As part of the institutional programme of ART CITY Bologna, CUBO presents the project Pleasant Places. The technological Sublime and the relationship between art, nature and technology, the personal exhibition of Davide Quayola, one of the world's most recognised digital artists.
The exhibition designed specifically for the CUBO spaces and curated by Federica Patti shows different types of "digital paintings". The video Pleasant Places is quite central. It is being presented for the first time in Italy and was shot in ultra HD mode in the same countryside of Provence that inspired Van Gogh more than a century ago.
Accompanying the video-installation in Spazio Arte are the trees of the PP 3D-scans series, images generated on the computer starting from high-resolution 3D laser scans of the same Provençal landscapes of the video. The project is completed in the Mediateca by a varied digital collection made available to the public which is useful for furthering Quayola's artistic project and the rendering process that allows the artist to reach an almost infinite and perfect level of image definition: with 4K shooting resolution (Ultra High Definition, or 12 million pixels per frame, the same resolution as film), the artist initially shows the natural landscape in all its bright beauty, sampling and rendering the subject live, but the scene soon evolves according to a progressive and alienating morphing. The image analysis algorithms used by Quayola take action, disrupting the image and altering the acquired data like a virus capable of dissolving contours and splitting the atomic bonds of matter. The metamorphoses in progress create a solemn dynamism which digitally reconstructs the gesture of painting following hybrid creative energies, perceivable as human/non-human traces, partly natural and partly computational.
VIDEO - Process Breakdown
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Pleasant Places is a hybrid between video, painting and digital sculpture where, for example, the energy of the wind among the trees has allowed, through the creation of an algorithm, a transformation into a BLUR in which it is difficult to identify the boundary between reality and artificial and where even
the sound element undergoes a treatment similar to the visual data: sampled and translated into code, reworked through filters that alter its recognisability, recomposed in an iridescent and emotional synthetic flow, the familiar rustle of leaves in the wind becomes a tapestry of sound, white noise, and the chorus of the cicadas in the sun is transformed into the granular and sparkling swarm of matter. In general, the evolution of new technologies allows and generates the development of new languages.
"Works like Pleasant Places have the ability to induce emotional awareness of the media reality that surrounds us, making the inexplicable feel familiar: the aesthetic experience thus described can be compared to a feeling of 'Sublime technology', the result of the relationship between man, nature, art and technology. We can consider these multimedia masterpieces as the pinnacle of a journey, an apex that reaches a never-before-seen expressive power and that opens up unexplored paths and scenarios. In other words: a kind of magic." (from the catalogue text by Federica Patti)
The exhibition project is enriched by a schedule of related events .
