The screens in shopping centres are large windows to information, advertising and cultural content. Yes to all opens the opportunity for international artists to rethink how the context in which their work is to be shown can condition the work itself, challenging the limits of software, distorting possible advertising realities and proposing new ways of looking at hardware.
The shopping centre is a space without limits, without rules, without truth, it is an empire of confusion where there are no prejudices, order or hierarchy; a space of saturation where the ambition for "more" and accumulation as an end in itself reigns. A place that organises ideas, invades our senses and seduces us, goes straight to our tastes and attacks our weaknesses. This space learns from us, knows us better than we know ourselves, expands into all areas of our lives [1]. The shopping centre is, for many, the new public space. A sort of air- conditioned city that hosts some of our most important life experiences. The first moments of adolescent independence, the first aesthetic decisions, the first kisses, the first adventures. A non-place-home [2] that accompanies us wherever we go. A safe, comfortable space, but at the same time saturated, crowded, where we are one among many, where the collective overcomes the individual. A phenomenological space, built from the senses. A place that satiates us, that excites us and that bores us.
In the same way, the Internet has become a perfectly organised space of disorder. In a few decades of history, the way we consume content on the net has been established. The structure is always the same; the formats are getting closer to each other. The same code and the same goal: a social vision and a need for visual recognition in less than a second. It is so fast because there is no night; everything is on and available 24 hours a day [3].
These two worlds come into contact through very thin devices that are superimposed on any material. A thin but very deep digital layer that covers the marble or the landscape and transports us to an immaterial reality, that of the 0's and 1's transformed into brilliant points of light that, together in thousands, become technological windows that take us to new, imagined places. These moving images augment the spaces and adapt their rhythm to the ever faster changing society. Images move, circulate in an infinite loop of screens, are copied and reproduced [4]. Digital baroque, technological mannerism, data- sensitive cornucopia. This liminal space, where anything can happen, is a place for art.
[1] Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace, 2002.
[2] Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, 1992.
[3] Rafaël Rozendaal. Exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall, text by Marti Manen, 2016.
[4] Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, 2017