Filippo Sciascia: Exploring the digital world

A solo exhibition by native Italian artist Filippo Sciascia is being held at the Gaya Fusion gallery in Ubud, Bali from July 16 to Aug. 16. In the exhibition Sciascia presents cinema, painting, music, literature/philosophy, and speech in a single video "performance" -- which is a highly ambitious endeavor, according to writer and art critic Jean Couteau.

A screen: a woman appears, her image blurring, then turning clear before blurring again. She is compulsively whispering the same repetitive sentence, whose text simultaneously appears on the screen. The text, which comes and goes, is a "philosophical statement" on man's endeavor in life. As the text continues unfolding with the woman whispering, the screen divides into several sections displaying different scenes; then as the screen is further subdivided, the face of the same woman reappears in multiple minuscule windows. Other women appear, and another reading of the same sentence is proposed. Simple, obsessive music accompanies the whole sequence. And, when the video itself stops, a set of paintings come into view, which was produced by the artist on the basis of this video and to illustrate it.

What Filippo Sciascia presents in this work is a highly ambitious endeavor: cinema, painting, music, literature, philosophy, and speech are all brought together in a single video "performance". Not only are the traditional boundaries between these genres explored, questioned, and even transgressed, but each of the genres, with the exception of music, is itself questioned and "dismantled" in structure or content.

The pictures are sometimes realist, sometimes blurred through the manipulation of pixels; reality is thus relativized. The cinematographic narrative is "cut into pieces" and its order at times reversed -- thus losing its meaning. Sound becomes silence, as the obsessive whispering is most of the time voiceless; meaning is thus rendered "meaningless". The screen is split into as many scenes as deemed necessary, while the content itself, and thus the meaning of the message represented, are manipulated at our convenience, as the name of the performance -- For Your Consideration -- indicates. And the "paintings" that the artist creates out of his video are based not on "reality", but on the engineered pixel rendition of this reality, relativizing it yet again.

As this short analysis of this video piece demonstrates, Filippo is systematically exploring all the possibilities opened by the recent digitalization of the media -- a late 20th century invention. The "formal research" aspect of his work is thus paramount. But this does not mean that the content side is neglected. His innovative approach to "form" through his exploration of the video medium in fact aims at conveying a message as multi-faceted as the form.

The core issue that Filippo is raising is a classical issue of the position and condition of being human. His approach is resolutely anthropocentric, after the tradition prevalent in the West: most of the images focus on a human face -- that of a whispering woman -- or on human actions and statements. Yet, the readings one can make of his presentation of the issue can differ radically according to the context.

First one can take the text that accompanies the video at face value, and read it as a positivist statement. The obsessively repeated sentence "We are always trying to do something, or become something or be somebody; and in this having to be somebody we create all our difficulties, because right there the ego comes popping" then become a call, an invitation to do something, while being wary of one's ego. This is proposed for "our consideration", as a matter of realism.

But it is also possible to make an altogether different reading of the same utterance, especially if one frames it in the context of the video imagery where it is inserted. The way the characters behave and utter the script -- repetitively, inaudibly, or blandly, as if the meaning was simply "for your consideration", as the artist puts it, and thus unimportant -- suggests an underlying existential questioning, which the artist expresses by baring the inherent ambiguity, and contradiction, of the human condition.

As shown in and through the video, humans are both central and marginal, all-powerful and impotent; the choices they make, even when they seem to be decided based on "consideration", are illusory. In this interpretation, it is not only the individual's perception of, and hence, power over reality that seems to be in question, but "reality" itself, whose only truth, perhaps, lies in being an illusion of reality.

Whichever interpretation one chooses, it is obvious that there is no true way to interpret the video. It is for our "consideration". We can read it as we like: it will always be contingent. In the end, Filippo is not only telling us that there is no reality, but also that there is no "truth" in any reality.

One recognizes, in this multi-faceted reading that Filippo is proposing to us, the mark of several influences. Filippo being Italian, the name of the great playwright Pirandello comes to mind with regard to the idea of multi-faceted reality. But a more universal existentialist search for meaning pervades his work. It will be interesting to see how he further deepens the treatment of these themes in his future work.

Yet, it is not in the "message" side of his work that Filippo really breaks new ground, but rather in the way he links this message to a novel exploration of "form", made possible by digital technology.

Filippo's work shows that he senses himself at a crossroads. He has a new instrument, the digital video camera-cum-computer, which embodies a new phase of scientific and technical innovation. He grasps that this new instrument should revolutionize artistic creativities, the practical methods that artists use to combine form and content through the available techniques of their day. Then he launches himself in a systematic investigation, in all directions, of the potentials of his media. He sees, in his quest, all the formerly existing barriers between different media and genres breaking down one after another. His work is the dizzying result of this exploration.

Filippo Sciascia is indeed not the first artist, nor, probably, the only one in our times to be enthused by the breaking of new ground. Scientific and technical innovation has always played a paramount role in the evolution of the arts. In the 13th century, it was the rediscovery of Euclidian geometry by the Northern Italians that led to Giotto and the Florentine school of painting: the third dimension of reality -- depth -- could now be made manifest in the two-dimensional form of painting.

From that time onward, the focus of artistic expression changed: symbolism, or any other type of artistic expression, had to be molded into a realistic form. In the 19th century, the discovery of black and white photography by Niepce and Daguerre was no less momentous in its consequences. Invalidating the search for realism in painting, it led first to the exploration of light and color by the expressionists, and then to the systematic "deconstruction" of art (form, subject, media, etc.) now known as modern and contemporary art. The introduction of film at the beginning of the 20th century did not have an immediate influence on the other forms of visual expression, but it impacted greatly on literature, as it multiplied the possibilities of storytelling and rendered verbal description nearly useless. Cinematography became an artistic genre in itself.

Today, given the opportunity to record, reproduce, "cut and paste", and thus recombine sounds and images at will, a whole new field of artistic exploration and creation opens before us. Filippo Sciasca is one of the artists pioneering its discovery. May the field he helps to open be a wide and beautiful one.

For more information about Sciascia's works, exhibitions and biography, please visit www.filipposciascia.it or e-mail sciascia72@hotmail.com