Third Nature
How can the relationship between individuals, technologies, materials, objects and economic trends be portrayed? And how does their interplay manifests itself in this time and age?
Over the last decades the development of technology has had an incredible impact our perception of time and the way in which we interact in social relationships. Virtual realities allow people to relate to one another also at great distances, with real time connections, thanks to the vanquishing of all limits of time and space in modern communications.
Both the world of the net and that of technology have become part of the geographical, social and cultural reality of our time. They are the means through which we can learn, broadcast, record and communicate events.
Elisa Strinna has always been fascinated by the relationship at play between a society and the way in which that very same society elaborates its own contents (and, going even further, by the relationship between the latter and its natural context).
In this particular historical moment Elisa wishes to investigate the ever growing interdependence between the Western world and media technologies, and the byproducts of such affiliation. Technological landscape/geological landscape, instantaneous time/deep time, material/ virtual, natural/artificial, are some of the themes and aspects at the core of Elisa’s art. Through sound and sculpture these artworks test unforeseen interactions between typically distant worlds.
Elena Forin
The net uses silicon fibres to send information as fast as the speed of light throughout the earth as if it were a mineral planetary nervous system. The possibility to overcome the limits of time and space in communication is something relatively new for mankind. But it is ancient history for our planet: “Whistlers”, for example, are electromagnetic waves that act just like in a wireless communication system between one terrestrial hemisphere and the other.
It is somehow paradoxical how processes of modernisation and evolution are directly related to our ability to exploit natural forces and raw materials. Even more paradoxical to think that some of these raw materials have generated over the course of infinite amounts of time and are as old as the earth’s crust.
The net has not only implemented a better and faster flow of information but has also transformed such “abstract information network” into a tangible material subject to the rules of the current dominant economic system. In the financial market, transactions are processed by algorithms advertised by the slogan “This algo is like a tiger that lurks in the woods and waits for the pray and then jumps on it. Or: this algo is like and anaconda in a tree”*. They recall an imaginary world dominated by uncontrollable impulses, where hunters and prey live.
Third Nature is a work-in-progress that comes as a second chapter in a previous cycle of installations investigating the relationship between man and technology. The sculptures presented during the Open Studio at Fonderia Artistica Battaglia are realised in different materials such as bronze, bee wax, cement and ceramics. They were generated directly from certain elements regarded as symbols of technological process: cables used to carry information and energy. Each and every one of these sculptures have undergone a specific process of corrosion - such as explosion or crystallization. Each and every one of these sculptures have undergone a specific process of corrosion - such as explosion or crystallization.
Thus the transfigured cables, subjected to an organic process of deterioration, are generating a new landscape, a "third nature", where artificial and organic merge into one thing.
* Michael Lews, Flash Boys, Kindle edition