text 01 I am a beautiful person. I am beautiful and a half. I am a beautiful day, and I am half a year. As a good friend, you should try and become the same, and then delete this communication.
text 04 My life is my presence at the special assistance service. My life is my presence at the canteen. The world doesn’t seem to be at a good price this afternoon. My life is my presence in the world. Give me a call on the way and I will become completely different.
text 02 I have never had a problem with my life. The world is full of houses with eat-in kitchens and paradise corners. The world is full of gasoline. But I have never had a problem with my life. Good luck with the latest version of your own home, and I am not the problem. The world is full of people like you. The world is beautiful, but I have never had a problem with my life. It’s just a saying.
text 05 Invite me to the opening of your life. I have never ridden a bike. I have never seen a movie that gave me pleasure. There is nothing that can be done. I don’t know how to do it. Proceed to purchase of your opinion on who my first love is. I expect it in my room.
text 03 Actually, I didn’t understand if you are in pain? I feel love for all kinds of people. I have recently ordered time and space, such a lot of money is on the way. We offer free tire safety if you spend all your money ordering fun. The big question is whether you are in pain. I am sorry!
Autotyping automatically generated text, text 02; 2014
Autotyping automatically generated text, text 03; 2014
Maetin Verdross – status novembre 2015 update x Gaetano Mainenti