Filippo Sciascia: Exploring the digital world

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