I saw an image in a publication a few years ago (Espresso. Arte oggi in Italia, Electa 2000). It was called Deep in my mind and showed Giovanna Bianco’s pale face, slightly out of focus, shown in profile with her eyes closed. It was taken during an encephalogram with electrodes, sensors, cables and the straps to hold the apparatus in the correct position on her skull. It was a very important image for understanding the starting point of a highly original artistic career.
Riccardo Caldura, Extended Alphabet, notes on Bianco-Valente's artistic research, 2008
This artistic exploration lies on the border between perception and reality. It makes use of technology and electronic devices to give a visual form to the process of decoding the bio-electrical impulses which make up the incredibly fine psycho-sensorial and neurological network we use in our relationships with “external” things.
The Neapolitan artistic duo Giovanna Bianco and Pino Valente, who are partners both in life and as artists, are particularly interested in exploring an area where the contact between reality, the body and the mind reveals a primordial condition, indistinct and full of murmuring, out of focus and suddenly sharp.
It is as if the messages coming from outside had been captured at the moment when they were passing through the audiovisual decoding network, allowing them to be understood.
Often very large Lambda prints, video projections and environmental video installations are the visual expression of the artists’ investigation and recording of the area of contact between internal and external, the lightning fast connections which pass between them, synaptic activity not yet translated into a distinct representation. Their work starts from an investigation of the sensorial magma, producing threshold images which can not be defined as being simply dreamlike - even when they are made up of the deep vibrations of the REM stage, as in the eponymous work from 2002 - nor can they be mistaken for a plain and simple perception of reality. This is an investigation of sensorial experience which on one hand pays great attention to scientific analysis and results, but on the other is not afraid to address altered states of mind brought about by taking drugs or psychotropic substances.
Many of their works, particularly the videos, seem to have a powerfully psychedelic flavour, with strongly altered colours and shots taken with the camera just skimming over the ground (“Cloud System”, 2004), as if only the relationship between the very close (blades of grass, stems of wheat) and the distant sky in the background (“Uneuclidean pattern”, 2003) existed.
These are images which show landscape in a primordial way, where even the smallest thing is an apparition, shadows of shifting colour, light fringed clouds. In “I should learn from you” (2003) for example, a person appears holding the string of a kite flying way up high, a blaze of light which oscillates against a pink-orange sky. In 2003, with sound design by Mass, Bianco-Valente composed the various sequences of their widest ranging video work “Self Organizing Structure”.
This lasts about 35 minutes and shows recurring elements and aspects of their poetics: psycho-perceptive alterations during a car journey or a walk; the primordial landscape, in particular with images of highly evocative seascapes; abstract compositions generated automatically by computer programs which combine the generation of the artificial image with the growth of micro organisms; the insistence on the gaze, with slow footage of a face with the eyes open, caught in a moment of such intense attention that it hardly blinks.
A fixed gaze, on the edge of hallucination. “Altered State” (2001) is a particularly revealing work. The video shows extremely rapid shots of phrases from Alfred Hoffman’s diary- the man who discovered LSD, and a friend of Ernst Jünger. The video and single images of “Slow Brain” (2001) also refer to the experience brought about by drugs.
When we look at the work of the Neapolitan duo, particularly the pieces from 1997 to 2004, it is as if we are asked to reconsider, through a kind of echo, the psychedelic atmosphere of the 1960’s. Bianco-Valente seem to return to that atmosphere, but now it has been stripped of all social re-birth and alternative lifestyle ideology, “cooled” and regarded purely in terms of the visual power it contained. There is another work, (“Machine is dreaming”, again from 2001), which gives a good indication of this separation.
This is a faintly ironic consideration of that most outstanding machine (the computer). For the Americans of the 60’s, this was a device which represented the possibility of technology leading us to another life, parallel to ordinary life and with much broader horizons. Bianco-Valente’s dreaming machine is nothing other than the remains of a dissected computer, utopia reduced to its basic components, laid out on the floor.
Only the mother-board is raised slightly off the floor thanks to small supports made with tablets of some “psychoactive” substance. The machine is presented in a state of “physical suspension”, in the words of Bianco-Valente. Using a series of complicated calculations it creates an infinitely varying buzz which sounds like the sea.
Dismantling the myth of the ideology of freedom related to altered states caused by hallucinogenic substances, also leads to the dismantling of the myth of an ever more high-tech, immaterial and virtual aspect of digital images created by the computer. In contrast, this also favours a concentration solely on the power of the image itself, independently from the amount of technology needed to elaborate it. It becomes a highly efficient tool for exploring the shifting boundary between reality and vision, between artificial and natural.
An appropriate distance from the pathos of psychedelic and cybernetic experiences allows the artists to have a great variety and freedom in the solutions they use. Highly elaborated images lie alongside very low-tech solutions. One example of this is “Unità minima di senso” (2002), an artwork/installation made up of a thin strip of paper that is 1 km long. The two artists filled the paper with writing and drawing over the course of several months, a recording of a stream of consciousness. Another example is the very recent installation “The effort to recompose my complexity”.
This was made using computer drawings of neuronal matter (on paper and reproduced in black and white) glued to the wall. Bianco and Valente then elaborated this with a wall drawing of lines and marks to connect the various elements. This is a network laid upon a network. The movement of the hand links together the fragments of digitally reproduced connective tissue. As already seen in the video installation “Relational Domain” (2005), “The effort to recompose my complexity” is a good representation of that which the Neapolitan artists are nowadays interested in highlighting and bringing out.
This is a profound relational plane which unites the form of the nervous system with the growth of trees (“Adaptive”, 2007); which unites the material of neuronal connection in “The effort to recompose my complexity” with the network made up of airline routes in “Relational Domain” - where the nodes take on names of the deepest poetics, precisely because they come from the work of air traffic control organisations. In this sense we can see a variation or evolution in the artists’ research. The investigation of psycho-sensorial states led to the creation of a remarkable series of works between 1997 and 2004. These included videos and single works and were of great interest also due to the intense exploration of highly original chromatic solutions, close to abstraction, that took you - almost holding you by the hand - “into the current of another memory,” as was written in Neural.
These were works on the edge of vision or of dreams.
However the works of the following years seem to indicate a shift in their research towards the idea of networks, maps and journeys: for example the aforementioned “Relational domain” (2005), or the series of triptychs “Reactive” (2007), which show the image of a globe, its surface covered with a dense connecting network, or the latest installation I mentioned before (“The effort to recompose my complexity”). Entering a room/brain, gazing at the subtle and hypnotic development of airline routes, imagining walking across the globe to reveal points of sensorial saturation. It is almost as if the globe itself had encephalographic area which reveal unexpected action.
All these works highlight the intensification of research related to using images to show the idea of networks, nodes, areas of density (fine dust, micro-organic, ‘neuronal’).
These are elements which make up the enormous connective tissue which extends in every dimension inside and around us. The task that Bianco-Valente seem to have taken on is that of bringing out this fabric of imperceptible connections, recording the generative code and its intimate functioning.
From the smallest unit of meaning to the reconstruction of an extended alphabet, which constitutes the extremely thin layer, the “staminal” and equipotential condition, the profound relational plane in which physical phenomena are not separated from psychic ones. Long before the vault of the heavens was etched with the complex network of civil and military flights of modern aeronautical maps, it was a place filled with psychic-astral maps.
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Taken from Alfabeto Esteso, Bianco-Valente, Dario De bastiani Editore, Vittorio Veneto (TV), 2008