Diana Marrone - Interview with Bianco-Valente, 2003
We meet Giovanna Bianco and Pino Valente in their new studio in the Vergini district of Naples, in front of a pair of PCs looking out through as many windows. The shutters, painted deep mediterranean blue, are just ajar onto a crowd of screeching seagulls pushing well beyond the harbour in search of food.
The duo's current projects, considered the most original and among the most prominent on the contemporary European scene, draw on theories of evolutionary convergence. To put it simply, nature develops similar solutions to similar problems, and the human brain and its mechanics also follow this immutable rule. They are captivated by technology and science and know their most recent developments in depth. Perhaps because, as they explain - she with studies in film, he a former geology student - they haven't read much art history, and instead devour treatises and programming languages.
Your latest exhibits, for example Slow Brain in Turin, seem to be moving more and more towards a technological dimension, as if audiovisual poetics alone were no longer enough; you increasingly create entities, as well as environments. Is this your new interpretive model for installation?
Technology has always been the basis of our work, but for us it's also a game. By technology we mean a set of tools, and we always try to highlight the limits, the paradoxes that arise from the use of machines. We have worked extensively on brain processes and in particular on the biochemistry of the brain: what allows us to retain memories, or perceive mental images.
Our main interest is to draw poetics out of machines through open works where complex dynamics emerge spontaneously. For example, in the installation Volatile (2001, electronic circuit boards, microprocessor, artificial life simulation), we programmed only a few fundamental parameters, which the machine executes, generating a phenomenon we perceive as natural: the flight of a flock of birds, which is random and different every time.
Staying on this track, let's talk about Artificial Life (ALIFE): it's an impressive project and, likewise, a highly unusual commission (from the Fondazione Ansaldo, Genoa, ed.). How did it come about?
All our research develops around two fundamental nodes: on one hand the relationship between body and mind; on the other, the relationship between natural and artificial. We worked on this project for about two years. We developed it and proposed it for a metro station in Naples. But it wasn't accepted, because commissioners usually prefer to have a "physical", material work.
In Genoa, on the other hand, they fell in love with it. And ALIFE is a completely immaterial project, it's ultimately a projection. The core of the project was tied to the metro station setting: an everyday landscape of urban mobility.
And installing in a metro station a work that evolves very slowly over the course of decades (virtually designed to continue indefinitely) means, in a way, capturing the evolution of the thousands of people who pass through these non-places every day. Someone passing through a station who sees a static work, like a sculpture, at some point stops noticing it, because it becomes transparent and part of the ephemeral transit space. A work that instead uses artificial intelligence software (for ALIFE, developed together with a group of researchers who study complex dynamics, ed.), in practice imitates the evolution of the first unicellular organisms up to life as we know it now – in short, in constant mutation.
In Genoa we found more fertile ground for this kind of language. Even though it's a technically complex work. In New Mexico, there's a research institute that studies chaotic dynamics, using software capable of managing complex variations, such as weather forecasts or stock market fluctuations. In short, everything that escapes mere physical calculations.
They manage this kind of operation through the use of simulators, which learn as they calculate and are therefore able to plausibly predict even non-mathematical evolution. What remains the most difficult stage for a machine is learning about the surrounding reality. We created Minimum Unit of Meaning (2002, installation: ballpoint pen on paper, 1.5 cm x 1 km) starting from exactly this concept, following one of the theories some researchers are focusing their work on: giving the machine an indefinite quantity of information, minimal units of meaning, so it can acquire a cognition of the world.
If the machine, when asked a question, quickly weaves together all the building blocks of meaning we have distilled within it, then – through a continuous true/false, true/false system – it manages to understand and respond. In the end we decided to draw out from our minds the strongest experiences that marked our growth, memories, recurring images, describing them on a thin ribbon of paper a kilometre long that occupied almost an entire room of the gallery. The ribbon was completely tangled: it looked exactly like a human brain. And the viewer, who grabbed a piece of it to read, would then get lost in the tangle and move on to other units, different from the one they had started reading from. It took about three months to create this work. We decided to entrust to an extremely fragile medium what was stored in our minds.
Your new Neapolitan studio is set on a street that seems to be naturally attracting a growing number of artists, someone has called it the new Neapolitan Chelsea: is that a coincidence? How do you find it here?
Bianco: It's fairly coincidental.
Valente: It's not a coincidence, this has remained one of the very few areas of the city where the real estate market is calm. And it's also completely central.
Bianco: It's a very beautiful area, and then discovering that, even in this building and the surrounding area, there are other artists (Marcello Simeone, Mariangela Levita, the curator Gigiotto Del Vecchio, ed.)…
Valente: This area, the Vergini, is actually more recent than the historic centre, it dates back to the 18th century, and in the ancient city this was the area used for burials. The name comes from two Greek fraternities, one of which had taken a vow of chastity. Later, under the Spanish viceroyalty, they began building very elegant noble buildings, with beautiful staircases and gardens. Just steps away is the Fondazione Morra, and rumour has it that Raucci and Santamaria will also open a new space in the area.
Beyond the places, also the people who inhabit them: especially Neapolitan bands. In Welcome X (1998, video, 2'38'') you worked with 24 Grana, who composed the original music, and in 2001, for Mindscape Dwellers (video, 2'57'') with TU'M. How do these networks come about, and how do you move within the local contemporary electronic music scene?
We should also add, in 2002, a collaboration on the scores for Deep Blue Ocean of Emptiness (2002, video) with Mou,Lips!, a band from Pescara that makes experimental music. There are also Neapolitan bands we find very interesting. And we met them elsewhere, in Pescara, at an event focused on art and electronic music (Peam 2003). Electronic music attracts us a great deal, and in a sense we also try our hand at making sounds. Until 1998 we made our audio tracks by using – and sampling – shortwave frequencies. Actually, we still capture these sounds. We pick up wonderful sounds, like that of a lost ship, somewhere in some ocean, communicating with another.
In these moments we feel like very small entities. Even when we pick up coded messages: it happens often. On this subject, for example, we created JSR (2000, installation). We can't play any instrument, and besides the radio we capture real sounds, with which we create harmonies of meaning. Going back to the networks with contemporary musicians, in the case of Mou,Lips our contact began by email and by now it's as if we've always known each other. In the case of 24 Grana, the work was commissioned by a curator who put us in touch because he was fascinated by both our work and theirs.
We liked each other and, after several meetings, the work proceeded separately: us on the images and them on the sound. Right now, though, it's laptop music that fascinates us: we see it as a concert from mind to mind.
Over coffee, between the two half-open blue windows, they invite me to a private viewing of their works. With one premise: the duo interprets the video form as tableaux, a work that can be looked at exactly like a painting. Because they are aware that video is a complex expressive medium, which can sometimes take time to be perceived. Their goal is to produce works whose understanding plays out on multiple levels, even if only for a viewing of a few minutes.
I ask them to start with Welcome X. Particles of heartbeats rendered in cold colours, which seem hidden in a womb, or seen through a lens of the past, suddenly shift to pink. And they introduce human figures, echoing – thanks to the extremely crisp soundtrack – the ecstatic, sun-drenched atmosphere of post-punk or recent ambient music. It's a brief interlude, prelude to the return of graphic experiences. In this work, which like all the others was built as an endless loop, the grammar of rhythm is still present, and it's possible to identify fragments of narrative.
Deep Blue Ocean of Emptiness, with music by Mou,lips, presented in Syracuse in the beautiful Necessary Kids exhibition curated by Salvo Lacagnina, portrays the interior of a building, abandoned because unsafe, captured by their camera in a surreal way: the low-angle shots echo a vision through bifocal lenses not quite sitting right on the nose, on this occasion tinted green. The sensation of swimming in a gelatin, so thick it seems like molasses, breaks against walls stripped and gnawed down to the bare plaster. But the power of the three notes of the refrain, syncopated enough to sound like a distant barking, keeps you afloat in a curious, alert hypnosis.
Deep in my mind (1997), one of their earliest works, enriched with sound sampled from AM radio, seems to already contain in embryonic form all the traits of their later works. It reveals a trance scene, a sidereal space, as lysergic as it is submarine, that swallows the human silhouette. The artists shot with a video camera and a small strobe light, at night, in a wood near Ercolano, and felt the unknown of that indefinite space echo around them like a real black hole, especially because of the abrupt transitions their eyes underwent from violent light to pitch darkness.
The work of manipulating the images is almost entirely done during shooting, as they have stated they prefer, through the heavy use of lenses and gels. As shown by Mindscape Dwellers, in which the grain of the image gives a pure photographic effect and a blue worthy of a glass-bottomed boat.
Once again, the human-machine chain occupies a predominant place: Slow Brain appears as a system of bands of varying depth in fluorescent green or shocking pink, with no titles or logo, in an endless loop, which displays in the form of colour tones the actions occurring at different levels of the cerebral cortex. The artists rendered on video some results of a scientific experiment which aims to establish, in people who have taken psychoactive chemical substances, the type, duration and intensity of the reactions to external stimuli that these substances cause in different areas of the cerebral cortex. Apparently the viewer observes a continuous line, made up of many intervals of dissolution of one tone into or over another: in reality they are unknowingly witnessing a representation of the millions of synapses that occur organically in the brain. And even more actively in the presence of psychoactive substances – substances capable of influencing immaterial processes such as thought.
Altered state (2001), is a hyper-fast, continuous quotation of excerpts from the diary of Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, a video presented at the solo exhibition in Turin by Antonella Nicola, while Untitled, 1998, was destined for a giant tufa wall, projected onto a monitor just a few centimetres wide and currently installed permanently at the Palazzo delle Papesse in Siena. Here too the duo's manipulative forays into AM waves provided the backdrop for a barely perceptible visual hypothesis: a human figure walking in broad daylight, entirely tinted red.
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Taken from Cultframe.it, June 2003