interactive multimedia installation
I<3bologna is an interactive audiovisual installation. Viewers create the audiovisual experience and urban narrative of the city by animating a bubble of audiovisual material inherent to Bologna. The audiovisual experience of the social becomes collective through users' iconic swipe and double-click interactions on their device.
Audiovisual materials related to the city of Bologna - collected on 'vertical' social platforms - are rendered through the software's sound and visual algorithm, creating an offline social bubble. Through smartphone connection, it is possible for viewers to explore the sound and visual landscape of the city of Bologna in a chaotic and conflicting way, traversing a virtual representation of it. The path of the material (recording - internet sharing - downloaded file) achieves an 'organic' compression of the information.
The space of the work demarcates an audiovisual landscape of the Internet grafted into real space through the combination of projection, personal smart devices, and speaker triangulation. The operation of this ecosystem takes inspiration from audiovisual fruition formats found in social networks. An endless, algorithmic ribbon of audiovisual particles that belong to the urban space of the city. From the videos that inhabit the work, a mapping of the city other than the traditional one emerges. Digital places of worship are grafted onto the historical architectural heritage, giving a new meaning and a different measure of urban spaces. Sound and body performance trends overwrite traditional ways of experiencing space, creating a hybrid cultural layer between real and virtual. The audiovisual stream of “i<3bologna” can be traversed by users through the action of scrolling (swiping), exposing a usually private process and creating a new experience of collective fruition, based on video and sound associations suggested by the work's generative algorithm. Emphasizing the sense of annoyance and the digital mechanism of fruition in its forcing itself on the collective highlights an important difference between real and virtual culture; its individual and volatile nature.
The videos that inhabit the framework come from Tik Tok, can be acted upon by or on behalf of the artist, or be pre-existing. They must all share a metadata (hashtag) that contains the name of the city or specific places in the city. The soundtracking of the videos is also mediated by a generative algorithm and always involves the use of three broadcast channels. The soundtrack arises from a mixture of elements already present in the videos and interaction of the connected users. spatial (sound and visual), the virtual space overwrites its characteristics on the real starting ones, returning an alternative version of the urban narrative of the city, mediated by the culture of digital sharing and returned in the form of an algorithmic and interactive audiovisual stream.
foto di Carlo Sgarzi
grafiche di Pierpaolo Ovarini