Contributor to the collaborative project “Is There Love in the Technoetic Narcissus?” of Francesco Monico, with the essay “Divagazioni narcisistiche, l’autocritica del pensiero e dell’arte”
about the project:
The slow flowering of a Narcissus Poeticus becomes the subject of a New Media Art installation hosted in an unusual exhibition space: a video Tv channel. The “Technoetic Narcissus” is a work that, linking authors and the public, seeks to assure intersubjectivity in the realm of signifying. The project aims to active collaboration between different voices from the artistic culture by producing texts that explore the concept of Human Cultural Narcissism, a concept that has yet to be properly theorised. It is an online televised experiment, an art work born at the end of the television era, an art work that in itself is a communication act that harnesses an exploration of one of the central ideas of the coming contemporary era – the necessary redefinition of anthropocentrism.
At the end of the exhibition, the texts and images of the flowering, along with the interpretative cooperation by various authors and participants, will be gathered and published in a limited-edition book – replete with its own ISDN – that will represent the real and final artwork. At the same time, a version will be made available through on-demand digital publishing for all artists, scholars and other people who are interested. The final work will be presented and displayed at the Nowhere Gallery in Milan in June 2010. The set of images and writing done during the time of flowering will become credible artistic – and perhaps even historical – forms because they will embody and allude t shared experiences of meaning, as well as contribute to the representation and definition of a new post-humanity.
The formal project belongs to the work insofar as it determines its purpose and is effective in promoting the analysis and criticism of some of its contents in a given linguistic and cultural context. The art in this work begins where mere material existence ends – art is the process and exists as a generative idea. Ultimately art recovers a material dimension as a work in the form of the book, the critical machine par excellence. In short, what I am doing is making the process of understanding become the substance of the art.
Technoetic Narcissus contributors:
Pier Luigi Capucci (Media Theory), Roy Ascott (Technoetic Arts), Jens Hauser (Bioart & Media Theory), Nicola Verlato (artist), Marta de Menezes (Bioart), Wu Ming 2 (Novelist), Enrica Borghi (Artista), Antonio Caronia (Critical Theory), Karin Andersen (Artista), Maurizio Bortolotti (Art Curator), Alessandro Bertante (Novelist), Giuseppe O. Longo (Cybernetic), Cristina Trivellin (Art Curator), Steve Piccolo (Musician), Amos Bianchi (philosopher & Media Theorist), Orio Vergani (Gallerist), Elif Ayter (Artist), Natasha Vita-More (Artist), Aria Spinelli (Art Curator), Antonio Lucci (philosopher), Alessio Chierico (Media Artist).