Opening day
They say about the exhibition
The exhibition on metacommunication featuring Pietropaolo Cannisatraci, architect and lecturer, and Manuel Grillo, artist and designer, reveals some communicative paradoxes. The display of 15 different works on which the number 5 is grafted as a compositional rule, serves to challenge pre-established interpretative contexts.
An eloquent example, Grillo’s work Wrong Portraits. A software enabled to read only text files is given as input, a .jpg file i.e., an image. The software goes into error thus producing an incomprehensible result.
How does this happen?
What happens is that the compositional rule (i.e., the algorithm) on which the software is built, does not know, nor does it “allow for understanding,” any image.
We can transpose the same argument to what happens between two people trying to converse without understanding each other. Each starts from different interpretive assumptions. Socrates in the 4th B.C. already argued for this assumption. Those who have preconstituted opinions are unlikely to open their minds to different opinions.
However, contemporary art and technology, make paradoxically obvious and simultaneously enigmatic, what we already know and often discuss, without being able to understand.
Every day starting at 6 p.m., Manuel Grillo will perform, interacting with the audience present, in order to unravel those interpretive paradoxes that the works themselves bring into play.
Gerardo Lo Russo
Calasso does not depart from Jung in assessing the number five as the transit, the means of remaining anchored to the earth while looking toward infinity and approaching heaven. In the Kabbalah and the Sefirotic tree, five stands exactly in the middle between earth and heaven, bringing man downward and showing him the height of infinity. Meanwhile, Dionysus savors the fruits of the earth and the vine to see in the power of the divine juice an enhanced reality, which the senses without such aid do not perceive because they are firmly anchored in the earth alone. Ulysses puts plugs in the ears of the rest of men and binds himself to hear the siren song. The “I” is made of sirens, and their song opens to doubt and knowledge the intermediate world that stands between men and the absolute. Grillo does what an artist must while looking at five: he seeks this augmented reality in science and cybernetics. He transmutes the stone of the world’s origins into the sister stone that the hand of men repurposes as a duplicate of creation to approach the absolute; God consolidated light and energy in his stone: men repurpose it by concentrating the energy of their machines into its equivalent representation. The man faber, and his technรฉ, works creation through his five fingers and with the thought that with the five takes us out into the world and up into the empyrean.
Alessandro D’Ercole
The artists
An architect in the Renaissance sense of the word since the 1980s, I have turned my passion for art into a transdisciplinary research on creativity, on what motivates and actualizes it. Put like that, it sounds simple-and perhaps in its essence it is. An intermediate outcome of this path, also implemented in the teaching career and presented at numerous conferences and foreign contexts, has been the understanding that one can be a performer by creating the conditions for other creatives to be performers, thus fostering the actualization of their potential. This probably motivates the intellectual and emotional attunement with figures of the caliber of Alessandro d’Ercole and Gerardo Lo Russo, not surprisingly present among the promoters of this initiative.
Pierpaolo Cannistraci
Artist and designer. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome in painting. Subsequently, he obtains a second degree in Technological and Multimedia Arts, with a thesis on the poetics of anthropologist Gragory Bateson and multitouch interactive technology. In 2016 he obtained a professional diploma as a software developer. Since 2019 he has collaborated with the Accademia Dei Romani directed by Gerardo Lo Russo, former director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. He has exhibited in Italy and China, participating in the first International Symposium of Contemporary Art in Chongqing. Currently his work questions the relationship between Art & New Technologies.
Manuel Grillo
The works on display
Word to the artists
< And yes, the whole thing is in the relationship. As in a journey beyond space and time, reading the title of your exhibition and reverting to the last sentence I quoted, “the Love that moves the Sun and the other Stars” > Michela Tobiolo thus blesses this dynamic project of ours. I would complete with the Michelangelo epigraph engraved on the lintel of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Valle Giulia, Rome: “Questo Sol m’arde e questo m’innamora.”
Stars, moon, cosmos are the first quotations that make up the thematic junction (NodeLab matrix anyone?) and revolving around the three pivots of the “invisible relations” that make up the logo. First, some number-based coincidences 5, followed by the relationship between mind, heart and Moon (from the Romantic vision to the “seat of the lost intellect”) and to close an inner “search” for the Absolute (represented by the magnifying glass). The communicative genesis (and let’s not
forget that the eponymous, and far more profound, biblical text opens precisely the PENTA-THEUCH) stems from a popular saying that from the very beginning proved adherent to the meaning of any search: “Aim for the moon…bad luck you will have seen the stars.” Oh yes, here is the title with a thousand reminders: “And still you have seen the stars!” because we have always aimed for the moon…
A final note. The project, for me, has been a “dynamic” reality; from the premises with which it was decided, it has in fact developed through continuous creative expansions, resulting in a fantastic and highly stimulating experience. This is why I chose a dynamic palette, relying on film clips (from early silent film to computer video clips) as the semiotic referral to what I wanted my content to be. The whole thing may seem like a jumble of notionalistic quotations, haphazardly pulled from the memory of experience. Instead, it is intended to propose a non-random cognitive path, stimulated in its reflections also by the reported historical segments. Just as Michela Tobiolo says, “one must see the relationships”; what links, for example, Ariosto’s Orlando to the story of Pink Floyd, and which of the two stories is truer, beyond time and space? Can a four-hundred-year-old fantasy be a universal metaphor, a precursor to a contemporary event? The CELLULOID, then, travels thus: it has been, for this time, my pen or my palette and by virtue of this choice the graphic quality of the medium is not important… indeed, inaccuracies make functional cloning platonically more acceptable. All in accordance with the maieutic method (that of Socrates, so to speak), that is, posing as a mental stimulus to help one find in oneself the ultimate meaning (of oneself and of things….) The Demiurge is, however, safe and sufficiently defiled.
Pierpaolo Cannistraci
The year 2021 is the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death. Starting from the entrance of the exhibition space, the public is invited to follow a path from hell, 2011, to 2021 (heaven). Turning point is 2016, the year of purgatory. 2 cycles of 5 years, as 5 is the compositional form of the videos of my counterpart in this bipersonal exhibition. A space/time loop that begins and ends at the threshold of the entrance/exit door. Exiting the exhibition to re-enter the cave. In the heart, the awareness, of having nonetheless, seen the stars.
Manuel Grillo
