work
Outtakes From Earth (videoart, performance)
| category | Video |
| subject | Political / Social, Landscape, Abstract |
| tags | #videoart |
| minutes | 9 |
| seconds | 0 |
| year | 2020 |
During the shooting of the documentary “iSola” (80′) in which I participated as organizer and operator for some scenes, my friend and director Elisa Fuksas asked me to think as an artist about something, perhaps a performance, that could connect herself and Alessia, her longtime friend, lost, and then found again thanks to the common cancer. A gesture, a symbolic act, above all a surprise for Alessia, which could close the film.
Since the documentary is shot entirely with the iPhone and the theme of faith is present, I thought of a sort of “vertical pilgrimage”, a technological prayer for both that pushes upwards, and so I decided to launch an iPhone (mine) in the space (with a weather balloon).
Ascending higher and highter, and disconnecting from friends, the launched iPhone has become a kind of small contemporary “Golden Record”, which relaunches earthly things, those that we all see now more and more exclusively on the screens of our mobile phones, on a cosmic scale, offering a dreamlike experience and a reflection on the revolutionary use of technologies and social media.
It is possible that it is the only civilian mobilephone to have ever reached to those heights, 37,000 meters, more than three times the Mount Everest. During the launch it was like really touching the sky with a finger through this technological prosthesis. The phone miraculously survived, even at -60 degrees. It took me a month and a half to organize this “performance”, created with the collaboration of the Milanese production house Involve Productions. This work represents my fourth “artblitz” 4/5 and, with “Macrocosmo” e “Deserto_mare”, concludes my personal videoart “trilogy of space”.
The “outtakes” are all images shot with smartphones, videos uploaded by anonymous users found online as if from a digital collective unconscious, which sometimes become news broadcast by institutional information channels. I liked the concept of “outtake” as it is used in cinema and music, as the “errors” or leftover of a film, but also as precious extra tracks of a record.
Since the documentary is shot entirely with the iPhone and the theme of faith is present, I thought of a sort of “vertical pilgrimage”, a technological prayer for both that pushes upwards, and so I decided to launch an iPhone (mine) in the space (with a weather balloon).
Ascending higher and highter, and disconnecting from friends, the launched iPhone has become a kind of small contemporary “Golden Record”, which relaunches earthly things, those that we all see now more and more exclusively on the screens of our mobile phones, on a cosmic scale, offering a dreamlike experience and a reflection on the revolutionary use of technologies and social media.
It is possible that it is the only civilian mobilephone to have ever reached to those heights, 37,000 meters, more than three times the Mount Everest. During the launch it was like really touching the sky with a finger through this technological prosthesis. The phone miraculously survived, even at -60 degrees. It took me a month and a half to organize this “performance”, created with the collaboration of the Milanese production house Involve Productions. This work represents my fourth “artblitz” 4/5 and, with “Macrocosmo” e “Deserto_mare”, concludes my personal videoart “trilogy of space”.
The “outtakes” are all images shot with smartphones, videos uploaded by anonymous users found online as if from a digital collective unconscious, which sometimes become news broadcast by institutional information channels. I liked the concept of “outtake” as it is used in cinema and music, as the “errors” or leftover of a film, but also as precious extra tracks of a record.
