NWe are certainly not discovering it now, but the combination and interaction between science, technology and expressive, artistic languages represents a privileged space for interrogating contemporaneity in a complex and profound way. Another proof is “Neural Swamp”, the installation by Martine Syms that will be exhibited at the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation in Turin from 14 September to 30 January 2022. An immersive work curated by Irene Calderoni and Amanda Stroka awarded the second edition of Future Fields Commission in Time-Based. An interesting operation, this one, carried out by the Turin Foundation in collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Interesting because it involves commissioning a work to a young artist giving him a long period to design and produce it (two years), but also an otherwise unattainable budget. And the idea is precisely to focus on a reflection that invests technologies and that puts in place a critical spirit on our time. Martine Syms is a child prodigy of international art, backed by various experiences and prestigious exhibitions, with a varied and complex talent. He is also the director of a feature film. His art ranges from an uncommon technological awareness (also matured with his visits to the Berggruen Institute and the University of Berkeley) to performance and audiovisual narration.
“Neural Swamp” will be a broad and complex narrative space with structures that refer to the world of sport that becomes a metaphor for the complex performances we are subjected to in the world of social interfaces (a theme dear to the artist). A performance to which mainly women are subjected, and in particular African American women. And here too another of the themes dear to Syms is grafted, that of identity, starting from the black one and the female one. It is the curator Irene Calderoni who tells the genesis and aesthetics of the project: at the center of this complex structure / environment we find three screens with two African American actresses who play part of a screenplay that the artist wrote for a film and which has merged in this work, which in turn will probably give birth, in a generative poetic process, to a new feature film. The actresses read a script but this script, as well as their voices, were fed to an artificial intelligence that generates new readings in real time. The voices themselves are produced by a second artificial intelligence, with the artificial sound attempting to mimic the natural one but causing a distance. The question of gender and that of African American culture are thus grafted into a deeper awareness of contemporary culture, characterized by the proliferation, circulation and use of images and by the constant search for technologies that erase or make invisible bodies, voices and black narratives. .
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