Archive for the ‘technology’ tag
What happens when…
What happens when mid-career art stars suddendly discover the potential of the digital medium?
This question is rolling into my head since when I read, last week in Art Basel, a short article on The Art Newspaper, enthusiastically endorsing Thomas Ruff‘s recent series of prints, Zycles (2008 – 2009).
I already knew about David Hockney‘s even more enthusiastic praise of the virtues of the computer, but Ruff’s naive remake of the computer art of the Sixties put a new light on it. Nevertheless, I still don’t have any answer for my question – just many incongruous feelings. Can anybody help me?
More soon. In the meantime, I hope you’ll enjoy this funny quote by his majesty Hans Ulrich Obrist (about Hockney’s Photoshop paintings):
“I’ve never seen anything like it… At first I thought it was a painting. The more I examined it, the more I wasn’t sure.”
Damn, Mr. Obrist, Adobe Photoshop was first released in 1990. Where did you live in the last couple of decades?
KINGS OF DISTURBANCE. Interview with Roberto Paci Dalò
KINGS OF DISTURBANCE. Interview with Roberto Paci Dalò, artistic director of Giardini Pensili
Domenico Quaranta
Published in “Cluster. On Innovation”, n. 4 (Biotech), pp. 46 – 49. © Cluster 2004
DQ. How do you relate to technology: how far can it be considered a tool or how far can it be considered a compromise? What role has it had in helping you overcome the barriers that bound the different art forms? Is there ever the risk that the tool takes up too much space and ends up becoming a rhetorical object?
RPD. First of all it must be said that theatre – and performance in general- is by its very nature a place of “high technology”. It is in the history itself of this art. We began working with digital technologies in 1987, back from our first long stay in the United States. In New York we bought a “lexicon lxp5″, that, among other things, enabled us to work on pitch and modify voices in real time, looking, at that time, at the work of an artist like Laurie Anderson who played specifically on this sexual ambiguity starting from the voice sound. The stage for us is the main meeting place of all arts, a meeting that goes through a consideration on sensoriality. Music – in particular electronic music – and its sound are one of the fundamental languages of all projects of Giardini Pensili.
Obviously, there is always the risk of a “technological rhetoric”, and also of a real technological fetishism. That is why we always work with “mixed” technologies, where, for example, the perfection of the digital meets the beauty of the “dirty” analogue… To us, these two worlds are like one and we try to transfer the qualities of both into the creation of works dynamically moving within these territories.
