Giovanna Bianco and Pino Valente live in a small apartment overlooking the alleys of old Naples. There, using a computer connected to a video camera, the pair – both in their thirties – create extraordinary videos that artificially reconstruct the processes by which images form in the human brain.
Ludovico Pratesi - Interview with Bianco-Valente, 1999
The videos “Mind Landscape”, “Giostrina triste” and “Deep in my mind” have already been shown in galleries and museums in various Italian cities. It's an original and distinctive art form, close to the mental journeys already explored by directors such as Wim Wenders in his “Until the End of the World” or Kathryn Bigelow in her unsettling “Strange Days”.
We asked Bianco-Valente to tell us how they create their works and what meanings they attribute to their evocative “mental landscapes”.
How do your works come about?
We're fascinated by the processes of brain activity that allow memories to become fixed in the human mind. We always start from images shot with the video camera – electronic images, which are by nature unstable and evanescent, characteristics typical of mental images. The computer then lets us edit the videos and control every single frame.
Do you use these sequences to build the plot of your videos?
In fact there isn't really a plot as such, but a series of images juxtaposed in a way that seems random, yet resembles how thoughts form in the human brain. There's no narrative, only a sequence of sharp cuts and light, fluid passages.
So you're working on the relationship between mind and computer?
Yes, we are. There are many similarities between electronic images and mental images. Both are poorly defined and transient, and therefore incomplete, because they arise from a continuous recombination of codes.
Can you give us a concrete example?
Take a work like “Mind Landscape”. It's a mental journey through childhood, in which we see children's faces – our own primary-school classmates – rapidly edited over a pounding soundtrack that we composed ourselves. This video depicts the very act of remembering moments from long ago, which is why the images are deliberately blurred.
Do you also work with different techniques?
Certainly. The video “Soft Luggage” was made partly with images downloaded from scientific websites, then reworked and edited to a soundtrack we created, to represent the sum of all our lived experiences – the “soft luggage” each of us carries in our mind.
Recently we gathered, on a chip, ten seconds of our brain's electrical activity together with our heartbeat and breathing: this organic data was digitised into an electronic memory.
Are you pioneers of “post-organic” art?
For us, “post-organic” means freeing ourselves from the spatio-temporal boundaries imposed by the physical condition of the body, in order to discover the properties of our true, immaterial essence.
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January 1999