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PHOTOGRAPHY

Automated Photography at Foto/Industria

with Milo Keller, Marco De Mutiis

The MAST Foundation is presenting the seventh edition of Foto/Industria, the world's first biennial event devoted to photography of industry and work, at a number of historic venues in Bologna and at MAST. The 12 exhibitions in Foto/Industria 2023 represent a chronology of points of view on the theme of PLAY, from the end of the 19th century to the present day. They offer an opportunity to observe and delve into the research of a selection of international artists. The ECAL is presenting an exhibition of its research project Automated Photography. An increasing number of images are produced autonomously by machines for machines with a gradual exclusion of any human intervention. Automated Photography is a research project developed by the Master Photography that addresses this situation by examining the technologies of image production and distribution such as: machine learning, CGI, photogrammetry.

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Workshop - Charlie Engman

with Milo Keller, Clément Lambelet

"Treatment, Synthesis, and Art Direction" Charlie Engman is an artist, photographer, writer, and art director based in Brooklyn, New York.He works across a range of media and disciplines from gen-AI art, photography, video, and fashion, and balances artistic, commercial, and pedagogical practices. He is the art director of the sustainable fashion brand, Collina Strada, where he is responsible for print design, branding, and runway show design. This workshop will investigate the ways in which media, aesthetics, and culture are interwoven and overlapping and are driven in large part by the accessibility of popular technology. It will also investigate the ways in which creativity is a collaborative and iterative process that bleeds across genre and category. There will be a key focus on the intersection of photography, AI tools, and videogaming / user-driven media.In this workshop, participants are expected to explore and challenge the ways they integrate and synthesize both professional and vernacular registers and new and traditional techniques. This will also serve as an introduction to developing art direction and making “ treatments ” for commissioned projects, and practical experience concepting and executing assignments that can bridge between a distinctive artistic practice and preexisting modes of making and sharing.

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Benjamin Freedman – Positive Illusions

by Benjamin Freedman

Positive Illusions is a photobook that depicts a series of childhood memories constructed using CGI. The resulting uncanny still lives, imagined from the perspective of a child, evoke a strange family presence in photo-realistic environments. Inspired by the nature of memory and simulation, I have based my scenes on what I could remember and used a phenomenological approach to fill in the blanks. Revisiting the past using CGI technology to re-stage events creates a unique flattening of the past and present – a process of pseudo visual archaeology. Some images in the series are repeated but with slight alterations, revealing the surrealist process of fabricating them and underscoring the phenomenon of distortion that is inherent to memory.

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Mattia Dagani Rio – METAMORPHOSIS

by Mattia Dagani Rio

METAMORPHOSIS is a photobook that delves into the complex tapestry of bodybuilding, examining its inherent interplay with torture, hedonism and eroticism. Bodybuilders subject themselves to gruelling training regimens, pushing their bodies to the absolute limits in the pursuit of self-expression. Using a combination of CGI with traditional methods of photography, this project explores moments of agony, highlighting the struggle and dedication required to reshape the body into an extraordinary form. However, it also shows how this practice is a deeply personal journey of self-discovery and self-acceptance which consists of introspective moments, vulnerability and a profound intimacy with themselves, where viewers witness a process of transformation that extends far beyond the physical body.

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Moritz Jekat – Wetlands of Pharmacology

by Moritz Jekat

Exterior virtual organs that enter our bodies and transform our brains surround us. These pharmaca multiply in wetlands between online and real life. In a desire for healing and reconnecting, a group of humanoid aliens inhabit this space and come together in a caring pile of thoughts, emotions and dreams. They share with you, thanks to subconscious writing and wetland tools. A waterbed in space invites you to relax. In the concept of adoption of pharmacology, in contrast to adaptation to the super-fast, consumption-based virtual spheres that are transforming social habits, Wetlands of Pharmacology experiments with a slow coming together and exchange of emotional and physical knowledge of five artists in a computer game engine.

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Amandine Kuhlmann – Cash Me Online

by Amandine Kuhlmann

Cash Me Online is a video project where I stage myself, combining performance with found footage. With the goal of achieving viral fame, I embrace delusion and despair in this exploration, which delves into the impact of cameras in the era of social media. Through a hyper-feminine digital alter ego based on my own algorithm, I perform in virtual and physical realms, fulfilling desires and aspirations. The project questions self-representation and the female gaze in the presence of empowered women on screen. The project examines tensions between toxic feminine tropes and how women reclaim them for empowerment. Found footage combined with a deepfake of my own face serves as a visual album, revealing content diversity and standardisation, introducing ambiguity in notions of dysmorphia.

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Mykolas Valantinas – Lullaby’s Fault

by Mykolas Valantinas

Lullaby’s Fault is a surreal docufictional short film that tells the story of twin brothers with wild and ferocious imaginations, the consequences of which lead them towards violence and ultimately, tragedy. Alternating between first person POV and a more stylised third person perspective, the film has a destabilising effect where the supposed validity of one comes into conflict with the surreal nature of the other. The narrative follows a metamorphic fairy-tale template where the protagonists undergo internal and/or external transformations. The naive, overwhelming nature of fantasy as a dangerous and explosive energy is expressed through two complementary perspectives: the eyes of a child and his older, lunatic self.

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Gabriela Marciniak – Early Retirement

by Gabriela Marciniak

“When you’re young and slow down, you’re lazy, but when you’re retired and you slow down, you’re happy to slow down”. As soon as we enter the word of adulthood, we realise that our everyday lives revolve around completing one task after another, checking off items from our to-do lists. Days pass in this manner, with the constant pressure of doing and working more. Driven by research, the artist explored early retirement in health resorts, places where we can relinquish control and devote our time to treatment, healing, pleasure and the process itself. There is no rush, no time. Video performance as a form of expression juxtaposes the body with architecture, creating a retirement wonderland. A one-channel movie, video performance, 4k, 16:9 frame

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Yuji Wang – 1.0.0.1 Days

by Yuji Wang

1.0.0.1 Days is a CG animation that revolves around the realm of data manipulation, delving into the inexorable rise of artificial intelligence in the era of big data. The video aims to speculate on the consequences of humanity’s increasing reliance on and trust in artificial intelligence, pondering the possibility of data manipulation and subsequent transformation into mere marionettes of information and electronic captives. From reality to virtual reality, is it possible to establish data as a new form of religion? As the narrative unfolds, a cyborg butterfly draws nearer to the humans confined to a glasshouse, with its tenderness, its curiosity, its ambition…

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Yumo Wu – The Room and the Photographs

by Yumo Wu

The Room and the Photographs investigates the intertwined relationship between perception, space and photography. Initially, observers were placed inside a room to witness the raw essence of photography in the camera obscura. The digital evolution has reshaped the ontology of the medium and provided an entirely metamorphosed experience – observing photography with a detachment from reality. As in painting, I assemble a meticulous collection of physical photographs and computer-generated imagery. These domestic spaces lose their inherent perspective. They are familiar yet strange, fractured yet imbalanced. My photographic constructions, part memories, part materiality, attempt to reveal the complexity of perception in the realm of photography.

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Sophie Schreurs – Fed Underbelly of Silicon Valley

by Sophie Schreurs

Fed Underbelly of Silicon Valley is an immersive installation that makes the hidden social and political tensions of social media platforms physical and tangible. The power of social media platforms is not only apparent because they possess the archive of our culture, but mostly because they decide on the visibility of content. While seemingly democratic, it is clear that nowadays some voices are amplified while others are silenced by content moderation. I draw a parallel between the mechanisms behind social media platforms and the workings of the human body. I imagine the body as a carrier of memories and emotions that seep through and cling to the walls of our insides. Just like our organs filter and circulate – so do the platforms.

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Alisa Strub – My Grind Bears Fruit

by Alisa Strub

My Grind Bears Fruit is an installation of projected self-portraits combined with manually painted text which chart territory in my engagement with identity, self-revelation and contemporary media culture. It explores the tension between public and private life, the need to talk about ourselves and our thoughts while creating a blurry line between intimate documentation and a constructed point of view. The seemingly still but slightly moving images are situations where I perform for the camera, influenced by the perception of what I consume online daily. They combine and collide with an intuitive, free, yet deliberately scripted use of words culled from net culture and create a rhythmic counterpoint that challenges viewers to confront their own experiential thresholds.

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Emma Bedos – Linger

by Emma Bedos

How can we continue to exist in the places we have left, through the memories of those who remain? In this project, I wanted to grasp the feeling of distance and the way technology tries to compensate for it. I asked my relatives on my home island to capture images of shared memories. Transcribed in photogrammetry to materialise them, the combination of communication and memory work creates a new shared environment. The result highlights the omnipresence of the void. The installation materialises this remote contact, as the negative of itself, via cuts in fluttering and elusive silk. The imagination completes the memory and projects fantasised images of a distant ideal, where presence/absence resonates and lingers.

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Yang Su – Cloud and Beyond the Infinite

by Yang Su

Clouds and Beyond the Infinite is a video installation with real-time simulation. Thanks to enhanced rendering engines and higher definition visual representations, the era of the metaverse, an immersive digital virtual environment, is fast emerging. Yet behind the dazzling and realistic visuals of the metaverse lie continuously expanding data centres, more GPU processing and power consumption, and the ensuing heat and carbon emissions. As the metaverse becomes better and more liveable, our physical environment is gradually deteriorating. The artist chose the “Cloud” element to depict an immersive virtual world, showing the flow of an infinity of clouds in various contexts.

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Alexey Chernikov – Above Everything

by Alexey Chernikov

Developed during the war in Ukraine, this project focuses on the fragility of our peaceful existence, the power of surveillance and uncertainty about the future. The project uses the visual vocabulary of military drones. A thermal camera is mounted on a drone that provides recognisable black and white imagery. The medium itself has a vital role as it conveys the aesthetic appearance of the work. A huge amount of images from battlefields are shot from the sky. This footage most often ends with a bomb strike. In Above Everything, a parallel reality is created where the ending of each video is unpredictable. The video sequences, together with distorted propeller sounds, create a feeling of constant threat, depicting the tension caused by the war that is happening thousands of kilometres away.

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Nikolai Frerichs – Carrie Ann

by Nikolai Frerichs

The movie Carrie Ann questions the concept of standardisation. Individuality and losing control seem impossible to achieve in digital environments. Nevertheless software developers are constantly trying to build new tools and possibilities to simulate our world as realistically as possible. However, when we take a closer look, we recognise that these tools and representations are full of stereotypes. Is it possible to speak about love in a controlled and unnatural synthetic world? Is our Idea of love just another readymade asset in our mind, formed by the ideals and clichés of the society we live in, or can love resist it? Is it truly something bigger or just a projection of our imagination? Does it have the power to save us from the standardisation of everything?

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Metaphotography - VR Workshop

with Robin Bervini, Milo Keller

During this five days workshop mentored by Milo Keller and Robin Bervini, the students worked in groups to create sublime environments inspired from reference photographs. The goal was to bring the viewer to a strange location to be observed from a static landmark. The students learned the basics of environment creation with the Unreal Engine 4 and they faced the technical complications in order to have their projects running on the standalone headset Meta Quest 2.

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Automated Photography Worshop

with Marco De Mutiis

In this one week intensive workshop, digital curator Marco de Mutiis tasked the students with creating a photographic project through a process of gameification, or with otherwise automated processes.

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Book making workshop

with Nicolas Polli

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Manqin Zhang – I'm not a Loner

by Manqin Zhang

I’m not a Loner is a photo-based installation in which Manqin acts as an archaeologist digging into the forgotten and insignificant part of life. The work consists of three resin spinning tops, four concrete blocks, five T-shirts, twelve lighters and two plates. By treating them as historical artifacts – displayed on plinths of different heights, evoking a forest-like environment – the work intends to construct a narrative of individual history through memories, relations and objects. While individual history describes fear, anger and guilt (personal, family-related, societal and historical), Manqin wishes to increase the role of the individual in history to evoke the importance of being oneself and to confront modern alienation.

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Natalie Maximova – There Is No Spoon

by Natalie Maximova

Mention Bien This artwork is an interpretation of the possibility that we are living in a computer-generated reality, similar to a video game, inspired by the ideas of simulation theory. The world is built as an assemblage of soulless structures with no indication of time or place. The rapid change of architectural styles throughout the journey explains the ambiguity of simulation theory and the impossibility of proving it. There are multitudes of architectures and imaginations, thus there are multitudes of mysteries. It is a journey halfway between dream and nightmare. In the absence of a total understanding, what else can we do but plough ahead? Video installation: CGI animation created in the game engine, surround sound.

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Olivia Wünsche – New State of Equilibrium

by Olivia Wünsche

New State of Equilibrium is a visual interpretation of my years-long spiritual quest and psychedelic adventures. Inner peace, a sense of deep connectedness, unbounded love for the natural world and longing for transcendence are central themes I tried to visualise throughout this project. Both the book and the installation attempt to question and investigate the mechanisms and limitations of our cognitive and sensory perception. By emphasising the simultaneous presence of the visible and the invisible, I seek to challenge the secular, materialistic worldview that still seems to prevail in our Western culture.

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Exquisite Corpse VR Experience

with Milo Keller

On the occasion of the Biennale dell’immagine Chiasso, the 2nd year students of the Master Photography programme presented, from 17 to 19 September 2021, “Exquisite Corpse” - a series of Virtual Reality (VR) projects at the Palestra CPC. Art Direction: Milo Keller Assistants: Florian Amoser Robin Bervini Students: Emma Bedos Alexey Chernikov Mahalia “Taje” Giotto Clemens Fischer Nikolai Frerichs Hikaru Hori Augustin Lignier Sophie Schreurs Alisa Strub Yang Su

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Maeva Bosko – Step into the unknown

by Maeva Bosko

Entering the Unknown is an immersive experience that tends to alter the consciousness during an introspective journey. Because of its wild and authentic side, the forest has always bewitched the collective mind. A nature of peace but also a kingdom of mysteries, the forest gives off an almost supernatural force. To cross the threshold of the forest, because of its deep roots, is to open the door of the unconscious and to trigger the awakening of panic fears, terrors or even phobias. According to Jung, these terrors translate the fear of seeing the contents of the unconscious revealed, the fear of meeting oneself.Starting from the conscious world you gonna dive to reach the world of the unconscious. A fall into the realms of the unknown.

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Joanna Wierzbicka – Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something

by Joanna Wierzbicka

What is a body, where does it start, where does it end? How do we experience having a body and being a body, especially among other bodies? How can we resituate ourselves within earth others, and rethink relations on a wider level between human and nonhuman actants to account for a more ethical living? The project aims to interrogate the notion of bodily matter, recapture our corporeality and challenge the assumption that our bodies end at the skin. Instead, they are redefined as radically open systems, human and non-human assemblages, corporeal chimeras, microbiotic multi-species in the constant process of becoming. Matter, when recognised as an active agent, helps to acknowledge infinite interactions within complex networks of agency between various porous corporealities and entities. Trans-corporeality disrupts divisions between a body and the world. Bodies leave traces everywhere, ascribing themselves into various corporeal, technological, political narratives, but also traces are ascribed onto bodies - mediating and altering their flesh. As captured by Haraway in the figuration of compost - we are always becoming with others, together creating a lively matter of compost, composing and decomposing each other. “Nothing is connected to everything, everything is connected to something” takes a form of an installation, a speculative self-portrait as compost, built out of images of my own body (made with different apparatuses including Scanning Electron Microscope, digital microscopes) mixed with still lifes of food and different materials representing the transformation and movement, as in compost. Additionally, sculptures are accompanied by the video that expands on the idea of corporeal companionship and brings in the notion of uncanny-like lump of flesh covered with skin. It is a performative act, a result of wondering how to become a microorganism, a bacteria and if I am already enough of one. All the parts of installation, exploring the line between oppositions such as human/nonhuman, internal/external, self/the other, refer to the definition of an abject and are meant to translate that moment, or a sensation - how a breakdown in meaning, something expelled from “I” eventually comes to define “I”.

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VR Workshop

with Milo Keller, Robin Bervini

Virtual Reality introduction workshop tutored by Milo Keller with the technical assistance of Florian Amoser and Robin Bervini. During this 5 days introduction, students learned to use Unreal Engine 4 to prototype and test their scenes in real-time. Working in pairs, each of them started to develop a level of a global VR experience that will be presented at the Biennale dell'immagine 2021 in Chiasso.

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Iconic

with Lauren Huret, MAP

In this workshop, first and second year students had group discussions around what makes an image iconic and developed group and individual projects. The workshop was tutored by Lauren Huret

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Model Behaviour, Version 2

with Simone Niquille

The assignment draws inspiration from traditional portraiture but intentionally diverges, enabling a critical exploration of the cultural and digital constructs of 'self' and 'family' through the lens of Neural Filters, emphasizing daily output over quality, with editing deferred until later in the presentation preparation stage.

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Book making workshop

with Nicolas Polli

The workshop is a complement to the Photobook semester project during which the first year students, tutored by graphic designer Nicolas Polli, learned to think of the photobook as an object. Each student developed their sequence and made creative choices that led to the production of a dummy.

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Emidio Battipaglia – Build38, Patch Release 13

with Simone Niquille, François Zajega

Mention Bien The work addresses genetic determinism, representation, network infrastructure and privacy using a range of digital techniques to reflect on technology. Current technological approaches are characterised by an aspiration to map the world in order to achieve a full quantification of reality, reducing the subject to mere data or a collection of commodified objects. The installation uses a range of technological tools (VR, DNA analysis, AI, photography) and aims to present the outcomes of my theoretical research through a personal journey.

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Robin Bervini – Until I Stop Trying to Get Out of My Skin

by Robin Bervini

Mention Excellent Prix Elinchrom “Until I Stop Trying to Get Out of My Skin” is a spatial and virtual reality installation that depicts the artist’s personal struggle in seeking his identity as a mixed-race man in Southern Switzerland. Surrounded by white family and friends and knowing only local culture, the artist identified as white, but the continuous questioning of his origins and prejudices made him doubt his belonging. The installation puts the viewer in the artist’s shoes: by embodying his avatars, the viewer meets the artist’s alter-egos which are the embodiment of his ideal selves at various stages of his life.