Critic texts

'Nell'era del telefonino l'arte è mobile' by Valentina Bernabei on La Repubblica (Ita).

'Gallery in Your Pocket':An Interview on Rhizome with Chiara Passa.

'Not Here Not There' Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Volume 18 Issue 6.

'Una galería de arte en el bolsillo’ by Stefano Caldana & Roberta Bosco, El Pais (Esp)

'Virtualidad y dispositivos móviles: nuevas posibilidades expositivas', by Lorea Iglesias. (Esp)

'ART IN THEORY' Luxflux: Intervista a Chiara Passa (ita)

'Suoni E Immagini Nello Spazio' Digicult (ita)

Chiara Passa Responses to five questions about digital culture posed by Lev Manovich.

1. We live in 'remix' culture. Are there limits to remixing? Can anything be remixed with anything? Shall there be an ethics of remixing?

1. We live in the age of information—rather, of petroleum. We summarize, remix, cut and paste all at the speed of present-day communication. Information today is transmitted through cybernetic energy in an instant. But why place limits on this “remixing culture?” Actually I would define culture as “modus vivendi,” the more it’s existed in society, from the beginning of time. The problem is that today’s society, having reached an equilibrium in well-being, is stagnant. Therefore, it will be difficult to see new advancements (in all fields) until the end of the petroleum age. Only when a new age begins will we see innovations in these fields, and thus a new way to communicate, walk, remix, write, make art, eat and maybe even make love.

2. In the last few years information visualization became increasingly popular and it attracted the energy of some of the most talented new media artists and designers. Will it ever become as widely used as type or photography - or will it always remain a tool used by professionals?

2. The visualization of information goes back quite a ways. Today, internet and digital media are at everyone’s disposal. The “web” phenomenon, in particular, sets the difference between “high and low technology.” An artist, a web designer and “the richest man in the world” will use the same software, without difference—a unique technology—to create a website: Flash, Dreamweaver, Front Page, html, vrml, wml, Java, php, etc. Internet technology attracts and diffuses itself easily between pop culture because it’s in the palm of everyone’s hand. While in cinema, it’s exactly that difference between “high and low technology” that maintains the highest level of business. The knowledge of means, money and professionalism make a difference and create that “gap” that, according to me, will always be there between professionals, users and “lovers of the trade”. The more this “unique technology” diffuses itself, the more the “gap” will widen, because there will always be less to make up the difference. Also if, in my opinion, this “unique technology” is placed in the right hands, it can do miracles.

3. Today cinema and literature continue the modern project or rendering human psychology and subjectivity, while fine art seems to be not too concerned with this project. How can we use new media to represent contemporary subjectivity in new ways? Do we need to do it?

3. To me it seems that, since the beginning, cinema and art have both represented psychology and subjectivity, just in different ways and times. Actually, I’ve noticed that lately, the cinema is becoming more conceptual than narrative (I’m thinking of the films Ferro 3 and 2046, or directors such as Lars Von Trier, Lynch, etc.), and art more narrative: the interactive video installments of the Studio Azzuro come to mind, that to do a metaphor of reality, they become familiar with their installations using narrative scenes. Contemporary art (digital) doesn’t need to represent human subjectivity (and yet it represents it in the form of video games) but needs to be “represented!”.

4. 'Blobs' in architecture and design - is this a new 'international style' of software society, here to stay, - or only a particular effect of architects and designers starting to use software?

4. More than just a style, a “blob” is geometry revised through fractions and algorithms (existing since the 70’s). Today, maybe for designers, artists, architects, and “lovers of the trade”, it’s one of many instruments; a means of expression. And like all means, it’s not enough to be candidly overpowering, otherwise we would always see more works that used this process of the technical, to the detriment of the message.

5. While the tools to produce one own media have been more accessible and more powerful, people never consumed more commercial media than now. Thus the essential division between 'media amateurs' and 'media professionals' which got established in the beginning seems to be as strong as ever. In short, the 1960s idea that new technologies will turn consumers into producers failed over and over again. Will this situation ever change? What will be the next stage in media consumption after MP3 players, DVD recorders, CD burners, etc, etc, etc.?

5. Surely the production and consumption of media is increased because the wealth of contemporary society has increased (especially that of the west). I feel at the same time producer and consumer, in the sense that I use the above mentioned technology. Therefore, the 60’s intuition hasn’t failed. It’s the way in which technology is used that makes the difference. For example, a film made by “media amateurs” can be much more interesting, participate in many more festivals, and can be more exposed to the public than a Hollywood production, notwithstanding the “professionalism” (and the budget) of that production. In fact, “amateurs” (artists, bloggers, activists, journalists, etc.) publish and obtain more success than media professionals. “I read Indymedia and la Repubblica; it’s a shame you can’t find the first at a newsstand.” Today more than ever, that which makes the difference between “media amateurs” and “media professionals” is money.

On "Calling a conversation in universe"

In “Calling a conversation in universe” camera lens, isolated in a neutral background, are animated in continuously different versions: variations bordering on abstractions and research on the composition of images. The “attracted” camera lens, look inquisitively at each other, court and couple with each other to the rhythm of electronic music, especially created for the animation by musician Mokamed. In short, the usual, everyday “war” inside the real and virtual one. In “Time bomb the love”, missiles change into basic architectures, through vertical-horizontal movements, to the rhythm of technical music. Thus, the missile, a symbol of breaking through space becomes a living space, a mobile unit. Missiles and camera lenses an imaginary pairing, highlight two aspects which are closely related to us: one is tied to a more “intimate” realm, sexuality, the other tied to the social situation with wars taking place, distinguished by missiles filmed by camera lens, which we use for information. Therefore, camera lenses: photography but also military, are attracted to each other to clash, and as the dynamics of war consists in waits and bombings, camera lenses and missiles couple and explode expressing the climate of tension we live in everyday. The challenge is undoubtedly the use of new technologies and the media, which give us the possibility to “freeze” fragments belonging to a “data-image” flow (fluid, unstable) which is always changing. My animations draw upon the speed of communication to create a final result, the fruit of unpredictable sense moving and sliding.

- L’oading – genetically modified videogames-

I've worked with Chiara Passa this year in occasion of the “L' oading” exhibition, from me curated at the Civic Gallery of Contemporary Art of Siracusa "Montevergini". Objective of the exhibition was the recognition of the more interesting artistic experimentations in the field of the digital artworks, in Italy and worldwide, using like topic and thread conductor the videogame. I have chosen to insert in my selection the animation "Calling a Conversation in Universe", realized by Chiara in 2002, because draft, to my judgment, it’s a meaningful work to comprise the influence, aesthetic and conceptual, who the videogames have on the contemporary visual culture. In this Chiara’s project, the aesthetic of the computers games is used to simulate one metaphorical history of love, a virtual courtship "who happens between two ‘photographic lens’. One in front of the other, they scan obsessing, attracted and they are rejected to one with each other. They are accompanies with a cold and hypnotic electronic sonorous. The reference to the more intimate sphere of the human communication, the sexuality, joins to a reflection about the “seduction”, often deceptive, of the mass media. Chiara uses the new technologies to comprise the intrinsic language. She never was overwhelmed and ingenuously fascinating from the digital medium; experiments in rigorous and personal way on the unknown creative possibilities who they offer to her. Medium, who too much often we see to become the only message in art works that seem to ingenuously celebrate the progress of the technique. Her animations are characterized from a constant study on the shape, geometric and often essential, joined to a three-dimensional and dynamics vision of the virtual space. Her installations force the spectator to be confronted with a other ‘oddity space’, with an ‘digital elsewhere’, it is by now our quarter dimension, one perspective who is impossible to ignore. Because the binary code and the world wide web are modifying the man and its visions, its language and its "symbolic shapes". And the artists, as the sociologists of the average teach to us, from Mc Luhan to De Kerchove, are the most effective antibodies of the technological and scientific progress; they sniff in advance the implications and the risks, the riches and the dangers. In the Italian panorama the art work of Chiara Passa it is shaped like a search outside from the common one, in a moment in which the artistic experimentations with new technologies arduously still not to being accepted from the public, great part of the critic and above all from the market.

Valentina Tanni. Civic gallery of Contemporary Art , Siracusa 2003

"ART AND CRITIQUE" (Arte e Critica), October-December 2001

Chiara Passa moves inside the digital planet, inventing virtual architectures, all with a circular geometric matrix and vividly using colours; mainly reds, acid greens, electric yellows. Compressed missiles, but also buildings referring to utopian architecture, spaces, which are apparently ascetic, futuristic, full of symbolically loaded truths: “The circle is the symbol of life for me,” says the artist. “It is that place inside of which everything has the same distance from the centre.” A meditation on living, which becomes a meditation on being and, lately, on being an artist involved in the Pipeline project. The project is an interactive four story house thought of as the artist’s house and designed as a place for everyone, a space of extreme freedom where the basic decor does not hinder, on the contrary, it highlights the purpose of the single areas, from the area of mental and spiritual exercise to the area of love joining. Universal themes and symbolism are vividly united, the images and videos link in the dimension of objects giving birth to energetic “compressions” of sense.

by Daniela Bigi.

COMPRESSIONS

The present communications’ system has allowed the passing from a passive to an active function of the informative message. Therefore, our role as information consumers has undergone an individuation process. Chiara Passa makes us ponder the mechanisms of this interaction, how each one of us can choose, manipulate and reinsert data taken from the ether, today. Chiara highlights the possibilities which modern digital technology gives us, today, to block and dispose of the information flow to our liking. Compressions is composed of extrapolated and manipulated stills, of a series of frozen images and forced to collapse until they loose their original identity. Thus, Chiara Passa, deviates the correct decoding of the missile-message, which is clearly visible in the computer created video movie named “time bomb the love” (’98). In order to dilate the transmission of a different image, in which shapes recompose themselves in bare and futuristic architectural prospects. The new architecture-message thus becomes independent from the initial source and acquires three dimensionality in space, like in “the acid house” (’99) a ceramic work of a house plunged in a natural context which accentuates its alienating dimensions. All of this is transmitted with a winsome and easily understood chromatic language, also because it is close to the visual grammar used by advertising companies, web designers and largely manifested in music videos. It could be the most effective and popular of the esthetical research of the last years.

Daniela Lotta. L’Officina, Vicenza 2000

Time Bomb the Love!

Looking at the images created by Chiara Passa one is immediately struck by the extreme synthesis and by the intense colours with which the subject matter is depicted: whether it is missiles isolated in a neutral background and proposed to us in continuously different versions. In this case the research on one single theme repeats itself in order to explore different formal solutions, continuous variations bordering abstraction and an elaborate research on image composition. This is how a link with some aspects of the painting tradition surface (symmetrical frontal compositions, colours applied à plat), as well as, through the use of innovations introduced by the recent computer technology. As a matter of fact the compositions are composed of a kind of blocked image, a single frame, that is isolated and blocked. The challenge is undoubtedly the one with new computer technology, which gives us the opportunity of freezing fragments belonging to an ever-changing data flow. In this new scenario the still image can substitute the camera shot, as well as, aspects of traditional painting, immobility thick with aura,. Thus a deep contact is created among the most recent technological innovations and fluid, liquid, unstable and ever-changing mass media images. The speed and conceptual “lightness” of the nineties need an ability to make things elastic and originally mix information coming from data banks available to us: mass media. They are a constant background of our lives, and they are now brought to the art world in order to produce a new and modern outcome. Chiara Passa’s images live through this elasticity, picking up the speed of communication to generate and end result which is the fruit of unexpected “shifts” and slides of sense.

Guido Molinari. Galleria Studio Ercolani, Bologna 1999

"Pipeline Project"

Pipeline, straight line, chipset, actually “virtual”, is a project of a cylindrical house four stories high. It originates by a digital manipulation of a missile, a symbol of breaking and space exploring. inside it have obtained another "space", a dwelling place or rather, a "super place", a home for anybody. The whole project, (built with Macromedia Flash, 3d Studio and Quick Time) is interactive and entirely walkable by the spectator (it could never be a "non-place"). Pipeline Is a home (artist's) which denies the concept of "absolute ownership", it Is a temporary mental space which fits in with spectator's needs just when it turns out that space is recurrent. Mouse exploring in the first visual display Ieads to interactive signs that bring the view of other architectural projects of cylindrical houses, created by the manipulation of some Russian, American and Arabian missiles.
Clicking on the red missile, the "enter" button (In a continuous becoming home, “in my slang compression") always in the first display you can enter the elevator that leads to other four floors. On the first floor there is a super-essential bedroom, almost a “Zen” one...surfing with mouse over the bed you can listen two people making love.
On the second floor there is a lounge (a little "theatrical") with a round sofa winding all around the place. Moving in this room you meet a interactive hairdryer and if click it, you’ll listen to shoot!
On the third floor we are in the relax room, ‘projection-study’, watching a interactive ‘Buddha film’, changing in a waterfall; and in the end, on the fourth floor we find the ‘balance room’, with an egg inside containing the external prototype of a yellow house keeping its balance on a single point, interacting with equal and counter forces generated by constant egg oscillations.