The Invisible Pavilion

Artists

The art, find my friend, sildenafil is flowing in the wind.

curatorial text by Simona Lodi

The Invisible Pavilion is a hallucinatory experience of rewriting the world, remedy an encouragement to increase the whirl and flow of information on invisible r/Reality.

The Invisible Pavilion contains a r/Reality that is open and spontaneous, drawn and analysed from shared data. The double r reflects its double connotation—the lower case r refers to the everyday reality that we all know; the upper case R to a proprietary name, the augmented Reality that is produced.

A word that is also a graphic mark signifying two meanings that are opposite though coexistent at the same time—the tangible and intangible, the visible and the invisible.

The resulting experience is hallucinatory because it gives rise to a suspended sense of insight, which expands the boundaries of the world. A world understood here as a display surface, and as an extension of the exhibition space towards and infinite number of different planes of r/Reality.

The Invisible Pavilion is, therefore, both occupying and occupied—occupying specifically the Biennale, but occupied in turn by a continuous stream of posts/objects from a blog/space shared by artists. A free, fluctuating flow of works in the form of signs and symbols, information and images, expressing the artefacts produced by a r/Reality that is always on, both night and day.

This r/Reality is hence an hallucination unleashed. The aim and value of the initiative is precisely to increase the flow and make it an engine for interaction, to create a multi-author notice-board which is, in the end, a constant flow itself.

A Pavilion which is experimental and without invitation, and which ultimately is not a provocation. It is, rather, a bit of black humour, casting a wink at the aura that shrouds the Biennale, that historic, promised land, which tends to lift in the midst of augmented reproducibility.

An emblematic abstraction to decorate with illusion and signal change in a venue, a city, a place that speaks and interacts, that informs us continuously, non-stop. It announces that human-machine interaction, the interface, has become the urban environment, a collective external space, a Pavilion—an area in which to aggregate and share information in real time, which changes our perception of the physical venue through a gesture that transforms the city, a gesture by artists that are augmented town planners.

Building this r/Reality was not, however, a conscious decision. It is a fact, a place where our town-planning artists have been thrown. It is a r/Reality that is not an object distinct from what it will become, but the object of its own becoming.

The artist is the builder of what the world will become, the r/Reality that exists as an expression of art—an art that is no longer an interpretation of the world, but an act of dialectical transformation of the tangible and intangible, the visible and the invisible.

For this r/Reality, for this Pavilion which “comes into being on its own”, artists have been invited to produce not just a “piece” of work, but rather a stream of “pieces”, a constant flow of work, for a curatorial project that reaches out and speaks to the Visible Biennale.

BIO

Simona Lodi, art critic and curator, lives in Turin. Since 1993 she has been a contributor to variousleading contemporary art journals. Simona’s professional career spans New York, London and Turin—acity that has embraced the world of new technology and communication. It is in this context that the ShareFestival–Art in the Digital Age, of which Simona is founder and Art Director, has found fertile ground togrow and develop.

Les Liens Invisibles is an Italian-based duo of internet artists, Clemente Pestelli and Gionatan Quintini.Most of their artworks—which include an online viral mass suicide performance, an hallucinatory petitionservice and a series of other works staged on popular social media platforms—have been exhibitedinternationally in galleries, museums (MAXXI Rome, New School of New York, KUMU Art Museumof Talinn) and international media art festivals (SHARE, Transmediale). Les Liens Invisibles recentlyreceived an honorary distinction at the Transmediale Media Art Festival (2011)

Nine Artists have been invited to contribute to the pavilion project, viagra approved
performing the space of the Biennale with their own stream of works during the whole period of the exhibition.

What these artists have in common, page
and hence the reason why they were all invited to take part, sick is their focus on confronting our perception of reality through the conscious, mocking and obviously hypercritical use of new media. The invitation to contribute to the Invisible Pavilion was yet another chance for them to comment on the art industry and all its contradictions in the context of the Venice Biennale.

Lots of images made up of lots of pixels are the answer to a figurative approach to the aesthetic reproduction of reality, questioning the unstable nature of the real world and the contemporary methods used for its digital reproduction. The space was used to post images using Augmented Reality to confuse the audience, prompting them to think about the provisional character of reality and contemporary methods of reproducing it. On show is a series of invisible components making up a global image, which purposefully and randomly represent the leftover mistakes of a restrictive, institutional system. Ultimately they are a comment on the abstract and defective context of art, which creates gaps and blind spots (or invisible pavilions) in its methods of production and representation.