Diana Gianquitto - Bianco-Valente: What comes before art, 200
7Suspension. A skipped heartbeat. A momentary loss of breath. Standing before a work by Bianco-Valente triggers in the observer the same instinctive mental and psychic short-circuit felt on discovering a new reality: an elastic ebbing of consciousness as it withdraws from the flat plane of being, to be more clearly reflected in a heightened, vivid awareness. Vivid and incandescent, just like the chromatic magma of red-orange fluorescence and electric greens that sets ablaze the pixels of the videos and the surface of the images of the duo from Potenza and Naples. As if one became a tabula rasa again, waiting to be filled with information, as if one saw reality for the first time or, rather, as if one perceived, for the first time, its lucid meaning.
Perception: it is precisely this neuronal mechanism - one of the most essential functions, to which every living being equipped with a brain or a pre-cerebral apparatus owes the ability to interact with external reality - that lies at the very heart of Giovanna Bianco and Pino Valente's research. But the two creators' approach to the subject is markedly innovative compared to that of other artists up to now. Coming from different and apparently (1) opposite backgrounds - she from humanities studies in languages and cinema, he from scientific studies in geology - the two artists, who were "born into art" together, thanks to a mutual falling in love that sparked a creative and existential spark even before, and even more than, a sentimental one, pour into their research that fullness of perspective that only the integration and perfect interweaving of two distinct points of view can guarantee.
Psyche and science: this is the duality of their skills, and it is to this formidable two-pronged operating tool that we owe the twofold sensation one feels in front of one of their works: on one hand, a "cooling" of emotions, brought back to the zero degree of their birth, that is, to the moment when they are still and only unconnoted perceptions, devoid of any positive or negative attributed value; on the other, an accelerated, propulsive "heating up" of the suggestive, almost magical aura and of the communicative intensity of their images. A twofold feedback, as we said, and indeed the two registers of "cold" and "hot" proceed in perfect simultaneity and symbiosis; it isn't possible to feel the first without the second, and each inevitably and instantly refers back to the other: the two reactions cannot exist separately. And, as when handling ice and flame together, the sensation of one violently heightens the perception of the other. What is the source of this double communicative shockwave?
A close examination of their works reveals a surprising fact, which at the same time identifies their unprecedented distinctiveness: while the art of the past sought to be, alternately, either a faithful mimesis of reality - as in all the Realisms of the various eras - or a replica of the emotion it generated - as in Romanticism or Expressionism - or a biological study of its perception - as in Impressionism and Op Art - the art of Bianco-Valente instead manages to fulfil all three of these functions without identifying with any one of them. Their work, without wanting to be either an imitation of objectivity, or the expression of the subject's emotions, or a mechanistic perceptual study, recreates, in a way that can only be called demiurgic, another reality, a second nature. Thanks to a paradoxical use of technology - used to capture fragments of reality already "sabotaged" from the outset in their truthful correspondence to the source, by means of an use of equipment that accentuates, through filters, lenses, structural modifications, the image's indeterminacy and instability rather than mechanical high fidelity - their work carries the ambition of reconstructing a Second World in the laboratory (2), convincing and "objective" in its plausibility, at least as much as the original one.
The aim, however, is not to mimetically recreate the natural world, but to reconstruct a particular perception or "mental image" of it.
And this is served very well precisely by the deliberately imprecise, blurred use of technology, which in this way manages to reproduce images that, in their indeterminacy and their smudges, are in every way similar to those we experience in our memories or in the dream dimension. One might then be tempted to conclude that Bianco-Valente's work serves mainly as a vehicle for the artists' own subjective and emotional intimacy; but no - and this is precisely the key trait that sets the duo's research apart from other experiments in art history centred on the value of the Self, making it unmistakable. The presentation of these "mental images" to the viewer is, in fact, not "emotionalised" or "subjectivised" from the outset - that is, it is not loaded with psychological meanings already given and determined by the two artists' personal history and affective life, which explains the "cooling" sensation described earlier - but is, on the contrary, deliberately left indeterminate, open to completion by the observer's own emotions and by whatever they wish to fill it with, without providing any predetermined, univocal key to interpretation. And it will be precisely the viewer's emotional participation that loads the work with meaning and subjectivity - but their own subjectivity, not that of the artists.
The sense of violent truthfulness of being-there, and the sharp communicative power of Bianco-Valente's images - the "heating up" mentioned earlier - stem, paradoxically, precisely from the fact that they are free of an already-conditioned subjectivity, one in which, at worst, a viewer might fail to identify or recognise themselves; instead they stand as thoroughly plausible mental images that the artists, latter-day Matrices, "implant" into our brain, leaving them open to whatever emotional interpretation the brain wishes to give them, like blank screens onto which one can freely project one's own psychological reactions (3). Truly a second nature, another reality set before our minds. And so the circle closes, showing how the duo manages, through the re-presentation of mental perceptions so convincing as to be experienced as a second reality capable of stirring intense emotional responses in the public, to draw together all the main currents of artistic research up to the present day - on objectivity, subjectivity and perception - and to move beyond them as well. The innovative approach to the theme of perception lies precisely in the fact that their works, far from being mere biological studies of the phenomenon, present themselves as "emotion-triggering devices" in their own right, not passive recorders of a pre-existing feeling but producers of feelings themselves (4).
So strong is the drive to be creators of a "further world" that some of the duo's research is directed at technologically replicating not only the mental reality of images, but even the organic reality of living beings and their evolutionary or behavioural processes (5). Technology itself, in the two artists' work, does not seem to be positioned as something opposed to nature, but seems almost to be considered an integral part of it as well. In the relationship between the technological and the natural element, the duo's interest seems to lean more towards highlighting the points of contact and mutual interference than towards emphasising a total separateness between the two spheres. After all, technology, as a product of humankind, is not entirely alien to it: one need only think of Derrick de Kerckhove's research on how the workings of hypertextuality and computer networks replicate those of the human mind. And our own essence, too, is in some way similar to a computer, since we are a combination of body/hardware and mind/software. The astonishing interconnections between the natural and technological worlds, between hardware and software, between body and mind, are a central theme in many of Bianco-Valente's works (6). In any case, in all their works, the deliberate highlighting of the machines' limits and inaccuracies can be read precisely as an attempt to grasp their point of contact with organic "imperfection". Finally, the "human" use of technology, not mechanically passive but consciously active, is unmistakable in the artists' own creative methodology as well (7).
But the reflection on the de-subjectivisation of images, and on the necessary contribution the observer must make in order to attribute emotional meaning to them, also automatically leads us to recognise another essential trait of Bianco-Valente's works: their being, in the deepest sense of the term, interactive art. The creative "device" designed by the artists is incomplete without the active inner participation of the viewer, and indeed, it presupposes it constitutionally. This aspect is truly fundamental to their art, even though at first glance it may go unnoticed, thanks to the aesthetically complete and self-sufficient face that the duo takes care to leave in their work, so as to make effective communication possible even at a first, less deep level of reading. It is thanks to this need, as well as to an uncommon sense of the eurhythmy of the image, that we owe the formal, compositional and chromatic balance of their works. In particular, colour - generally set on fluorescent, intensely expressive tones - plays a fundamental role. But a deeper, more complete understanding of their work cannot do without an interactive completion, or "inference" - to use a term and a concept on which the duo's latest experiments, including optical ones, are focusing - that is cognitive and emotional, and that must come from the public. Compared to other experiments in interactive art, in fact, the participation required is even more intense, since it involves the individual's deeply psychological sphere. Compared, for example, to some of Studio Azzurro's research - great pioneers and investigators of the use of video in artistic interactivity - it is interesting to note that an exact reversal of terms takes place: whereas in the "sensitive environments" of the latter, emotion and subjective lyricism already appear to be built into the work from the start, while the viewer is asked to bring about a real activation and perception of the machine-work through "natural interfaces" (8), in Bianco-Valente's works, by contrast, the study of perception and its realistic plausibility is greater from the outset, while the emotional part is entrusted to the public, who are responsible for a psychological-cognitive completion. This is also why the artists deliberately leave the situational context of their images unclear, in order to further encourage a free, participatory inference on the part of the viewer.
Like all interactive art, the two authors' works are not an artistic "object" already given and determined from the outset, but a creative process that comes into being in the making. In this way they truly become life itself, warm and throbbing existence taking place in the present moment. Moreover, the concept of art as an eventual phenomenon that comes into being only in its actual existential "happening" is also fundamental to the genesis of the artistic duo, which, as mentioned, formed as the result of a real union of life, and even to their working method, which often welcomes stimuli coming from genuine encounters with other artists. This, for instance, is behind their numerous collaborations with musicians. Music itself, moreover, plays a highly significant role in Bianco-Valente's creations, and by pervading the real environment and lending multisensoriality to their works, it brings them even closer to a form of total art, art-as-event and art-as-life. The existence and the endless possibilities of its interweavings have also often been a vibrant source of inspiration for the artists, both in the sense of neurological "interweavings of ideas and memories" (9) and in the sense of astrological "interweavings of destiny" (10). A firm awareness of life's unpredictability, and of the impossibility of any forecast, pigeonholing or definition regarding its events, is the aspect that most forcefully emerges from the way the two authors approach the theme of existence, in both its organic and mental processes (11). On closer inspection, this is nothing other than consciousness and deep respect for the freedom of every living being: the same freedom and openness to endless possibilities that, not by chance, the artists leave to the emotional reception of the observer, instilling in them, beyond a participatory response, the profound lesson that any stiffening or labelling of life amounts to turning it into death.
An art that happens as life, that is born only in the moment of the viewer's actual participation, becoming real in the emotional colouring that they attribute to the "mental images" of reality: Bianco-Valente's work is the recreation of an original World in which there is not yet any difference between perceiver and perceived, a primordial state of being that is at once the capturing of reality and reality itself. It is the Universe in its embryonic gestational phase, an indivisible whole between objective nature and its subjective reception, in which one cannot be distinguished from the other, just as mother and the child she carries in her womb are one, two lives in a single body. It is that incandescent bubble of life that existed before human beings separated from the cosmos they now perceive; it is the art of fusion and of merging, of the holistic union between the living being and its environment (12). It is the truth, that immensely true world that can only exist before the separation between the knowable and the knower has taken place, and where gnosis is still possible. And it is precisely our emotions that "give birth" to art, and that choose what face to give to truth, since, in carrying out the process of perception, they place themselves as the perceiving entity before the perceivable and fill images with meaning. This is why, in front of the duo's creations, the need to understand, to recognise, is immediately triggered: it is precisely the choice of what one wishes to see in them that gives birth to emotion, and to truth. There is, in their work, beyond any autistic nihilism regarding the possibility of communicating with the world and with truth, the sense that a glimmer onto the Absolute might still be opened, even if a subjective Absolute, and that one might come to attribute meaning to reality, even if only a minimal unit of meaning (13). And, in the end, no Absolute can be more true than the one that holds deeply for the single individual. The impression of brushing against Beauty, the Sublime (14) - understood not as antiquated, mawkishly idealistic categories, but as that state of free actualisation of being that comes from managing to give meaning even to what is squalid and painful - which one often feels before their images, is probably due precisely to the existential, even before psychological, completion of meaning that the artists manage to activate in us. Bianco-Valente's work is not an emotional reworking of life; it is itself a real perception that triggers emotion and meaning; it subtly identifies what exists in the moment just before the re-cognition and interpretation of reality, what comes before the completion, through the observer's psychological inference, of the artistic process: it is, in every respect, what comes before art. And what is it that comes before art? It is us, it is Life, it is that primal, alogical universal magma that precedes any cognitive or moral superstructure, it is Spinoza's Deus sive Natura and Nietzsche's beyond good and evil, it is the creating and destroying God of the Hindus, it is the union of Matter and Spirit. It is, in the end, only existence, the photograph of existence. And let each of us perceive it as we will.
Notes:
1 In reality, the two fields are not without points of contact: besides the observation that science, especially following studies on quantum mechanics and relativity, has recently discovered itself to be less "exact" and more "unpredictable" than previously believed, there is also cause to reflect on how scientific discoveries are made possible by a certain component of intellectual "creativity". Moreover, the most advanced studies in linguistics cannot ignore a "scientific" consideration of the bio-morphological aspect of the organs of speech.
2 Besides the fact that interest in perception is common ground shared by both biological and psychological/psycholinguistic research, this "laboratory re-creation" of a second reality also constitutes, in some way, a point of contact between Pino's background (science has always employed laboratory simulations) and Giovanna's (the cinematic image is, in a way, a convincing artificially recreated "second world").
3 Psychologically similar is the laboratory reconstruction of episodes from one's own life in the technique of psychodrama in play-therapy settings, in which emotional interpretation and the attribution of meaning are entrusted to the observer-protagonist and not to the other performers. In other respects, the Freudian ideal of the "blank screen" is likewise similar.
4 The presence of the authors' own subjectivity, kept out of the emotional colouring which is instead left to the viewer, is thus in some way limited to the particular perceptual "cut" of reality that they choose to show us, as if the artists were choosing to simply let us see the world "through their eyes"; and each viewer, then, may interpret it as they see fit. In this, their work is strikingly prescient of some innovative devices recently introduced, a kind of cameras so small as to be almost "bionic eyes" that can be "worn" all day long, with the aim of genuinely giving others "the world seen through one's own eyes". Bianco-Valente, however, go even further, because they show mental perception, not a passive optical recording of the world.
5 See Alife, or Volatile.
6 Machine is dreaming, Breathless.
7 The effort to attribute meaning to technology in Bianco-Valente's work produces that "repositioning of contemporary Man in relation to the technological medium" that Paolo Rosa speaks of with regard to the particular use of technology he advocates.
8 "Sensitive environments" and "natural interfaces" are terms coined by Studio Azzurro itself, and refer to environmental-scale installations in which interaction is triggered by entirely natural tools and gestures, such as the simple touch of one's hand (Tavoli) or one's own breath (Il soffio dell'angelo).
9 In Relational Domain, for example.
10 See Tempo Universale.
11 A clear example of the impossibility of an absolutely exact, mathematically "Euclidean" and "Cartesian" reading of reality is Uneuclidean Pattern.
12 Thus, the union of body-mind and nature-technology that pervades the duo's experiments is only a small-scale maquette of the broader union between the living perceiver and its perceived environment.
13 Minimum Unit of Meaning is in fact the title of a work by Bianco-Valente centred on memories, ideas and experiences present in one's own mind.
14 Among the different shades that the sense of the Sublime can take on in Bianco-Valente's work is also a kind of panicked sense of immersion in nature (an element the artists have openly said they love very much), sometimes emphasised by a low vantage point, as in the already-mentioned Uneuclidean Pattern. But also notable is the presence of what Mario Costa would call the "technological sublime", as in Tempo Universale.
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July 2007