From 20 to 22 September, I screened my videoperformance Sconfinamento, conceived and created during the first Italian sanitary lockdown, at the Dayhim House of Culture in Tehran, curated by the Iromedia platform in collaboration with Videoformes festival in Clermont-Ferrand.
The specified #IROMEDIA platform was provided for the purpose of systematized introduction and interaction of the new media artists at the high level of the global contemporary arts. This opportunity makes contribution to identification, analysis, collection, and protection of the Iranian artists' productions on the basis of a local discourse with respect to the present new media events in world.
The first annual Iromedia is a special exhibition of video art and installation art in participation with France and the #VIDEOFORMES international digital arts festival as the guest of the first annual event.
In this event, 9 works of this festival's selected works will be shown. All of these works will be represented with directorship of @Gabriel_Soucheyre, Director and Founder of the @VIDEOFORMES festival and invited curator of the exhibition.
The selected artists are as follow:
Sconfinamento
During the COVID-19 lockdown, the Italian squares, always so full of life and rowdy, were suddenly silent and deserted, while life was hiding inside the houses, inside the silent buildings that harmoniously surround them. Daily life, once feverish, has become a fleeting and ephemeral circumstance: the squares were controlled by police vans, enlivened by the flight of a seagull, by a flag in the wind, by a runner's bicycle, by a couple wearing masks while walking the dog.
And so the loners adventuring in the confined city were narrative elements of a dystopian and cinematic story, which I started spying on avidly, through the dense system of tourist and surveillance webcams, accessible via the web, which I have discovered oversee almost every city in Italy.
While I was locked in my studio, it gave me relief to look 'outside', to spy those beautiful airy and sunny squares - the places where I would have had an aperitif and a nice dinner, under normal conditions, through this virtual window on my computer screen. I also came to project these images, on the wall of my room, as in a new panopticon urged by the discomfort of the quarantine.
At that point, being an artist working with live media and interaction design, I decided to take the next step.
Through motion tracking technology, I grabbed the webcam feed and passed it to a software, specially compiled for this project, which records and visually tracks the movement of people, vehicles, and animals, processing all the data flow and turning it into a concert for synth: movements generate sounds, modulations, graphic visualizations, digital effects. Finally, I returned everything back to the network, through a series of live streaming on Facebook, in a creative ring of real-time manipulations and interpretations.