Alice Palamenghi

Metronom: Vello d’oro (Golden Fleece), 2020, is the third video work included in the Digital Video Wall project, Eden. It is a fantastic narration of the landscape of Lo Internet in which you reconstruct a mythology of the Net and its symbols by telling the journey of the digital revolution and retracing the iconic motifs, the references. What are the sources of this what can be called a new epic and how did you insert them into the work?

Alice Palamenghi: The core of attraction around which I have developed my visuals over the last eight years is the ancient Greek epic, while for some reasons, including generational ones, the formal outcome of my works has always been a digital product. In my own way, I tell stories in which you can find references to a world of the past (the mythological ecosystem), which after a long process of disclosure, revision and translation have crystallized in the form that today is part of our cultural heritage.
In the same way, I tell the expansion and spread of another frontier, another territory that is The Internet (and with it, of course, the technologies that have allowed this development). It is a space that, as we know, is in continuous renewal, in continuous development, on which, or within which, representations of a pre-existing world (the social context, culture, history) are transferred and that by definition existed before of the internet. It is a translation process that stratifies and encompasses not only classic encyclopedic knowledge, but naturally also “popular” beliefs, folklore, and the aesthetic “children” of the contemporary era.

M: In your works you explore, experiment and use tools and motifs belonging to digital graphics such as glitches, datamoshing and vaporwave. What role does this contamination play and where does it come from within your research?

AP: The approach and contamination with glitch aesthetics, or otherwise known as the error, happened as I said, first of all for generational reasons. I took part in the first group exhibitions in 2010/11; at that time, aesthetics and glitchy languages had already been accepted and normalized by the artistic community. I mean that important debates had already arisen around this way of working, a lot of literature had been written about it and many artists (and many works), especially in the sound art field, had contributed to the history of “new” compositional and expressive canons. Furthermore, the rapid obsolescence of technological devices, especially digital ones, has allowed me, from the very beginning, to be able to work with a large number of devices. In the wake of this “delay” I mainly focused on analyzing the Glitch in its original form, that is, in its manifestation as an error in the reading / transmission of a data stream, and consequently, on the formal results of the work, which in my case concerned the image.

M: The waporwave aesthetics refers by definition to a heterogeneous imaginary, composed of explicit and manifest traits and symbolic references. What does it mean in your work?

AP: My pieces are made up of symbols, so I can say that they are “my work”. The stories I compose are ultimately sequences that reflect the image of something that is not “there” at that moment. This is what I mean when I think of a symbol: it is the projection of an entity that is off stage. It is an idea, an abstraction. And as such it can be transported, incorporated (projected) in multiple forms.

M: By 1998 the digital revolution had come to fulfillment and its end was decreed. Twenty-three years later, the territory of The Internet was traversed in its entirety. Reaching the end of the Internet means there is nothing left to see, and there is no longer any link to visit. Once you have covered each of the ganglia of the network, you find yourself outside this connective swarm, without being able to re-enter it. So, who a little before was being in the world, then is a traveler. And his, an exclusion from history, more than the end of history. The shelter for the abdicator in his wandering is the Golden Fleece, capable of healing any wound.
Alice Palamenghi
March 23, 2020
London. First day of Lockdown.

This is the introductory text to Vello d’oro (Golden Fleece) that marks the beginning, or the end, of a real epic of The Internet. It was composed in London, the city where you live, on the first day of the Spring Lockdown. How has this narrative framework accompanied this period? Are there any points in common between the end of The Internet and the end of an unsustainable Western lifestyle?

AP: The Golden Fleece with its mythical healing properties is an image and at the same time a tool that I thought of after becoming aware of COVID-19 and the results that, almost a year later, we are observing.
The fleece offers shelter, protection, care. It is a sort of rescue blanket used to save the shipwrecked, the survivors. Whoever covers up or dresses in it, is someone “obscene”, that ,who is temporarily placed “off stage”, out of history. The castaway needs care, assistance, and most importantly, to be identified. Their future will depend on this. From the idea of the shipwreck I developed a story about the end of Lo Internet not as the collapse of a system linked to a fatal error, but as a sudden change of paradigm that leads you to be a stranger or, again, “out of scene”. It means being outside, beyond the borders, beyond the frontier and not being able to re-enter. This is an element that I have been using for some time, and that I have also discussed with Giuliano Tarlao, with the experience of CRUDOSTUDIO.

M: Together with the artist Giuliano Tarlao in 2018 you founded CRUDOSTUDIO, defined as “a transversal research center”. Could you tell us more about how the program is developed and what are the main topics you are addressing, bearing in mind the definition you gave it?
DO ROUTINE NOT RITUALS appears at the bottom edge of your site’s home page, is it a warning or more of a work style?

AP: “Transversal” is an adjective that we often use, and it is for us one of the lowest common denominators in any research process, including the field of art. During 2018 we spent a year in Brescia (IT) in which one of the activities we have most developed with CRUDOSTUDIO involved a cycle of workshops with the aim of disseminating the results that we somehow felt we had achieved with our research. This also meant discussing and talking about the social and cultural scenario of which we are (or were) inhabitants. Each workshop was a work environment in which the tools used to work were the concepts, ideas and small philosophies put to work to investigate a segment of reality, with the aim of understanding it better.
Do Routine Not Rituals is one of the statements with which we currently sign ourselves (the other is Always Remember To Spread A Good Karma) and at the same time one of the concepts we used in the context of the workshops I mentioned.
By preparing the work material for one of these events the online timeline of our searches based on the word statement generated an ‘echo chamber’ of feeds pointing (or suggesting) to contents (text documents, pages web, video, etc..) mostly in the motivational field: coaching, optimization of both personal and work productivity, self-improvement. In each of those contents the word “ritual” appeared every single time. This also interested us for the “old” legacies that this term brings with it (the sacrifice, the open “sacred”, superstitious) and the overturning (adaptation) that has been done within a specific area of contents. From an alternative point of view, which is outside the economy and logic of web platforms, we have worked in relation to the statement (to making a statement) developing it, once again, as a concept, a small philosophy put to work. And then tell about oneself, say who you are, name and identify yourself (to get back to what has been said regarding the discourse of Il Vello d’Oro). In conclusion, our work is the result of a training. A workout is the result of a routine. Something that improves and develops over time (like a habit). In our case, routine is something we do so as to create the best condition to develop our research (which concerns the understanding of reality), our interests, our life.

Alice Palamenghi (Gavardo, Bs, 1992), graduates from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, School of New Technologies for the Arts. She currently lives and works in London. Palamenghi’s research refelcts on the Technique, as techniques and technologies, intended as a mirror to identify the human: the Technique is a tool that incorporates concepts, books, libraries, language, archives. It’s in clothes, culture and knowledge that the ‘human’ defines properly. In this rebound (in which the human actually materializes outside of itself), Palamenghi develops her work by modeling 3D landscapes, re-proposing the traces of the human presence and its history.

Alice Palamenghi

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