Priva(te)cy: ContainerArt Rome - Jerusalem :: November 22 - December 2, 2007 :: Piazza del Risorgimento, Rome.

ContainerArt, co-produced with Enzimi, organizes in Rome an itinerant exposition of contemporary and avant-garde art. Displaying – in various containers scattered through the city – art installations, pictures, videoworks and sculptures of the most innovative artists. For this occasion some members of nITroStudio in collaboration with Javier Ideami realized Priva(te)cy…

Virtual Narcissus: interconnected faces :: Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible (Paul Klee) - Sensuos and melancholic, the reflection of the unaware Narcissus evokes the beginnings of the image concept and all theories of representation, as suggested by Leon Battista Alberti in his De Pictura (1435-36). The abstraction of our own image is, indeed, a way to apprehend the reality which leads to one’s own conscience, through a primal journey in the inner self.

The reflection of the digital face today takes place in the mirror of the ocean of information, endlessly changing and gains a numeric and telematic physical dimension. As David Lyon says, our doubles become then some electronic «data-doubles» generated by observing individual’s flesh and blood: our electronic souls surf into virtual paths drawn by credit cards, magnetic cards, mobile phones, security camera’s, webcam, cookies, hard disks and all other electronic devices we daily use. The synergy between computer and telecommunication seriously endangers the privacy, which is now accessible only to those economic lobbies that steer the information flows.

The topic of electronic surveillance arouses therefore a lot of interest between artists and activists; it questions the undefined boundaries between social security and intrusion of the State or private individuals. At the same time Internet represents the extended site of the collective intelligence described by Pierre Levy and dynamic interconnection of data in real time is certainly a decentralized system that knows no restrains and goes beyond any settled power.

Evoking the association power-knowledge of Foucault, the intrusive eye of the surveillance camera’s can be then reversed and given back to the “victims” through Art, making visible the invisible. The self-reflection will therefore double in an ongoing process to end up multiplying itself and gaining an incredible cognitive potential when set in the internet as shared information and detectable by the a-dimensional environment of the web.

It is a new identity space. The image of one’s own face will disintegrate in discontinuous and quantifiable fragments of a specific numeric set that becomes a visible image, creating itself again at any moment, somewhere else, anywhere.

Priva(te)cy invites to join this initiative of “self surveillance” and collective awareness: let’s renounce to privacy and let’s offer out of our own will our face to the shared journey in a global knowledge. Getting to the other side of the yellow mark makes the difference between staying in the queue at the post office behind a line, under the passive eye of a surveillance camera, and dare to jump in space and time instantly spreading our own memory inserted into the circuit of thoughts of an interconnected memory.

In the darkroom of the container, the meaning of the captured image will reverse and it will start the emotional process while recognizing itself in the vertigo of the exploration: the virtual Narcissus will offer his ubiquitous reflection in an unexpected moment and will recognize it inside the collective interactive work, built in a dynamic web publishing. Each participant can decide individually to decrypt his own hidden image and let it be an active part of a conscience of the net.

From Rome to Jerusalem to the entire world the space is compressing, the time is accelerating in this act of freedom of the interconnected faces.

Paola Ruotolo (translation by Paola Palma)