lost civilization of the vessels

lost civilization of the vessels, 2009
Audio-visual, SD 4:3 Stereo, 5’10”

Series of 675 photographic prints, 24 x 32 cm

Click the picture to watch the video on Benna's Cinema

The artwork explained

This site's purpose is to make some of my most cryptic artworks more comprehensible and this multidisciplinary suite will be the first one to be examined.

Being quite evident that “lost civilization of the vessels” deals with environmentalism, for its strange writings it may seem rather indecipherable than cryptic, anyway there's more to know about it than what people may have understood at first glance.

Why I made this suite of artworks?

That year I was in Tuscany, Italy. I like to walk through the countrysides and enjoy nature, so I was very displeased to see how dull and couldn't-care-less people can turn the beautiful lands into dumps, scattering rubbish all over the fields, especially from cars running along the country roads.
I was very surprised for the incredible number of garbage debris scattered all around the places where I was walking through.

So, I decided to document that: in the next weeks I bore the infrared camera, and started to take pictures of the most significant pieces of trash I came across.
I decided to use infrared photography for its dramatic and estranging aura, and its wearing effect on dyes.
I didn't shoot every piece I found and I could have continued for days, alas forever, but when I reached about 1500 photos I decided that was enough.

After that, my first thought was that mankind, continuing to scatter dangerous stuff everywhere that way, you know, will face many problems. Although littering is not the worst of the many disasters caused by mankind, it meaningfully emphasizes the meanness and shortsightedness of such people.
I then imagined a day where mankind would be definitely extinct since a very long time, so long that not even the bones nor the concrete would have survived time or a final war Armageddon, so that the only and permanent traces of its lost civilization were those perdurable small debris.

The second thought, while watching all the photos I took, was that the biggest part of items were vessels, just like one of the most common archaeological findings. Containers, receptacles, boxes and bottles for foods, cigarettes, sweeties, drinks, water, drugs and medicaments, or other “goods” available in stores, most of them contaminated too and full of toxic substances and additives.

A civilization used to put everything into vessels.
Hence the title.

After some days of screening I selected about 650 most significant pictures, and decided not to photo-manipulate them leaving the original pink tint, as I am used to, because it renders an alienating vision like from another dimension.

The alien writing system

Who could have come across those garbage findings from a lost civilization? Another race, maybe extraterrestrial, an alien species who travelled herein. So I decided to transform all the pictures into file cards or slides as if they were belonging to an alien archaeological archive, a catalogue listing findings of unknown use. This is the purpose of the bizarre writings on them.
That was the basic idea, but the good is that the alien writing system is not a meaningless fake, it is indeed real and coherent.
I created an alien language totally from scratch, with an alphabet including the phonetics, a simple grammar with rules, a basic dictionary of words, a numbering system, and even a peculiar temper of these imagined alien travellers. I made it all very exotic.

I will not reveal what is the content of the writings, I only say they are remarks and brief annotations describing the findings.

I challenge daring decipherers of ancient languages and cryptoanalysts to decrypt my fictional alien language. That is not a hoax.

The phonetics system was necessary because I planned to make also a video, to bring an additional narration to the bare series of pictures, where you can hear the alien voice reading the titles appearing in the video, just like a presentation for a study. I wanted that voice to be inconceivably weird for a human being, as if it was emitted by the most exotic phonatory apparatus, maybe producing frequencies we can not even hear.
I recorded the phonemes and altered them until I obtained what I imagined them to be, then I pasted them in proper sequences to form all the needed words. The result is that whispered gurgling.
As the writings, also the voice is coherent and phonetically correct.


The video

To complete this audio-visual, I created an introductory part preceding the close sequence of all the slides.

I wished to make the video as if it was a brief report storing data about the travel made by those extraterrestrial archaeologists and their findings.

I designed some more slides with alien writings and a hypothetical cosmic coordinate system imaginatively locating our infinitesimal planet between astral bodies, galaxies, superclusters or filaments in this part of universe, some vaguely recalling the mysterious crop circles. The slides became 675 in total.

I added a virtual view of the Earth from space, then some vintage video footage showing a desolate, quiet and inanimate land, and a tensional soundtrack made with some noise manipulation.

The catalogue with the complete series of 675 slides

Me and video art

Benna, skopèin: beato carlo liviero, 2010
Audio-visual, SD 4:3 Stereo, 5’10” (cyclic loop)

Exposing the enslaver machine

A consequence of being video artists may be that of becoming slaves.

Video artists need video technology to speak, to express their minds, their vision, but technology is like a golem: you can either take advantage of it or subdue to its strength.

These words are not merely a way to impress the reader: I see indeed many video artworks, especially by young artists, who are worriedly trying to flaunt how they can master the machine, or how much their style can be trendy. Most of the times they are technology slaves, always playing with the ultimate gadget tool.
Someone will agree that many video artists are interested only in being skilled, manifesting meanings that are just pretexts to show their assumed talent, gimmicks concealing their unconditional devotion to technology. That’s virtuosismo, a very bad habit that we may find in every kind of art. (1) Nothing to blame if they enjoy that, but deep inside their own the need to prove they can accomplish a good job is breeding.
Worst of all are those who use technology and special effects to fill an expressive vacuity. All these artists-technicians may eventually end up to become artisans of some cutting-edge production factories, silently making cars and perfumes ads, or processing bits of the latest 3D thing.
Art is not a profession, you don’t have to accomplish a job; indeed you are here to tell, no matter how you do it: just tell. (2)
Don’t care about the tool or the technique, and express your thoughts, since our world needs new ideas, and not to put another slave into overfilled cages: the word art has its etymology in the Sanskritic root ar, which means to go, figuratively as starting an action.
 

Benna, nothing happened archetype, 2012
Performance and drawing, video recording SD 4:3 Stereo, 32’36”
India ink on spolvero paper, 210 x 85 cm and four mobile parts

Personally, I don’t tell my thoughts only through Video Art, that would be too boring. I practice several art disciplines. Painting is much less technological than video, if not at all: a brush, some coloured powders, a medium and a surface. The brush is nothing more than an extension of the tool I am. I, as a tool, change the reality around me, transforming it into a painting. So drawing and graphics are, and performance too, et cetera. Even photography can be less technological: build a stenopeic cardboard box, put some emulsion paper in it and expose; the result is a “transmutation” of light into a sheet of paper, which then I can enjoy with the eyes and touch.
On the contrary, electronic video exists only inside the machine, it can be generated and viewed only through the machine. You are an external operator of a black box, which is needed to keep your immaterial artwork alive. (3) You rely on the black box.

So what?
I don’t want to depend on anybody, figure out of any box: I use video, but don’t care to be considered a good technician. False modesty apart, I am skilled indeed, and I could show my best awareness on the ultimate lure of the actual charming style and cool fashion to which people cyclically stick, or simply make the picture to look better with that magic undertone, but I don’t care.
Instead I often use improper devices that could produce video noise, mangled audio, low resolution. But again that’s not a choice of look and style.
Then, why? Because I wish to “expose the machine”, and maybe eventually get rid of it. This is a process of deconstruction from the inside, I want to use the very same tool to make people aware of it.
In fact, one of my concerns when I create a video, is to make the beholder aware that the video motion pictures are not the reality, but just an interpretation of it through a sensor, through a lens, through data encoding.
I need to put a veil on the picture, a “layer of abstraction”, as a tag exposing the device’s invisible presence. Actually I do that using colouring, video noise and vignetting: they remind me old vintage photography, which I appreciate very much for its innate layer of abstraction made of technological immaturity.

Benna, lost civilization of the vessels, 2009
Audio-visual, SD 4:3 Stereo, 5’10”

I had in good esteem the Dogme 95 movement, at least to a certain degree, because I don’t like to have any rules at all. I like the degrading of the picture due to the hand-held shooting and the refusal of additional lighting in the set.
I have always gone in the opposite direction of the endless run for lifelikeness and picture perfection.

Benna, topic #6, 2010-2011
Audio-visual, SD 4:3 Stereo, 15’33”

But there’s another substantial point: as I said before, video pictures are not the reality. Here we can find an important concept: in our times the most of us are hopelessly accustomed with the comfortable mental laziness for which what we see is what it is. Since Surrealism, Magritte warned us that is not so, and this applies to video, photography, painting (and even our eyesight, but my interest is now focused on humans dealing with machines). This is virtual reality. (4)
The more lifelike picture, the better illusion. Images are deceiving us, they are a parallel reality, a pataphysical dimension, people tend to forget that, so there’s the need to denounce its mystifying power of persuasion again and again.
For its persuasiveness, a perfect lifelike picture is the best mean to deliberately cheat and change people’s mind, and build false proofs which create false beliefs, in order to change the vision of true reality. (5) That’s what especially commercial ads are pursuing.
Video is not the reality and must not even be our perceptive reality.

Benna, skopèin: le tue migliori amiche, 2009-2010
Audio-visual, SD 4:3 Stereo, 4’12” (cyclic loop)

Finally, video may enslave people, both the artists and the public, also by making them addicted. The run to the perfect virtual reality deception will never end: from PAL to HDTV, to stereography, to holography, to mind implants and so on.
If artists follow their own need to be recognized and acclaimed for their technical skills, they will become technology addicted like their audience.
Artists are the ones who speak: they are empowered to tell their thoughts and possibly to guide the others toward freedom and independence; otherwise speakers and listeners will get all caught into that addictive game of relying on machines.
Like old men relying on walking sticks. (6)


Footnotes:

(1) Since mankind used to dwell into caves, art has been a way to communicate, to make the others aware of something that needs to be recorded, that deserves attention, that is nice or is a danger: from great hunting scenes to strange happenings like signs in the sky, from the revelation of a beauty to the denounce of a totem.

(2) Nowadays our psyche is literally submerged into visual art: our society has become a visual society and most of the aspects of our life are the issue and the cause of mental contamination by pictures from – and back to – ads, movies, signals, banners, toons et cetera. Since the cave graffiti, mankind evolved with images side by side: it’s self-evident the reason why our brain performs well in processing visual records. And the reason why many people would like to master the power of images is self-evident too.
It’s not so self-evident the reason why one would like to be considered, or someone consider a person, an artist: indeed the difference between a so called artist and the others is just the role: the first is the one who talks and the others are the audience, at least until the speech takes place, and the roles are not absolute, they may change in time; everyone can be an artist.
Acquainting this, the greatest artists of all times seem to be the politicians; in fact the artist – either visual, musician, writer – is a politician; the word politics have to be meant in its highest meaning: originating from the Greek word politikè, it is related to the participation in public and social matters.
And, well… what we call politicians are indeed party politicians: most of the times they are “humble servants” (e.g. slaves) making the interests of their own masters, simply working to live into the divine light shed by banks and other powers.
So, the true and supreme politician is the artist, the poet, the prophet and the philosopher; the others are just money gluttons.
All in all, that’s why artists should be concerned firstly for what they express.

(3) Apparently, also the black box is an extension of its operator: it can be used to change the reality as a tool like the brush, but there’s a big difference in the level of dependence: me, the brush and the painting are belonging to the same dimension, that of the human sensory reality, where I can see the artwork with the eyes, and also interchange the brush tool with another thing belonging to this dimension, even the bare fingers. The video artwork is instead a processing of electrons that belong to another dimension, and it can be enjoyed through nothing but an electronic device.
You are depending on the machine: I guess that not much people is capable to build a digital videocam, and also hope that not much people is dreaming to be directly brain connected to a video player or have a SD-Card slot in the back.

(4) Virtual reality is a locution from the ’80s (but originated before) actually seldom used, because this artificial electronic reality is dangerously converging, slipping and merging day by day into our reality, for that same mental laziness.

(5) Yet in the times when it was a rudimentary and experimental technology, photography has been used by world governments to create photomontages to disguise crimes, riots, wars, to manipulate public opinion and to make false proofs against opponents. It’s never too late to stress that images are not the truth: they are indeed simply concepts, thoughts, personal and partial and biased visions of it. They are fables to tell.

(6) Perhaps the destiny of man will be that described in the perpetual myth of the golem: the creator of the machine perishes under its overwhelming power or subdues to its ultimate beauty and perfection; this is caused by a lack of self-esteem: he does not even see any more his own ability in having created the machine; he is persuaded to have been surpassed and to be outdated, obsolete.
To converge into one man/machine hybrid will not save mankind from vanishing, as awe-struck transhumanist philosophers are hoping, but it will accelerate the process through an exploiting absorption where at last the weakest part will be definitely obliterated and discarded: the stronger prevails, that’s a natural unavoidable rule. The solution would be that to prevent mankind from building its headsman.
Anyway, I don’t believe that mankind will have nothing more to say, although actually trying to stop a suicide jumping man is a desperate mission.

Why do I make art?

Art, meant as its primal etymological root, is the most powerful means to reach the mind of the others, for it is the example we give them through our deeds and acts.
Yet art is also the most fragile aspect of mankind, because what to do or how to behave is in the end uncertain, and that moves me.

I also like art because it gives me the chance to express myself more universally and relatively. Visual and audio are expressive means leaving the viewers more chances to abstract than speech: what you do, that is. It is a deed, an act, that can be taken as an example, not a statement or a demand.

But also because mankind always lived beside deception: today we are surrounded by artfully misleading ads, movies, music and the like, often made by artists deceived themselves. My intent is to create art free from deception, for a free mind, for free people.
Many of us are trapped into superficial minds. Our society is dominated by the lures, the false certainties and the nihilism bore by the schizophrenic chronic swaying between greed and sloth, when not stuck to addiction. There is a need for balancing, for a counterweight to restrain the bad consequences that we see everyday everywhere, to achieve an agile, motile and free mind.

Along my journey I learned that the wisest people prefer to achieve a cognition by themselves. Artworks, being indirectly given metaphoric clues, are the most discreet way to inspire people, giving them new tiles to solve their own philosophic puzzle, or to make some others simply realise that there actually is a puzzle.

Art is not the only way to do that, after all it is sufficient to have tact, but I like art, since I was a child, since the last time I was a child: well, I must say that I occasionally practise meditation and, not pretending you to believe this, I had visions of countless previous lives, I walked this planet countless times since a very long time, and, as this time I finally solved my puzzle, this life will be my last presence here, and I have hints to give. Just hints, clues, bits and crumbs, because we can share the same tiles, but not the same puzzle.

The song that does not exist

The unbelievable song

In this epoch, most of the things that we consider as real are indeed nothing more than shadows, ghosts, dreams.

People do believe in what they see through representations, recounts, images, depictions, and actually what they see on-line. Today, something that is not on-line seems not to exist. History is a recount of someone about past events.

“The unbelievable song”, which is not the real title of the song itself, is a conceptual artwork that exists indeed, I invented it, but there is one rule that prevents most people to believe that it would ever exist:

The unbelievable song must not be reproduced with any means except human voice and must not be recorded with any means except human memory.

This means that I can not write the song down on paper or here, or record it on a tape or digital file. Nothing. I can only sing it in presence of people, live, in person, but only after I instructed them that they must follow the rule of never recording or writing it, and only after I got their promise to respect the conceptual artwork's rule. In this fashion, this conceptual artwork is like a secret in plain sight: real to people who heard it, but unreal to the media. Trust is fundamental.

A formula required to listeners can be: “Swear on what you care most that you will never record nor write the song that I am going to sing to you. Promise to me that you will sing the song only with your voice and only after having instructed your listener about these premises.”

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