May 22 5:22pm Domenico Quaranta When did you start working on "Content Aware"? 6:37pm Enrico Boccioletti It was back in 2011, I had a first set of images: on February 22nd I first posted some on a dedicated Tumblr. 6:50pm Domenico Quaranta 2011 - 2013. It's quite a long time for such a project. I mean, usually this kind of simple intervention on images, based on the exploitation of a single "default" effect, produces a limited set of results. Why are you still interested in it? Do you see any evolution in the project? 7:24pm Enrico Boccioletti This is a good one, indeed. It wasn't even meant to become this sort of collection at the very beginning – rather more a sort of conventional series, started to finish. But I kept up instead. Perhaps to stockpile lazily these basic interventions in a sporadic attitude has something to do with an idea of absence, which is embedded in the images themselves. To reiterate this action in some irregular pattern is a way to render this absence more and more evident through accumulation. 7:39pm Enrico Boccioletti I don't even know if this makes any sense. I could be doing just one image, or go on forever like this – which in the end are similar options. 9:32pm Domenico Quaranta I like your use of the word "laziness" to explain something that is, in fact, the result of some form of hyperactivity. I think this has a lot to do with the internet, and with the experience of spending time doing things online. Content Aware is the lazy reiteration of the same tool on different images ― in a way that sometimes can surprise you and your audience. Can you elaborate on this? May 23 6:15pm Enrico Boccioletti ‘Things are conspicuous in their absence’, is reported on the cover of “The Book of Japans” by Momus. This very lack is intensified by the reiteration of the same gesture. I was reading Boris Groys a while ago on e-flux Journal, reflecting about how the emergence of the internet drastically changed the conditions of workspace, erasing the difference between the production and the exhibition of art; this is basically what Brad Troemel states in his recent essay “Athletic Aesthetics” for The New Inquiry, reflecting the state of mind that lies behind the context-driven art project Jogging: ‘Release early, release often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity’ – in the words of open source programmers' credo quoted by Harm van den Dorpel. At a time when studio practice and vernissage overlap, how can laziness (referring to that idleness praised by Bertrand Russell) be anything else but hyperactivity? 6:54pm Domenico Quaranta Good point - and one that raises issues of context and audience that I'm sure we will touch later on in this conversation. But your excess of quotations - man, you are a cut-up artist - forces me to take you less seriously and to question your first reply... 6:59pm Domenico Quaranta I suspect that what actually brought you to keep up with the project is the medium of delivery you (accidentally?) chose for it - a tumblelog, instead of a documentation page on your website. There, you got in touch with your accidental audience, and your original purpose – to explore the potential of a default tool - was replaced by another one: to entertain your folks. Am I right? May 25 1:50pm Enrico Boccioletti Yes, definitely. I guess you hit it on the nail. Entertain my folks to entertain myself – and to probably feed my own narcissism, as well. Looking at it from this perspective makes me think that the choice of a tumblelog as display was all but accidental, and the idea of ‘broadcast’ had been part of the work from the very beginning. 2:21pm Domenico Quaranta You talk about narcissism - definitely one of the main reasons that brings artists, such as everybody else, to maintain an online presence. The online audience gives you the kind of feedback that you won't ever experience in the white cube: it likes, votes, reblogs, comments, circulates, reuses and abuses your work. Often, however, this process gives your images an autonomous life, makes them independent from you as a "creator". Most of the people who enjoy your work on Tumblr may don't even know that it's made by a nice guy based in Milan who answers to the name of Enrico Boccioletti. How do you relate to this? 4:27pm Enrico Boccioletti I see such an autonomous migration of form among a potentially enormous audience has more to do with narcissism rather than having you authorship recognized – say old-school “fame” . Also: am I the “creator” of an image, when I'm just doing not much more than execute an operation based on conceptual reflection, over an image I just found online? June 4 12:10pm Enrico Boccioletti Tom Sherman in an essay from 1995 titled “The finished work of art is a thing of the past” considers the fact that is impossible to decode a single work of a living artist in itself, and the living artist's body of work is an expanding work-in-progress and perhaps any discrete object or image is part of this unfinished process.I think this has to do as well with audience and feedback, especially when you are dealing with the online. Immaterial work and objects are carriers of information. I am afraid I'm quoting (Sherman) again: 'Ethereal culture is grounded, made concrete, in its audience. Works of art in the immaterial domain are never finished, they are simply introduced (initialized) and placed (contextualized) for participation and interaction: the audience may add to, alter, customize, pass on, subtract from the work, etc. The identity or address of the work is therefore shared by the artist and the audience.' June 4 7:12pm Domenico Quaranta You made a really good point introducing a distinction between narcissism and identity. It helps a lot to understand not only artistic practices, but any kind of cultural practice on the internet, including identity construction, memes and Anonymous. Millennials, as Time magazine calls them, are narcissist, but not selfish. But what you say may also have disruptive consequences. For the first generation of artists active online, looking for a wider audience, going beyond the finished work of art, pursuing audience participation, rejecting what you called "the old concept of fame" also meant leaving museums and the art world in general behind. Now, I see more flirtation with the art world and the white cube, on both side. Is this a compromise, or a Trojan horse? June 14 12:11am Enrico Boccioletti This seems like a sort of Trojan horse to me. But, what does it actually mean? Isn't the concept Trojan horse itself a compromise? I mean, the first option in any competition, if any, is always the one of brute force at first. Secondary ways, like Trojans, do come afterwards. I think we should extend our exchange including Attilia at this point. 7:53am Domenico Quaranta Sure! How can we add her to this conversation? As a curator working in the art world, I'm always wondering what this attempt is meant for, if it would succeed, and how. With the avant-gardes, the story goes that their strategies have been co-opted, normalized and turned largely ineffective by the art world. Is this going to happen also with the products of the desktop studio? Take, ie., Content Aware. Online it is a collection of appropriated images, done misusing a commercial software, distributed for free to a wider audience. In the gallery, they turn into objects, made for a small audience which usually look at them as "photography". Isn't this a domestication of something that could be extremely wild? Attilia, as curators actively involved in this process, are we domesticating the wild? 9:49pm Domenico Quaranta [Welcome, Attilia!] 11:24pm Attilia Fattori Franchini Hello both! Very glad to be included in this conversation.. 11:28pm Enrico Boccioletti Hey Attilia! It's nice to have you here :) 1:36am Attilia Fattori Franchini Oh, wow, that's a good question. From an artistic point of view, I don't see the objectification of images as a compromise, I see it often as a statement. It can be a sort of repositioning action, a way to use the work to look at its audience and at the artworld itself, not vice versa. I hope that the artists ( and often curators ) are constantly making small wild actions, dispersed, online and offline. The work online has its own context to support it, its distribution modes and its reception. When the work escapes the desktop, this action becomes a strategic gesture, a sort of provocation. Suddenly the work itself, floating in the safety of the artist's desktop or the immensity of the world wide web, has modified itself into object to enter the white cube. I find this transformation exciting and often able to generate unexpected results, adding new layers to what is presented and transmitted. Sometimes the work's transition from a context to another becomes part of an artistic practice and gives new points of reflection and evolution. Wednesday 11:52am Enrico Boccioletti Indeed, I think it always comes to an interesting point when boundaries become blurred and elements recognition becomes more vague. I particularly care about this number of small dispersed actions Attilia was talking about, online and offline, I can relate most of my work to this dynamics of playing with distribution modes and slight gestures. Wednesday 7:55pm Domenico Quaranta Maybe, it's this very distinction between two different spaces, between "online" and "offline", between net art and "offline art" that does not make sense anymore. Maybe today the only possible distinction is between artists that realize that we are living in a layered reality, where we can't distinguish anymore between "the virtual" and "the real" and where it makes much more sense to talk about different forms of reality, and artists that simply didn't get it... Thursday 4:28pm Enrico Boccioletti Yes I guess so, like what Guthrie Lonergan called “Internet Aware”, but even a step forward: how do we deal with this new "hyper-materiality", which I'm seeing as a new tendency and necessity towards forms of augmented materiality, regarding the way we perceive space and objects through constant overexposure to image feeds and the point of possible awareness where digital and information technologies has brought our perception and the way we relate to the world too. 4:56pm Attilia Fattori Franchini I think that Digital Culture has definitely changed our relationship towards a linear definition of reality and representation. The distinction between online and off-line is becoming more and more fine, not just when we talk about formats of expression but also methodologies of diffusion; sources of departure. We are still part of a kind of transitional generation which met the world as not-digital, written and recorded. The interesting passage will be when the so called "digital - natives" will be dominant. As Enrico said we are already a step forward internet awareness, by now our space of observation and confrontation is constantly bouncing between various tools to record and perceive reality. 5:37pm Domenico Quaranta Well, it's hard for me to be so optimistic. Maybe it happens because I am a teacher, and in art schools I meet so many students born in the Nineties and attending painting, sculpture or set design classes (but also new media art classes) who look at me as an alien when I talk about these issues and are completely naive about them. We may be a step forward internet awareness, but most of the people out there, and in the art world, are still two steps back. Technologies are accelerating things, but institutions are still very slow and conservative, and most so-called digital natives have an experience of the internet that doesn't go far beyond checking Facebook on their smartphones. I've been obviously fascinated by the "digital natives" label for long, but recently I started thinking that the true digital natives won't be my children, but my grandchildren. What I mean, and what I meant in my previous question, is that sometimes (only sometimes) the white cube and its display formats seem to have the power to wash all what you said away from the artwork, turning it into something weak, ineffective and easily acceptable for an audience who doesn't care, and will never care, about these issues, and who likes it just as a fresh, comforting art market item. Can you make me change my mind? Thursday 9:51pm Enrico Boccioletti I'm not into that optimistic feeling too much actually, I think I was just trying to recognize some traces of some kind of tendency. What if instead - to preserve complexity and long term process and research - new forms of radicalism switch back to offline practice at a certain point, let's say, to make a statement clear and distinguishable from a background hiss and saturation of images and acceleration? Are we about to see a "slow art" movement as we have slow food? 9:54pm Enrico Boccioletti I'm also thinking of how many young western artists are linked more or less to hipster culture and how hipster culture embraced vegan and healthy food since a while, as a means to elevate itself from a cultural point of view. Friday 1:10pm Enrico Boccioletti And what about Kenneth Goldsmith's (founder of UbuWeb, one of the largest archives of avant-garde material online) efforts to print out the Internet? Friday 6:41pm Attilia Fattori Franchini My feeling is not negative. Young Western artists are definitely linked to hipster culture but they are also able to look critically at it and use the network to expand this criticality. Looking at DIS Magazine or The Jogging there is an implicit subversion of hipster culture and a subtle irony of cultural elevation and life styles imitation. I find interesting when the preoccupation between the work on the internet and the flatness derived by its translation into the White Cube/gallery space is incorporated into practices. I think that instead questioning the purity of each context and what functions better, it is interesting to look at the space that stays in between and how artists relate to it. I see the way this translation is treated as an artistic action no a a task for curators. When a curator needs to directly translate into a physical space something that belongs to the web, as you, I find it difficult to maintain the quality and the power of the work against the gallery and market dynamics. Saturday 12:12am Domenico Quaranta Well, it's both an artistic action and a task for curators. Luckily artists are taking care of it more and more, but it didn't happen for a long time, and it's still often the result of an ongoing conversation - with curators, gallery owners, collectors. Sometimes it works fine, sometimes it fails. Anyway, I was not dismissing "materialization" in general, I just wanted to point out the fact that the context is less mature than it may appear from what is still a relatively small niche. Still small but - and this should be pointed out - extremely different from what it was just five years ago. It doesn't focus anymore on the internet as a medium, but on connectivity as a condition. And it includes artists as Hito Steyerl, Seth Price and - I'd dare to say - Maurizio Cattelan, and critics as David Ioselit, Boris Groys and Jennifer Allen, that can be able to bring these issues at the core of the art world. It's the beginning of a slow process of adaptation and change, made, as you say, of small wild actions, and in which, I think, artists and curators should not forget the disruptive potential of what they are working on. Since the art world is so good in adapting everything to its own standards, we have to be, by default, on the side of change... Saturday 1:32pm Enrico Boccioletti In the end is a matter of "awareness" to have the last word. I mean, when everything is available – or at least we're living with a feeling of having everything at hand, selection is inevitable. I wasn't trying to be uselessly critical towards newness (I contributed myself a number of Jogging posts, for instance, and I am a big fan of DIS mixes and their "evolved lifestyles" editorials); on the contrary I am trying to identify a set of tendencies and possible trends, which could strengthen inclination to openness and, in the words of Domenico, on the side of change. I strongly believe in versatility and reversibility to be embedded in any reasonable artist statement and work. Awareness is political, as a choice. Today 12:32pm Attilia Fattori Franchini I totally agree with both of you about awareness and change. Extremely admire the work of Hito Steyerl and the writing of Jennifer Allen or David Ioselit. I think that all these actions and positions contribute to change, to awareness and to artistic development from artists, curators and audience. Still the discourse is quiet restrict to fews but slowly is penetrating the more conventional exhibition space as the idea of art object itself, subverting it and challenging it. I find very interesting when artists belonging to more "classical" practices as painting/sculpture, start incorporating elements derived by the screen opening new ways of executions and reflection towards the image and the idea of representation. 12:44pm Attilia Fattori Franchini If in one side the screen enters the gallery space (often flattening its essence), on the other influences culture at large and other practices destructuring the so called system. Change in this case is dispersed but maybe irreversible? And surely political.