Everytime you switch me off, I die. A little. group exhibition by Like A Little Disaster at FOOTHOLD, Bari

 

 

 

 

 

Everytime you switch me off, I die. A little

Organized by Like A Little Disaster

Daniela Corbascio, Claude Eigan, Alexandra Koumantaki, Andrea Martinucci, Catalina Ouyang, David Stjernholm, Maurizio Vicerè, and Jonny Tanna

FOOTHOLD

Bari, Italy

April 28 – June 2, 2018

 

 

Like A Little Disaster is proud to present Everytime you switch me off, I die. A little a project that involves works by Daniela Corbascio, Claude Eigan, Alexandra Koumantaki, Andrea Martinucci, Catalina Ouyang, David Stjernholm and Maurizio Vicerè + a dreamtale by Jonny Tanna.

 

ON 

– Where does the flame of a candle go when the candle is turned off? Where does the light go? Where does the past go?

Firstly I realized that I am not immobile at the center of the universe. Then that I am not distinguished and different from any other sentient and non-sentient being. That I am far from being entirely transparent to myself. Now, digital light tells me that I’m not a separate agent, but an informatic organism  sharing with others a global environment fundamentally made up of information: the luminous Infosphere.

I observe myself observing myself in the communicative production; I see myself with the eyes of a possible audience; I glimpse myself in the luminous traces I produce online. I observe the light and light observes me and captures me, I am subjected to it.

I risk losing myself in the labyrinthic network of changeable and temporary connections, the fragmentation of the perception of myself corresponds to a multiplicity of incoherent and disconnected relations. These intermittences push me in a myriad of directions, leading me to play a quantity of roles such as to make disappear my self-conciousness.

– Does the self completely saturated by digital light become a non-self? 

In the luminous technosphere there is the possibility not yet present in the real world. Each manifestation in physical reality must have a luminous representation. All changes in physical nature are consequence of digital information processes; nature has ended up in digital light.

I live in a place where autonomous intelligences multiply themself, where body-machines generate images fed by autonomous information that become new forms of life, where millions of environments cohabit in the same physical space, creating a chain of parallel worlds. The image becomes dematerialized, while I merge myself with a luminous medium that questions the notions of authorship, corporeity.

Identity is overloaded by the plurality of my iconic projections, falling into a biological imbalance where an informative proliferation develops, a background light characterizes the identity itself, to the point of confusing it with the traces of other actors distributed in the network.

Light allows me to enter an area with weak borders,  subject to continuous redefinition, marked by multiple belongingness and osmosis between center and border. Through light I instantly propagate myself in every direction, I multiply myself in an endless process, I extend myself in every direction.

I am surrounded by luminous flares that amplify my ability to look into matter and through space. I know, I perceive, I meet and communicate with others and with the environment through lights-prosthesis  making body with my body, quickly dissimulating one’s own otherness.

I am present-absent. Absent in the presence. I am here and there at the same time, I am on and off, my body expands itself, turns itself, extends itself, “naturally”. I am in the light of a transpersonal experience that allows me to look at the interconnection of everything, the permeability and instability of boundaries, the lack of distinction between the part and the whole, the foreground and the background, the context and the content.

I move in a landscape where the flesh no longer needs redemption because it has already become a body of light.

PRAISE BE TO THE FLAWLESS, ALL-PERVASIVE ILLUMINATION OF THE GREAT MUDRA. TURN OVER TO ME THE JEWEL, LOTUS AND RADIANT LIGHT.

 

OFF

More beautiful than the day, peaceful by all means, the star-studded, pensive and soft night is a better model of knowledge than the sun-struck, cruel, exclusive, eye-hurting, ideologically-prone and opinion-ridden light of day.

I live in a fluid space that extends the finite limits of traditional metaphysics, traceable to the anthropocentric sight and light, that is, linked to the space-time dimension proper to human sensoriality. I free myself from the anthropological structure anchored to the “vision”, to the truth of evidence, and lose myself in the trans-human horizon, revealed as trans-optical, trans-luminic, trans-spatial, trans-temporal….

My universe refers to what is widespread, not localizable or definable, to what is not shown, to what is stingy with signs, expressing itself, if it does, in an ambiguous and transversal way.

Light blinds me and prevents me from seeing. It is the shadows to give me the perception of depth, to make the sensible world endowed with density and concreteness. I need shadows to leave the opacity that is proper to the object. I need shadows to escape from the blinding light of a flattened universe.

I was in the center of an immense grotto. The ground was covered with fine sand bespangled with gold. The vault was as high as that of a Gothic cathedral, and stretched away out of sight into the distant darkness. The walls were covered with stalactites of varied hue and wondrous richness … The decomposition of the luminous rays by the thousands of prisms, the showers of brilliancy that flashed and flowed from every side, produced the most astonishing combination of light and color that had ever dazzled the eyes of man.