Luigi M. Verde

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       This photo introduces a short series of images, shot in analogue and freely inspired by a musical piece by Cattivi Costume. It collects lost glances, blurry faces that leave a mark without ever managing to delimit their features. In the anonymity of a suspended and desolate time there is a silent humanity, eternally waiting, made up of fragments of life and stories without any name that intertwine in a mosaic of solitudes and in an apparently casual meeting with no more past. "Sleepless men" who, trying to monitor the world and the sense of truth, have fallen into the trap caused by their own desires, transforming themselves into cold figures, wandering souls, lost and forgotten. No voice, no call or scream at the top of their lungs or arms waving in the wind and pitying eyes can no longer bring them back to a state of wakefulness.

      Formless faces that are lost in the mist of an endless night, appear like a lightless shadow that wanders aimlessly in a lifeless city. Souls without peace that are consumed without sleep in a senseless world that searches for a voiceless art and shows itself without emotion on a wall devoid of color.

      The photograph turns into a barbed wire cage ready to lock the text in a paper prison. It shows us that there is no limit to division, separation, fracture, fragment but there is always a wall, a network, a barrier that creates new cracks and other insurmountable distances. What choice is there in such a scenario? Which side of the network are you on? What tragic irony weighs on the weak will of the "sleepless man"?

      Here, in this imagined world, a longing for clarity, the memory of the way of smiling, is given only as a trace on a crumbling wall, an emblem of weakness and at the same time also strength of the memory, which, however, falters, yes deteriorates, rotates with ever narrower trajectories around the edge of an abyss, still leaving its indelible mark to shine through. All around is just a field of rubble, just enough to fill the scene, a pure and simple visual correlate.

      Halfway along this path characterized by a dreamlike dimension and which takes on the appearance of increasingly blurred faces along irrelevant landscapes, I imagined a possible change of perspective: if instead of "sleepless man" these clouded features were nothing more than puppets, old props abandoned in front of the backdrop of a difficult to decipher reality? What if the truth was elsewhere? Far beyond the narrow and geometric space of the paper where have I drawn these signs?

      Mists of dreams, meanwhile, insist on taking care of a world that escapes the gaze as it dissolves. Those looking for meaning and identity get lost in the indistinct and uncertain while dreamlike visions are confused between reality and fantasy, between light and darkness. Faceless shadows wander in places without a name and without history, masks of humanity hide the true essence of individuals. Empty and lost looks do not find a destination or hope. Distortions of the mind create an effect of vertigo and anguish, just as those who live in this foggy mist must feel fragile and alone.

      The sleepless man chose to live in this strange condition in the hope of being able to dialogue with the things of the world, as if they spoke to him a secret language that, in the normal state of wakefulness and attention, we cannot perceive. However, this has led it to separate itself more and more from that principle of demarcation that allows us to distinguish between objects, fictions, imagination and from those pure concepts of the intellect such as quantity, quality, relationship or modality.

      So the enigmas piled up: here, at this time, under that particular light there was someone and, at the same time, there was no sense in being precisely in this place, at that precise moment. They have become photographs that underline an absence even before a presence, perhaps a trace that is less easy to erase remains, but never a presence, an authentic memory or a desire carved in the stone of memory.

      At the end it is the contrast between reality and illusion that emerges, between nature and man, between light and shadow. The blurred face in the foreground will still represent the illusion, the man, the shadow. An evanescent, indefinite, anonymous presence that overlaps with reality, but does not erase it. A forest in the background represents reality, nature, light, a clear, detailed, identifiable scene that resists illusion, but does not reject it. He asks us to continually question who we are, where we come from and where we are going. He offers us a poetic and mysterious vision of life.

Condivido con i lettori di Artmajeur un nuovo post pubblicato nel mio blog sulle differenze tra guardare e vedere: 

leggi su "ideographie"

Buona lettura!

   We present the concept of an animation that arises from the fusion of two artistic languages: music and photography. The video is inspired by an experimental musical track, created by Cattivi Costume, Raffaele Cesarano (darabouka) and Patrizia Ferrarini (Tibetan bells), which masterfully blends Tibetan bells, ancestral instruments and voice. The result is a sound story that evokes mythological and primordial atmospheres. The photographic images that accompany the music were chosen to represent the visual dimension of this story, through a metaphysical dimension and trying to convey our way of knowing the world through art and away from some stereotypes. We hope you like the video and get involved. Good vision!

   In the depths of the ether, beyond the veil of time, flowed the water of oblivion and memory, weaving the fabric of an ancient legend. This was the silent kingdom of Mnemosyne, creator of memories and secrets, where the echo of past eras vibrated in the air saturated with spells.
   Mnemosyne, the memorial Goddess, splendid and omniscient, was the daughter of the ineffable Uranus and the primordial Gaea and had the gift of remembering everything, even the most distant and hidden things. It was she who held the wisdom and knowledge of the world.
   It happened that one day, in the skies of Olympus, Zeus, supreme among the gods, was taken by a storm of love for Mnemosyne and with her he had nine daughters, the Muses, who inherited his talent for the arts and sciences. But Zeus, fickle and unfaithful, soon tired of Mnemosyne, abandoning her for other lovers.
   The latter, hurt and disappointed, retreated to a secret cave, where she dedicated herself to cultivating her garden of flowers and herbs. Among these, there was a special plant, which had the power to transmit the memory of water. It was the water lily, the water flower par excellence, growing in a clear and deep pond. Mnemosyne used the leaves and petals of the water lily to prepare magical potions which she then drank to ease her pain and to relive the happy moments of her life. Thus, the water lily absorbed her emotions, her memories, her dreams.
   But Mnemosyne was not the only one who knew the secret of this special flower. Her daughters, the Muses, also knew where her mother's cave was located, and sometimes visited her to ask for advice and inspiration. The Muses always brought with them gifts for Mnemosyne, including splendid Tibetan bells, which produced harmonious and relaxing sounds. They were ancient and mysterious instruments, which came from a distant land, where a philosophy of peace and balance was practiced and had the power to create beneficial vibrations, which spread through the air and water, stimulating the mind and body.
   When the Muses played the singing bowls, Mnemosyne felt invigorated, furthermore her water lily potions became more effective while the singing bowls amplified the memory of the water, making it even clearer and more intense.When the Muses played the singing bowls, Mnemosyne felt invigorated, furthermore her water lily potions became more effective while the singing bowls amplified the memory of the water, making it even clearer and more intense.
   Thus it was that Mnemosyne and her Muse Souls became guardians of ethereal knowledge, authors of a narrative song intertwined between the transcendence of the waters and the harmonious choir of the bells, outlining distinctive codes of human and divine creativity that have always sung the cosmic hymn of 'existence.

"Aqua"

     The great German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that technology has a profound impact on the human condition. This takes possession of the human horizon, making it not entirely free but bound by its concreteness. In other words, it is technology that conditions man, influencing his destiny. Heidegger defined it as a "pro-vocation", because it anticipated and determined the path that man had to follow. This critical vision of technology highlights its role in our existence and what better example can we find than the transformations we have experienced in photography in recent decades? These innovations have been so rapid and numerous that they have left us no time to deeply assimilate the relationship with the tools used in creating and editing our images. This has at least been my personal experience in the field, always attracted by every form of innovation and progress. But with the images created by artificial intelligence the situation could undergo, in a certain sense, a turning point: if we strive to interact without being "manipulated" by the algorithm and without resorting to botched solutions in the vain search for our own authorship , we find ourselves in our hands a sort of generator of visual paradigms, a sort of Universal Camera (MFU).

      I would now like to propose a curious analogy between the newly created MFU and the better known MTU or the Universal Turing Machine. Alan Turing, one of the pioneers of the theory of computation, created an abstract model of a computer that can manipulate data contained on a tape of unlimited length, following a set of well-defined rules. This machine is capable of executing any algorithm, that is, a finite sequence of steps to solve a problem. The Turing machine is a powerful theoretical tool for studying the calculability and complexity of algorithms, as it allows us to understand what the limits of mechanical calculation are, it is also an important source of inspiration for philosophy, logic, intelligence artificial and cryptography. The Universal Turing Machine, proposed in his fundamental work of 1936, is instead an entity capable of simulating the evolutions of any other Turing machine: this is precisely the sense with which we could consider the algorithms for the automatic generation of an image starting from a text or a sketch, the fruit of our thoughts.

      Returning to the previous identity between Universal Turing Machine and Universal Camera, our MFU, in addition to creating photos, can also simulate real technological paradigms. This characteristic can be understood as the need to loosen the grip of the chains of technology during the entire creative process, so as to make them less decisive compared to the (recent) past. We also have the possibility of focusing more on our "vocation", limiting the effects of the "pro-vocation" of Heideggerian memory.

      To this end, I would like, in closing, to comment briefly on the photo that accompanies the beginning of this post: it represents my hand surmounted by a chipped lens from my old Durst photographic enlarger. The hand is our will to continue to be the undisputed authors of the creative process, even if crushed by the weight of a technology "cracked" by its own excessive development. Personally I believe that I will continue to prefer the use of paper and hands to trace the signs of my thoughts on the world. 

“Look at my face: my name is Might Have Been; I am also called No More, Too Late, Farewell (Guarda il mio volto: il mio nome è Avrebbe Potuto Essere; mi chiamo anche Non Piú, Troppo Tardi, Addio)”
Dedica scritta da Edgar Auber sulla foto di un proprio ritratto regalato a Marcel Proust

     Marcel Proust, the famous French writer, was able to transform a simple sensorial experience into a powerful metaphor of memory and creativity. In his masterpiece "In Search of Lost Time", the narrator tastes a madeleine, a soft and fragrant sweet, dipped in tea, and suddenly finds himself projected into the past, in a flow of vivid and intense memories that inspire him to write his Opera. Proust's madeleine has thus become a symbol of how an object, a flavour, a perfume can evoke emotions, images and thoughts in us.

   But what does Proust's madeleine have to do with the contemporary image? In an era in which we are inundated with images of all kinds, from those of social media to those of advertising, from those of art to those of information, how can we distinguish between those that have a value compared to something more similar to some sort of visual noise? To further complicate things, there is the possibility of giving shape to almost any idea by means of image generators such as Dall-E, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion to name the best known. How then can we find images that speak to us, that touch us and make us reflect?

   A possible answer can be sought through the lens of artistic experience, which in addition to being the result of a creative act, is also a complex path that unfolds through:- Curiosity, which pushes us to explore, experiment and seek new stimuli and challenges.- Sensitivity, which allows us to grasp the nuances, emotions and atmospheres that hide behind the images.- Imagination, which allows you to imagine, to invent, to transform reality into something different and original.- Criticality, which helps to evaluate, compare and discuss images, highlighting their meanings, messages and contexts.- Communication, which encourages sharing, collaboration, dialogue between those who create and those who use the images, creating a network of relationships and exchanges.

   The artistic experience as a process is therefore a dynamic, interactive, multidimensional experience, which involves different cognitive, emotional, social faculties, which stimulates, entertains and excites.

   The images that have value will therefore be precisely those that behave like Proust's madeleine, that is, those that manage to trigger in the public a curtain of thoughts and feelings that pass through different creative moments in which they can identify. These visions are not just representations of an external reality, but are above all expressions of an internal reality, of a vision of the world, of an artistic sensitivity. They do not only represent objects to look at, but are also stimuli to listen to, to feel, to taste, they are processes in progress, which invite the public to participate, interact and create.

   Examples of images that behave like Proust's madeleine can be found in various areas of contemporary culture. For example, in art, we can think of the works of Andy Warhol, who transformed objects of mass consumption, such as Campbell's soup cans or Coca-Cola bottles, into pop icons, capable of sparking reflections on society. Or we can think of the works of Banksy, who used spray and stencils to create provocative and ironic graffiti that question power.

   These are just a few simple examples, but there are many others, in every field of culture and communication. The task of those who create and use these images is to know how to recognize and appreciate them, using them as sources of inspiration and creativity, striving to convey the message they want to convey to us in a clear and passionate way.

   I conclude these brief notes with Proust's own words: "the only true discovery does not consist in finding new landscapes, but in having new eyes".

Se ami l’arte e la bellezza, non puoi perderti il mio nuovo libro di artista: “Angelo nascosto, angelo della bellezza”. Si tratta di una raccolta di opere originali, alcune delle quali già presenti tra le pagine di Artmajeur. Ogni opera è accompagnata da una breve riflessione che ne svela il significato e la storia. Il libro è disponibile in formato cartaceo e puoi acquistarlo online. Se vuoi avere un’anteprima delle immagini, puoi visitare il link successivo.

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Welcome to Luigi’s fantastic world where a passionate fusion of Art and Science is celebrated in a single creative expression. For three decades, Luigi has expressed himself artistically through photography, making digital paintings and creating art books.

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      The subtitle of the conference organized again this year by the ALTANUR Cultural Association could be: "From Unexpected Connections to Deep Connections". At first glance, the worlds of language, alchemy, and transmutation seem like an unlikely trio. But if we dig a little deeper, we discover some truly intriguing connections between these three seemingly different fields.

      Language is like a hero of transmutation, capable of transforming ignorance into wisdom, fear into courage and even hatred into love. On the other hand, alchemy, that old quest to turn lead into gold or find the elixir of eternal youth, can be seen as a kind of metaphor for the linguistic process. Alchemists sought to cleanse and transform basic ingredients into nobler substances. Similarly, language performs a kind of conceptual magic, taking ideas, experiences, and emotions and converting them into words and speech. But be careful, this is not a simple process! It requires a fair amount of purification and refinement, just like alchemy. Ideas are put into the fire and shaped before being shared with the world. The ultimate goal for both alchemy and language is the creation of something more valuable and meaningful, an attempt to transform ignorance into knowledge and darkness into light.

     "Cattivo Costume" created an incredible soundtrack for this short video clip with which we want to celebrate this year's event. The starting point is a primordial sound, a sort of will that first manifests itself through the didgeridoo, a traditional instrument of the Australian aborigines that evokes an archaic, animal instinct, still full of chaos. This initial sound evolves, increasingly taking on an "ordered" architecture. Starting from the voices, bearers of melody and mathematics, and with the rhythmic design of the frame drums, traditional instruments of the Mediterranean area, we imagined ritual atmospheres of the native peoples. Until reaching a turning point, where the voices explore the boundaries, taking the tones to the extreme. Almost in a deformation, a destructuring of the architecture itself which becomes "liquid", in an emotional crescendo. It was as if the very architecture of music liquefied towards a new human structure, in harmony with creation.

     Finally, from a photographic point of view we instead focused on a slightly disturbing-looking scenario, with the aim of creating a visual shift on how we perceive the world when our eyes refuse to connect with the earth, the roots, the language of nature. It is precisely from this idea that the title RADICanto was born: a sort of fusion between singing and roots. Our gaze is confined within the trap of language: transmutation offers us that change of perspective that frees us from restless visions, ferrying us into a new condition of serenity. The world appears in the right light only if the alchemical forces manage to give a complete course to this process of transformation capable of opening us up to more authentic horizons.

Link to the video on my YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/QsGyYfMw1Ys

     Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this short pamphlet whose title takes its name from a column held by Alimberto Torri and which will examine the possible relationships existing between Art and Science. Let us therefore start with a first simple classification which has nothing to do with the extravagant Chinese encyclopedias dear to J.L. Borges:1. Scientific research influenced by art: Scientists who incorporate artistic approaches into their research to promote creativity, communication or inspiration, or to approach scientific problems differently.2. Education and dissemination: Educational programs or dissemination initiatives that use artistic approaches to make science more accessible, engaging and understandable to the public.3. Developing interdisciplinary communities: Creating an environment where artists and scientists can collaborate, share ideas, and deepen their mutual understanding.4. Philosophy of Art and Science: Philosophy can be used to examine fundamental concepts related to artistic creation and scientific research. Questions about the nature of creativity, the representation of reality and the search for truth can be explored.5. Critical Analysis: Art scholars and critics can analyze works of art that incorporate scientific elements or scientific themes. This analysis can highlight how art reflects or criticizes scientific ideas, or how it uses science as a source of inspiration.6. Science-based artistic creation: Artists who use scientific principles, data, or technologies as an integral part of their creative process to explore scientific themes or to innovatively communicate scientific ideas to audiences.7. Interdisciplinarity: A common way to explore the relationship between art and science is through interdisciplinarity. Artists and scientists can collaborate to create works of art that incorporate scientific principles or to conduct experiments that involve art. This collaboration can lead to new perspectives and innovative approaches.8. Exploring conceptual connections: Theoretical or philosophical studies that examine how artistic ideas and practices can interact with scientific research and vice versa.9. Historical studies: The history of art and the history of science can be studied in parallel to understand how scientific ideas and technological innovations have influenced art over the centuries. For example, Renaissance art was profoundly influenced by the scientific developments of the time.

I deliberately made sure that the first letter of each of the previous points formed the two Latin words RES FACIES, forcibly translated with an ASPECT OF MATTER that we want to explore in depth, through a mental experiment, in the company of an unaware Martian who had just put himself in I listen, in order to argue how robust the previous arguments are. In fact, the meaning of Art and Science extrapolated from the series of previous reports appears vague and generic to say the least. Therefore, investigating possible interactions between these two different domains of human knowledge could appear to be a vain pursuit: in fact, if art is any form of human activity as proof or exaltation of talent and expressive capacity, science is, on the contrary, something even more vague and impalpable, at the limits of existence itself, since there is in fact only a scientific "method" and not "science". It is therefore better to immediately give up on an undertaking that appears to be too generic or has uncertain contours, instead trying to shift attention to the single concept of artscience which we could meanwhile begin to place in the universe of chimeras, dreams or utopias but which would still present itself as an entity with already clearer and more defined contours. In this vision we can therefore begin to outline a first approximate definition of artescience as a rigorous, scientific methodology that establishes a precise relationship with those human activities as proof or exaltation of talent and expressive capacity. To give meaning to this procedure, we will therefore try to present some concrete examples of art science, touching as far as possible on the first evident interactions that emerge between method and creativity.

The metaphor of angels

     Through an artistic work created starting from a cross-play of images, we will now try to suggest some interpretation between two entities, apparently in opposition, which present themselves as irreducible: I am talking about a set of pairs of angels which I have called, respectively, hidden angel and angel of beauty. The angel of beauty is a sort of representation of reality, a first phenomenal level where things are given according to even fallacious or biased criteria, hiding behind an appearance of false candour, of perfection, real traps set to our detriment. Some aspects of contemporary society can easily be ascribed to behavior of this type; unfortunately, many specific examples could be drawn. Only by means of a more relativized vision of reality and a more defined action of reason, combined with a greater will, can we free ourselves from some of the previous prejudices: this consists of the figure of the hidden angel, a precious guide who accompanies us and it encourages us to open our gaze, silently, along less obvious perspectives. All that remains therefore is to move on the edge traced by these two opposing visions, taking into account that neither of the two alternatives is ever clearly presented, there is always some slight oscillation that makes us flex, more or less, in one of the two opposing directions.

The images of angels

     Having said that, we can now focus on some photographic images of these figures just presented, since we want to examine with a sort of lens not only the meaning of this work but also that particular link between method and creativity. Let us therefore begin by analytically dissecting these images starting from a preparatory distinction between photography and photography. What presents itself before our gaze would not seem to require such a distinction since both photography and the photographic present themselves in the same way and both in disguise! The photograph that offers itself as a truth is only a precise description, a syntactic and non-semantic operation of reality. The photographic, on the other hand, is the shell: the way in which the image appears to our gaze, that is, that set of shapes, colors, chiaroscuro, graininess, contrast, sharpness and so on. Please note that I deliberately used the term image when referring to the photographic since the photographic can originate from both a photograph and an anti-photography, i.e. a device not necessarily born from the application of geometric optics rules. Now, since in the field of conceptual art what we want to carry forward is the idea (specifically the metaphor of angels), here we are at a cross-section of the world that is completely consistent with what could be seen through the shots taken with a traditional photojournalist's camera, despite the awareness that what we are seeing in reality does not exist anywhere. The places cannot be placed in any precise geographical position, the personal identity of the people depicted or the concrete availability of furnishings and details visible in these anti-photographs cannot be traced back. Therefore, in summary, we have a somewhat more real idea of what these photos, albeit unreal, show us, since they tell us about those circumstances in which we feel deceived on the one hand by someone who presents himself in a commendable way, by more heartened by the carousel of imagination that helps us read the world in a more transgressive and disenchanted way. The methodological aspect then consists in recreating precisely this condition of plausibility whose aim is to help us understand the world through a clearer gaze (provided that we know how or want to make the effort to interpret these symbols). In other words, given that the photograph is configured, according to consolidated social patterns, as attestation of a document (to the point of considering it universally credible when affixed to the identity card) what the photos of the angels show are also a document on how the small one works part of the world depicted. In other words, they are like a kind of theorem or a procedure (in principle completely mechanizable) which starts from a series of axioms (angels, objects, wheat fields, clouds, chairs and ruins) and from a set of production rules (those created starting from the photographic coherence rules) assemble a series of demonstrations just as if it were a theory on a law of nature.

     In doing so we left the scientific component a little behind the scenes, that is, we considered it superfluous to consider an "equal" relationship between art and science as interesting, we also freed ourselves from a specific scientific context, given that any human activity is always referable to something specific: whether it is science, history or fortune telling, it adds nothing either to the domain of art or even to that of science or fortune telling. On the contrary, the illustrated methodology made it possible to create a more rigorous work for the purposes of the meaning that the author wanted to convey. So far, however, we have only focused on how the scientific component influences artistic production, let's now move on to the vice versa, or how a more artistic approach could impact the creation or construction of a scientific theory. In this regard I would like to briefly mention a famous experiment carried out by the physicists Michelson and Morley which cast doubt on the existence of the luminiferous aether and paved the way for Einstein's theory of special relativity. The experiment consisted of measuring the speed of light in different directions, using an interferometer that divided a beam of light into two perpendicular parts and recombined them on a screen. If light propagates in a medium called the aether, then its speed must have depended on the motion of the Earth with respect to the aether, and therefore varied as the direction changed. This would have caused a shift in the interference fringes on the screen, which could be detected by rotating the apparatus. Michelson and Morley performed the experiment in 1887, but found no significant displacement of the fringes. This meant that the speed of light was the same in all directions, regardless of the Earth's motion. This result was at odds with the predictions of classical mechanics and the aether hypothesis, and suggested that light did not need a medium to propagate. The Michelson-Morley experiment was a challenge to the physics of the time until Lorentz suggested, in 1904, simple transformation formulas to explain the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment.

     In fact, he hypothesized that the lengths of moving objects contracted and times expanded due to the interaction with the ether, the presumed medium in which light propagates. Einstein, however, with brilliant intuition, worthy of the best work of art, eliminated the aether hypothesis and simply postulated the constancy of the speed of light in all inertial reference systems, using precisely the same Lorentz transforms. That is, in some way he made a gesture very similar to that of Duchamp when he showed that any object can become art if it is chosen, signed and presented in an appropriate context: that is, he took formulas belonging to an uninteresting theory and presented them in the appropriate context of special relativity, eliminating ether and stating that the speed of light is constant, thus decisively changing the direction of physics. I wanted to take this example into consideration only to draw a first balance on the idea of artscience: a more interesting result emerges if the two disciplines somehow manage to merge with each other, or when one collapses onto the other bringing together points of view and new approaches. On the contrary, a marked separation of knowledge always risks placing a limit on the advancement of knowledge, obviously denials and new original points of view are accepted!
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Artescienza is the name of a column held by Alimberto Torri. (https://www.ticinowebtv.ch/channel/95/artescienza/)

Article also published on my blog: https://ideografie.blogspot.com/2023/09/artescienza.html