Vincenzo Fiore Marrese

Abstract

Research

“I (don't) know the spell” explores our inner border between ration and emotion through the lens of Internet technologies, posing questions on the dividing line between the performance art and the magic act. In this work, I used walking as an art practice.

For my performance, I cast a spell according to instructions in an old manuscript of magic. Then I broadcast my action on Instagram in a temporary account that I will delete after after a few hours. The idea is to model a collision between magical thinking and the world of information technologies built upon rational frameworks. The audience will experience this collision, and the art insider would appreciate the boundaries of the performance act compared with the magical one. With "magical thinking", I mean:

"the belief that one's (...) actions (...) can influence the course of events in the material world. Magical thinking presumes a causal link between one's inner, personal experience and the external physical world. Examples include beliefs that the movement of the Sun, Moon, and wind or the occurrence of rain can be influenced by one's thoughts or by the manipulation of some type of symbolic representation of these physical phenomena."[1]

Information technologies are a rational tool, but the use of the Internet seems to improve emotional behaviours. I will explore this theme through my performance using Instagram doing a magical act, a spell. There are similitudes between "magical thinking" and "performance art". First, in "performance art", the artwork is an action that sometimes involves objects. Second, the idea that art could be related to magic or rituals is intriguing. Historically, this kind of connection appears in the specific field of "performance art". I will explore through my performance the relationship between magic and performance doing magic and performative action at the same time. My action is artistic, but a magic action too. I'm doing it according to the instruction of a book of spells.

The topic is labyrinthine. Is magical thinking emotional? Are technologies rational? Is there a connection between a magic action and an artistic one? How do I take steps in the world according to the information that surrounds me? I (don't) know, could be the answer.

Research

Is it possible to change the rules of a game through the same game's rules? Playing, you cannot break the rules. But if you are allowed to change the rules, you can easily break the rules by rule. And if someone disagrees, you can always say that's the rule. Part of my art workflow implies, generally, the reading of academic papers around my topics. One of the most pertinent papers on my research interest for this artwork is "Law against the Rule of Law: Assaulting Democracy" by Ivan Ermakoff[1]. This text inspired me with the title of the piece[2]. The text is around this question, «How do authoritarian contenders use the law to dismantle democratic institutions?»[3]. In my artwork, I don't have the aim to show skills. I work on the edge of the ordinary, changing meanings and merging direct reference to the topic of the artwork (like the barricade tape) with some more related to the intuition (the sunflower not yet unpacked) or more elusive (the x-rays).

Research

It is an artwork about identity fragmentation and the perception of the body through Internet technologies. The context is about cities in different time zones. Berlin is in the UTC+1, and Kyiv is in the UTC+2 time zone. There is a time zone gap of one hour. When people talk through the Internet, this gap seems to disappear. It seems strange. They remain in their cities but, at the same time, they are elsewhere. They are able not only to talk but also to see each other. They experienced a sort of bodies presence. But in what kind of space and time, this connection happen? It looks like they are close, but they are still far. This situation reminded us of the “Achilles and the Tortoise” paradox. It seems that technology can fill this gap through the fragmentation of ourselves. We are not communicating directly. Each of us communicates with a mathematical representation of the other that appears through the machine. Despite the time zone gap, we live the same present. But it is a present that seems possible and impossible, at the same time because only the fragmentation of ourselves allows us to communicate with each other. This paradoxical situation is experienced daily, by a lot of people, for different reasons. We felt the urgency to explore it through the prism of our art practice.

Research

What kind of questions could performance art pose to the relationship between people and the social world while happening through social media channels?

After 50 years, performance art is still a contemporary art medium. But, is it a medium, like painting or sculpture? According to J. Westerman «performance is not (and never was) a medium»[1], but «a set of questions (...) about how art relates to people and the wider social world»[2]. I imagined that these questions are some FAQ about posting on Facebook as an online social world. I assign these questions to some famous performance artists, as fake quotes, printing them on some panels. I place these panels in the space of the theatre room. I move my body through the panels, creating some electronic sounds related to my movements by sensors. These sounds are related to the idea of how our data creates information in the social world. In this case, pure useless, creative information. I have a golf-club with me, is a reference to a success-story about performance post on Facebook by a professional golfer called Rick Shiels. With this golf-club, I destroy the panels with fake quotes. It refers to the history of performance art, through the piece called "paper breakthrough" by S. Murakami. But this action to destroy the panels happen with the lights off when the audience could not see. So they can see only the result, not the process. During the performance, the lights are off and on, alternatively. I construct a plot of the performance, and the main action is not visible.

Research

Two artists share the same space at the same moment. They act differently, and their actions appear not related. But because they are here and now, together, they start to collide. And in this collision, a new meaning comes up. It is related to the relationship between the body, and the objects as an ontological category. From one side, the attempt to dissolve the presence of the object through the movement, and the sounds. From the other side, the attempt to combine the body, and space, with the objects. This piece show, in a sense, how it is possible to found harmony from two different points of view, that appear as two different worlds of experience. It's time. It's time to collide.

Research

Two years ago, Facebook released to the public its guidelines about what is forbidden to post, the “Community Standards”, with a section on “Violence and Criminal Behavior”. Violence relating to aggressivity and Facebook rules the idea of violence. I found Facebook's rules related to the self-domestication hypothesis and the media, the Internet, that I used for my artwork. I created a tension between the media itself and a meta-vision of its rules. I created a video that could be engaging for the Facebook audience (it is not so long, based on movements, and so on), but that included part of the text from the “Violence and Criminal Behavior” rules in itself. As you will see in the video, this text became part of my environment. During my action, I played a sound based on synthetic voices of chimpanzees during a fight, again something between real and virtual. I worked on chimpanzees voices because chimpanzees are very close to us, but, at the same time, they are animals that could be aggressive. In the video, you can see and old “tile stove”. I pull out from the stove some ethernet cables, and you can see a light source. I liked to create a connection between the stove, as a source of energy, and the Internet that hosting Facebook. The Internet is a potential source of energy that needs to be discerned, under the light of critical thinking.

Research

“Body’s Law” is an action about a state of transition of the body. Transition means a passage from one point to another. It explores a social state of transition from the state of detention in a jail to the state of being part of a society.

Transition means a bridge-state, a state of passage from one point to another. During this state, a subject, like a body, is not entirely in the starting nor in the ending point of something: it is in between.

In this action, I explore a social state of transition. It is the state of passage from two other states. The starting point is the social state of detention of a body in a jail. The ending point is the social state of a body being part of a civil community, a society. If we presume that a body, generally, is part of a society before entering in jail, we can speak about this state of transition as a state were the body came back into an original social state, so it is a sort of “reintegration”. The action was, in fact, inspired by the reading of a handbook called “Reentering Your Community” a book developed by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, an agency of the United States of America.

The state of detention entails, in fact, the idea that the society needs to take control of some people by control their bodies movements and by containing their bodies inside a building, the prison. The level of the control on the body's movement is related to the penalty that the society believe that is necessary for certain people. For example, if the level of the penalty is high then the body’s could be incarcerated in a very small jail, also without contacts with others prisoners. In the community movements of the bodies looks like free, I mean free on purpose, but, often there are related to the social convention. But, obviously, there is a quite big difference in a body constrained inside a jail from a body constrained inside a social convention.

So, in this action body’s movements is a way to point through an art form, the dance. It’s a way to include an artistic purpose in the action. But action art is not the dance. Artistic action often involves the body of the artist and if an artist uses the body focussing on the movements it looks like that artist want to do dancing. However, action art is not dance nor theatre nor other well-defined forms of art, but in some case entails movements. So, in that cases, the body’s movement is a way to point to an art form, the dance, but remaining in a not well-defined form of art as the action art is. To remain in a not well-defined or not well-explored form of art, the artist uses the body’s movement focussing on the natural language of his body rather to a dance style.

During the action, some of this movements generate some electronic sounds in real time thanks to some electronic devices. The sound is related to movements because is a sort of metaphor of creation. The creation, in the meaning of creativity, is related to art but also to an action executed by the body in general. Again if in the action there are sounds it does not mean that is music, as a well-defined form of art, for example, the dance. The body’s movement generates sounds in real time like an outcome of the action, not with the purpose to make music. There are other sound sources that appear during the action, one is a synthetic voice and another is a sequence of sounds composed originally by the artist. The synthetic voice repeats some phrases taken from the handbook mentioned before. The sequence of sounds, actually, is something close to a music composition. Essentially the sound composition is in contrast with the sounds generates by the movements. It is recorded and it is created without the direct control of the body’s movements, so it is a metaphor of a sort of vital stream that burst into the state of transition without the possibility that you can shape it.

Body is an animal feature rather than a culture feature. To control a body inside a prison often we use technologies. But technologies are also essential in the relationships between bodies and community. Some features of the body are more related to the animal side than others. For example, the language is not related to the animal side as the body’s fluids, like saliva, drool. The artist uses his saliva to stick some paper sheets in the space around him: on the stage, on the wall, on windows etcetera. On the paper sheets, there are some phrases that represent the language: culture. These phrases were taken from the handbook mentioned before.

Research

“Suspended Sentence” is a piece about colonialism, pollution and exotic plants. It happens, generally, in botanical gardens. Some sounds that I recorded during my trip to Bangladesh create the core of the piece.

I developed this piece for botanical gardens and similar spaces. The idea is to add a temporary plant to the collection of the garden. It is an unusual plant, not a real one.

In Italian, my first language, the word "plant" has two meanings. The first meaning is "plant" as an organism. The second meaning is "map", typically "a map of a city". The unusual plant is "a map of a city". But this is an extraordinary map. Maps are, generally, pictures. In this case, sounds made the map. It is a "sound map of a city". It is a sound map that creates a perceptual contrast inside the environment of the garden. That is the reason why I work, primarily, with sounds. To enhance the perceptual contrast, I work on two different perceptual channels. The vision of the garden remains quite the same. The sounds that you hear in garden changes. What you see create a perceptual contrast with what you hear.

The city that I mapped with the sounds is Dhaka. Dhaka is the capital city of Bangladesh in Asia. I recorded some sounds from the city during my journey in Dhaka. I was in Dhaka to participate in a Biennal of Live Art. The sounds that I recorded were sounds from birds, traffic, demonstrations and prays. That sounds come from the categories of nature, technology, politics and religion: a complete set that could describe the sound environment of a city.

Generally, historic botanical gardens have exotic plants in their collections. Exotic plants, in the XIX century, comes from colonies. Dhaka could appear an "exotic" country, at least for people of XIX century. That is the reason why I use sounds coming from Dhaka. To make a connection and to create a reflexion about nature, city and the idea of colonisation.

Another reason is that Dhaka, according to some research, is one of the most polluted cities in the world. Put the sounds of traffic comes from a city like Dhaka inside a botanical garden, is another way to create some reflexion about the environment and the climatic changes caused by our actions. During this action, I also use my body. I move from one point to another, from a three to another three, and during my way, I create some electronic sounds, in real time, related to my movements. The metaphor of the movement refers to the idea that a lot of pollution is created to move bodies from one point to another. Scientific studies say that pollution is related to several thin particles suspended in the air. That is the reason why I use the word "suspended" in the title.

But this word could be another meaning related to law matters. In these terms "suspended sentence" is a law sentence. This sentence is special. It will not be applied if this person maintains is behaviour legal. This concept is particularly interesting for my artistic research that is, at present, around the relation with body and politics. The thin particles, related to the pollution, altered our environments and our bodies. We need to find an alternative. Humanity has a sort of "suspended sentence" related to this topic.

At the end of the action, I donate to the audience a printed card.

On the first side of the card, there is a picture. It is a picture of a leaf covered by dust. I shot this picture in Dhaka. On the other side, there is the phrase "Suspended Sentence".

Abstract