Everyone looks for and paints only the huge masses of trees of mountains,
without hearing the music of blades, of grass and little flower
and without paying attention to the tiny pebbles of a ravine – enchanting.
Joan Mirò

Every day we touch lightly, as with brushing motions, a great deal of electrical tools. They are part of our everyday life: tools that we use for eating, sleeping, having fun or for taking care of our body. They are always in the centre of attention with their perfect shapes.   We see and use them without realizing that the electricity, their lifeblood, lets out radio waves, radiations, interruptions, clicks, ground noises and interferences, phenomena which are perceptible only by means of instrumentation or complex techniques. Yet, knowing and understanding these phenomena can be a way to investigate modernity, to study some of its secrets and to reveal its duplicity. Indeed, part of my work is directed towards this research.

One of my main goals is the creation of unexpected interfaces among the abstract space, the code and the electromagnetism: an encounter with the immaterial world of the electronic culture. After all, everything is done for the satisfaction our own senses in an alternative, different way from what we are normally used to. It is inside the electric space – this material and, at the same time, non-material place – that new aesthetics paths are being open.  This aesthetic potential does not belong to the software nor to the Kantian phenomenon but to the technological language itself. It is the release of the peripheral that lets the unconditional process flow; it is a dystopic vision of the process which, as a result, is no longer under the software control nor bound to fixed structures or appearances.

The first part of my research is based upon the concept of reverse engineering, the concepts and aspects of the sabotage act and the de-contextualization of processes and operations. Through code lines and data alterations, the creation process grows in substance, identity and complexity. It is indeed the creation! The act of creation is strictly connected to the ideas of birth and life. To take part and to be part of the creation act is somehow exciting. In relation to the creation process, my interests are to translate, decode, understand, sift, screen, split, strain, convert and dismantle. In all these actions I can perceive signs which lead me to the concept of a return to the origins. The reverse engineering allows me to comprehend how a structure comes into existence, its origin, the tensions and the mechanisms which are behind such a process. The codes and the protocols are the main elements for the transcoding. In other words, the operation on data is meant to create such a strong effect on the media so that it needs to be collected and  photographed. The image that comes out on the machine level is nothing else but a readable code, a sequence of numbers which corresponds to the value of pixels.  The communication resulting from such a process does not concern the content, the meaning or the formal quality of the image but rather its dimension, type and structure. This is the moment when my operations begin.I tamper with the bit sequences by breaking it then I look into the complex identity of the concept of code.
Therefore, imperfection is not only an integral part of the human nature, but can be found in this process, deep inside the core of the machine where failures occur by means of natural causes – such as voltage swings and electromagnetic interferences – as well as manipulation. Beauty hides behind these failures. It is a beauty which derives from the thresholds or the borderlines of the digital technologies, from their stream of symbols and codes. The techniques that I brought into focus allow a crystallization of the process  that brings to life the pure aesthetics of failure, the beauty of anti-aliasing pixel structures.

The starting point is the sign abstraction, a simple failure strained to the complexity of constituent structures of emotional multilayers. The path goes through targeted constituent operations being cast out by programmed errors and forming failure-maps in a spatio-temporal compression.  The result is a display-vision, an aesthetics made up of discontinuous forces and intensities.

The aesthetics of failure (pdf, 10mb)