Jean Michel Bruyère / LFKs - La Dispersion du Fils (for AVIE)
Ulf Langheinrich - ALLUVIUM (for AVIE)
Thomas McIntosh with Mikko Hynninen, Emmanuel Madan - Ondulation
Martux_M - X-Scape 09_2009
Julien Maire - Exploding Camera, Low Resolution Cinema, Memory Cone
Christian Partos - M.O.M.
Erwin Redl - MATRIX II
Ryuichi Sakamoto + Shiro Takatani - LIFE-fluid, invisible, inaudible…

Curator: Richard Castelli (Epidemic)

The announced end of history, which spread through the last century from Kojève to Fukuyama, had, as corollary, the end of the future. 
First of all in its renaming into past future, as if future could not be envisaged but by people from the past, then with its dissolution in a permanent present also embracing the past. 
Postmodernism took over this undermining, and the recent self-proclamed altermodernism will certainly not be its rescuer.

Digitalife is an opportunity to offer a complex-free perspective on the future: 

Without naivety but without solemnity. An assumed future.

This future will witness the abandonment of this civilizations tendency to move away from the original global perception of the world, which is reminded by the “in essence immersive” prehistoric caves paintings, tendency toward a more and more focused perception, those of the predator: the target, the frame and since the last century, the screen. Through the development of new supports, it will witness both a return and an extension of this original perception of the world.

All artworks will be presented at Digitalife for the first time in italy, if not for the first time in europe or in the world. 

Some artworks will use the most elaborate technologies: 3D stereoscopic imagery, 360° immersion, interactivity, such as those developed for the AVIE (designed by Jeffrey Shaw with iCinema), drawing from ancient Greece like Jean Michel Bruyère with La Dispersion du Fils (after the drama of Actaeon described in one of Ovid’s Metamorphosis), or from abstraction of the most nebulous, like Ulf Langheinrich with ALLUVIUM.

Two immersion principles that are more physical, if not more material will be shown: Matrix II, Erwin Redl’s labyrinth made of diodes suspended with such precision that the visitors’ brain is unable to admit that the area in which he has penetrated is “real” and therefore takes refuge in the perception of that space as purely virtual.

Other artists will replace the classic screen with new supports: for example in ondulation by Thomas McIntosh with Emmanuel Madan and Mikko Hynninen, where movements of reflected light are induced by the vibration of water surface.

Then the nine aquaria of LIFE - fii... by Ryuichi Sakamoto + Shiro Takatani where the image is revealed in the narrow gap between the surface of the water and the overhanging fog.

Finally, two artists will make tangible the basis of our society of information: the pixel, as micro-mirrors by Christian Partos or through their projection without artifice by Julien Maire who will go until the explosion of a camera to commemorate the attack on commander massoud which announced this future in which we are now immersed. 

Without solemnity but without naivety. 

Richard Castelli
Curator