Gianni Romano, Interview with Bianco-Valente, 1998
Gianni Romano: Bianco-Valente could be defined as producers of electronic images, but these are particular images, far from the high-tech idea that digital production might suggest.
Bianco-Valente: What fascinates us about electronic images is their similarity to mental images. Ethereal and transitory, their manifestation is only the momentary expression of a code. We work with low-resolution electronic images, just as if they were our own mental images — poorly defined and extremely volatile.
GR: In fact, my impression is that these are mental images (and some of the titles of your works confirm this), images that have somehow been filtered through a post-technological memory that is aware of the changes underway, but still retains enough recollection of what the past was.
B-V: Our research in recent months has been focusing on the dynamics of neuronal interaction. We're studying brain physiology and the logic of the processes that allow memories and mental images to be maintained at the cortical level. Inevitably, one is led to ask where the boundary lies — if it can ever be defined with certainty and clarity — between brain and mind. Between organic substrate and consciousness.
GR: What tools do you use for your work?
B-V: The video camera is our most natural approach to the dynamics of external reality; from it we get scenes for our videos, but also single frames which, once processed, we fix onto canvas using a special plotter that prints using melted wax instead of traditional inks. The canvases are extremely delicate, but it's the only way we manage not to lose the particular chromatic qualities of our images entirely. Obviously, we do the video editing on the computer, which we also use to synthesize or process the sounds we need for the audio track.
GR: Many artists, especially when the technological medium being used is still a novelty (as is happening these days with the Internet), get a bit carried away by the medium itself — their work disappears and all you're left seeing is playful experimentation, the artist having fun with a new toy. I think this is one of the main reasons why so many people view work made with new media with enormous skepticism: it happened with photography, it happened with video.
Your work, on the other hand, gives the impression that there's no gap at all between your intentions and what the tools allow you to do. I'd like to know if this is intentional — if there's an awareness on your part.
B-V: We think that if there's a strong theory underlying one's work, if the research being pursued is continuous and at times even obsessive, in the end you manage to use any medium, material or immaterial, with ease, as if it were a natural extension of your own intentions. As long as what drives you to create a piece of work is the dynamic tension within yourself, it doesn't matter much whether you do it with a pencil directly in your hand or with a machine — there are exactly the same possibilities of using either one poetically, with lightness and simplicity.
GR: Once we had a conversation about the "post-organic," and I remember you had some interesting positions, not exactly fashionable ones.
B-V: We don't think it makes much sense to keep clinging to the solid, reassuring concept of the body, trying every way possible to extend its physical capacities with hyper-technological prostheses that can only partially, and for a limited time, remedy the slow but inexorable organic decay that characterizes it from birth. We can imagine the body as the means for moving, feeding, and interacting dynamically with the outside world, but the only dimension in which we can say we truly exist is the soft, immaterial dimension of thought — of cortical biochemical processes. "Post-organic," then, can only mean freeing oneself definitively from the spatio-temporal limits imposed by the organic physicality of our body, and tending toward decoding and transferring acquired experiences onto active, non-organic-based media.
GR: In some videos you combine sounds created specifically with the computer, or noises stolen from various media. Is this research that runs parallel to the image, or does it betray your interests in music proper?
B-V: When we don't synthesize the sound directly on the computer, shortwave radio is the instrument that produces the atmospheres best suited to our work. Radio waves in this range cover enormous distances and tend to arrive at their destination quite disturbed — to make an easy comparison, we could say they are "blurred" sounds. It's wonderful to shape these raw noises right away, slowing them down, adding reverb, and distorting them. If we hadn't heard them in their raw state, we ourselves would find it hard to believe their real origin.
GR: And your collaboration with 24 Grana?
B-V: Even though we worked in the same city, we didn't know each other personally, and, paradoxically, the idea of working on a joint project came from outside. After an initial period during which we only talked about how we each envisioned the work that was to be born, it was a beautiful feeling to discover that the scenes and the music — even though they had been created separately (to avoid subordinating one to the other, as happens in a film or a traditional music video) — were already in perfect harmony. At that point, all that was needed was synchronization and a few small adjustments to get the video that can now be seen and that will be included as a video track on their next CD, due out in a few months.
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June 1998