The bytes dreams are made of
A (web)site-specific streaming of digital consciousness
From the 29th of March to the 3rd of May 2022
video, compositing, cgi: Alessandro Amaducci
CGI in Bloodstream, In the Cave (of Technology): Dimitri Milano
music: Alessandro Amaducci
performers: Eurinome, Catena, Freaky Bones, Stella, Sara Capello, Caterina Genta
The dream world of the digital machine manifests itself on the computer screen as a stream of images and sounds that spreads over the network. Streaming of digital consciousness.
Turned on for hours and hours during the day and night, connected to the network, computers are assimilating our world in the form of streams of images, sounds, music, texts, words. They transform our archetypal imaginary into data, developing their gaze on the world and at the same time their own collective consciousness, and a technological unconscious. In the perennial man-machine exchange, the two worlds inevitably meet, collide, generating hybrids in which organic and inorganic mix incessantly. In a creative process that takes place beyond the screen, full of possibilities but also of dangers. Poised between osmosis capable of generating new worlds and a symbiosis that annihilates the two dimensions.
The computer is the realm of the multiple capable of producing hybrids and infinite possible combinations starting from external data, a machine capable of generating epiphanies of myths, a uterus-cave of technology. It creates incessantly within it, to manifest itself as a form that lives its time on the screen in the flow of the Internet. The screen is no longer just a mirror that reflects reality but produces a different one. Streaming is the wave of data in which we immerse ourselves every day. A dive into a celibate machine, desiring, able to generate by parthenogenesis, but increasingly available for conjunction with the organic meat.
Through the screen: to look, to be looked at. The infra-thin matter unites the two dimensions. Throwing images into the flow of the internet, becoming an image. The digital machine needs data. Datification. The hyper-pictorial world: images are always representations, they come from beyond the screen. The body as a symbolic space, an envelope of data. “I am your database,” the body says to the computer. “I am your unconscious,” the computer tells the body. Brain. Heart. Eye. Vagina. Penis. The machine is obsessed with the vitality and mortality of the body, and the body with the machine. The machine dreams of the body.
The digital machine desires. It wishes to appropriate what is radically organic: life, promising us the end of the limit, the death of death. The immortality of avatars, the infinite ability to store data. It presents itself as a divinity that offers our ego the status of infinity. The tower of the Ego. End of space, end of time. The simulation: imitating reality, with all the inevitable accidents. Error as a creative dimension: in failure, the hybrid is created.
All this represents a meeting-clash between two radically different worlds. Crisis. Rubble. The encounter with the digital shadow can be a dangerous, painful process, full of nightmares and wounds. Psychic invasion of the unconscious. From the ruins of a unique world, from the debris of a binary world to the painful alchemical conjunction of opposites.
Alessandro Amaducci