Rita Kersting, Bianco-Valente, 2003
Neapolitan artists duo Giovanna Bianco and Pino Valente – Bianco-Valente for short – explore the ways in which eye, brain and memory interrelate. Their installations, video works, texts and drawings draw on scientific experiments on perception and transform findings on biochemical substances, structures of sense organs and brain performance into simple, artistically provocative experimental arrangements.
Perceptual distortion, the fragmentation of images and the lengthy reactive chains a thought can trigger are typical problems investigated by Bianco-Valente. In technically sophisticated installations they reconstruct chemically proven cause-effect principles of human perception (“Machine is dreaming”, 2001).
Bianco-Valente take it for granted that machines will develop consciousness in future and be able to interact independently and spontaneously with the external world. The dualisms of body and mind, of nature and artificiality thus resolved are examined in their work. A work in progress that seems analogue against this backdrop, yet hints at a potential infinity of chain reactions, consists of a strip of paper several meters long in a heap, and on which Bianco-Valente write down day by day thoughts and images that come to mind. The loosely arranged paper object is reminiscent of a brain challenging viewers to check out a few of its centimeters and cast a fragmentary glimpse into the infinite imaginings of the artists.
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Taken from Reisefreiheit catalog, Neue Kunst in Hamburg, 2003