Urbanautica

THE FAIL OF AN ERA BEYOND TRUTH

by Steve Bisson

«The role of the artist in post-photography is no longer just to produce works, but to create situations that require meaning.»

You have both recently published a book with Urbanautica Institute which aims to enhance a debate on the photographic practice/language, and on the implications of new digital media. To start can you briefly introduce your visual research together with what attracts you of the photographic medium?

Stefano Parrini (SP): My visual research explores the processes that exist between man and the world in which I live. I do investigate environmental and territorial issues, as much as those concerning society and human relationships. I have always thought of the photographic language as a powerful and direct means of expression, suitable to dialogue with other artistic languages and with people. For this reason it has always attracted me. I try to approach these issues by placing my works on the boundary between the documentation and mystification, between memory and science fiction.

Giovanni Presutti (GP): The choice of photography as a medium was purely instinctive. As a child I liked to draw, but unfortunately I was not very good with it. Later photography allowed me to express and free my imagination. To build other worlds. At the same time I am attracted by social issues. Photography gives me the chance to react to injustices, to channel the anger they provoke me. It all starts with the emotions I experience reading newspapers and books, surfing the Internet, or watching films and television series. There is something that comes from the outside that reaches me deep inside. I wonder how and if this affect other people.

© Giovanni Presutti from the series 'The Era of Beyond Truth'

© Giovanni Presutti from the series 'The Era of Beyond Truth'

How technological progress, as the increased availability of cameras and the endemic use of images in the media, has impacted the way we perceive images and therefore the world?

GP: Recently, the founder of Twitter Evan Williams said: «I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place. I was wrong about that. I think the internet is broken». The same concept, in my opinion, applies to the dissemination of images through new means of communication. And in particular to smartphones, a prevalent medium for the creation and diffusion of images. Furthermore, the fact that mostly everywhere we can produce images does not go hand in hand with quality and meanings. Instead of diversity there is a growing uniformity. This I believe depends on the will to appear rather than to be. A need for instant pleasure and comfort that social media allows. What Susan Sontag professed forty years ago on the voyeurism of photography is fully realized with modern instruments. Therefore the significance that artists gives to their shoots, which allows them to stand out from the mass of images, is even more relevant today.

SP: Today we are in that phase in which we can not clearly perceive the effects of the revolution we are witnessing. Still we know that it has changed the relationship and the way of understanding photography and the world of images in general. We are overwhelmed by a giant wave of information and media that for some is anomalous and for others it is visual oxygen. The ease of production and sharing of images, and the consequent increase in their availability has certainly shifted our perceptual values. The weight of images on our existential balance has certainly changed. In addition, the often instantaneous sharing forces us to a daily and continuous production that affects the impact we have on our own life and modifies, whether we like it or not, our visual vocabulary. In a vast majority of cases the photographs exist only for a very brief moment that can go completely unnoticed. In other cases they can be seen by millions of people with extreme ease, even without a precise intention of the author. The growing search for consent has changed the needs and purposes for which photographs are taken, leading to a mutation of the concept of memory and its perception.

© Stefano Parrini from the series 'FAIL'

GP: I believe that an artist must necessarily look and inhabit his/her era, but with the ability to deviate from it, to observe it from distant, without identifying with it too much. It is through this attitude that we can capture the discrepancies and the critical aspects of our time. And in doing so undermining our way of thinking, to push it further. In a liquid society of images in which everything is ultra visible, and for this less interesting, the task is to represent the invisible, the one that people can not see, but which is there and which must be unveiled, so as to open consciences. Paradoxically, the fact that today there is a surplus of images must lead us to look for those that are missing.

Stefano, 'FAIL' proposes a reflection on the aesthetics of the failure of archiving digital images, thus opening a discussion on the definition of family memory. Tell us about this project, its main assumptions and "conclusions"...

SP: 'FAIL' arises from a real loss and a consequent recovery of a broken hard disk that has generated the aesthetics of the failure that made me think of family memories and the role of photography. When I look at a picture of my past I am always struck by the fact that certain details cannot not be remembered, so the photographs recovered from my broken hard disk reconstruct that incompleteness, a mischievous vision of the memory that will be handed down in this digital era. So for a while I chose to intentionally delete and systematically recover all the photos that I was shooting of my daily life with a cell phone. I guess I was trying to grasp new meanings in the definition of memory. As you said with regards to the book, given the ease of taking pictures with digital cameras memory becomes the subject rather than the object resulting from the shooting. In a way our photographs show more and more what we are rather than what we see. The ease of the medium and consequently the great possibilities of taking pictures, together with the ease of sharing on social media, have profoundly changed the balance that our society has with its own memory. The attention paid to the image is an increasingly important components of modern communication. Photography, in all its forms, has acquired a greater space, thus becoming a global mass phenomenon. So it was important this project as way to relate to these issue, and epocal changes I am witnessing.

© Stefano Parrini from the series 'FAIL'

© Stefano Parrini from the series 'FAIL'

Giovanni, your work 'The Era of Beyond Truth' focuses on the "post-photography" debate. In particular, through the parody of the current addiction to Instagram you show a neurotic need for appearance (presence) leading to degradation/impoverishment of the language and therefore of the depth of expression.

The role of the artist in post-photography is no longer just to produce works, but to create situations that require meaning. In today saturated climate of images there is an emerging need, as Joan Fontcuberta put it in his La fury de las imàgenes of an "image ecology" and a consequent recycling of photography. The concept of image ownership is de-legitimized in favor of appropriation and sharing practices. The work was born in a period when I was intrigued by many articles that talk about the buying and selling of social users. I started studying the phenomenon and I find out that the market for buying and selling likes and followers on Instagram has reached such a level as to be able to find like-selling vending machines in the streets of Moscow. Why such a demand? The issues here is that individuals are more and more identifyng themselves with their virtual profiles and therefore with their number of followers or friends on social media. Somehow it is no longer relevant who is following you, they are just numbers. In fact, it is not even possible to understand with certainty - as happens with the fake news - which of the purchased users are real profiles, a completely invented one or a so-called bot (a robot profile created automatically by the computer to simulate a person's actions while being fictitious). Hence the idea of the performative action of the purchase of 500 followers and the exploratory journey that is achieved through their contents. A digital parody that highlights some grotesque aspects. Although composed of both visual and textual contents belonging to different users, the result appears to be uniform as if it had been realized by a single person, thus making clearly visible the depersonalization of the language and above all of the personal identities. What comes out is perhaps the stereotype of today's communication, banal and insane at the same time. Sex, politics, nature, food, games, public and private, everything is now mixed in a single indefinable and indecipherable soup.

© Giovanni Presutti from the series 'The Era of Beyond Truth'

© Giovanni Presutti from the series 'The Era of Beyond Truth'

What about the process and the book editing?

GP: The realization of the project lasted exactly one year. As soon as the followers appeared on my account (it was easy to recognize them as they appeared about fifty every night around midnight) I archived them separately in order to distinguish them from my real followers. Later, I started to look at the individual profiles. A hard phase, which lasted months, as I tried to make a first wide selection of multimedia contents, thousands of texts, words, images and videos. Something was missing in this early collection of "found materials", and so arose the idea to re-photograph the screen of the Mac with my phone (in fact the shape of the high book is narrow, proportionally, equal to that of the screen of an iphone) and to manipolate the images both phisically and digitally. I began to perform on these materials by adding layers and acting directly on the screen as if it was my canvas. In this way I was able to transform them both formally and conceptually, to make them fully mine. To give a new meaning. The book was the right support to give a shape to this meaning. I could have made an encyclopedic book with hundreds of texts and images but I chose a more conscious selection. Now that the book has been made, I realize this was the right choice. The selection of images and texts could have been different, but not the meaning of the book. The path was long, but it was worth it. Every time I finish a project I look back and wonder at the road made. 'The Era of Beyond Truth' is a definitely an original publication with a very particular aesthetic, which at times may seem annoying and "unwatchable" to those who are happy with a pre-packaged vision. A book that marks my research path, and which demonstrates my current interest in the debate on post-photography and on the role that images play in society.

Book 'The Era of Beyond Truth' by Giovanni Presutti. Urbanautica Institute, 2018

SP: This project started two and a half years ago, after I had broken my computer and witnessed the loss of all my data. I started to worry about data recovery, and the value we give to our memories. During the research I developed the idea of concentrating only on the archive of my mobile phone, reputing it to be the most widespread contemporary medium in the production of memories. And among these those that concerned my family and my most intimate relationships. I wanted to enhance the most sensitive side of memory. The one that touches us more closely. What are we mostly afraid of losing? This was the essential question that I have perhaps tried to answer myself. So I discarded all the material that did not have this familiar perfume. I spent a lot of time recovering images and creating the corrupt archives from which I then chose the visual body that became the book. This last phase of editing in my opinion was the most difficult, trying to build a short selection out of a large one. This phase forced me to make choices and considerations which took many energies. Yet they raise my consciousness.

Book 'FAIL' by Stefano Parrini. Urbanautica Institute, 2018