Riccardo's latest version

This year I have been researching on the ways of perceiving and the ways of deploying colours and light, nurturing growing interest toward the writing of software for creating digital animations, engaging with the landscape to observe and document atmospherical changes, attending the course seminars with curiosity toward the deployment of narrative devices to contextualise and expand my research through story telling.

In the work For Seven Time We Woke Up developed for the Eye Research Labs, I have been studying the technological staging of colours - as editable materialities in the context of software editing and software development - and their effects on perception. I started this process after founding, during a bike tour in Rotterdam organised by Leslie Robbins, Becoming Invisible, a book from Ian Whittlesea. The book presents a meditation exercise based on breathing techniques and the imaginative synthesis of colours clouds, which lead the practitioner to reach the esoteric purpose of becoming invisible. At the age of 11 I had a similar experience. At that time my mother was carrying on a variation of this type of meditation aimed at healing, successfully she later said, a disease. Under her guide I experienced the exercise myself, which, I recall, resulted in a feeling of deep relaxation and strong physical awareness. With the idea of translating the book of Ian Whittlesea into a moving-image piece, I firstly tried to have on-screen text that would give directions on the steps to follow, but after trying this route, I decided to spoil the vision of any direct instruction and to focus solely on the evolution of a colour choreography and the composition of a layered sonic drone. Rather than giving to the audience the feeling of being following a meditation, I decided to work toward the presentation of a time-based experience - an immersive journey that I would describe in terms of ‘atmospheric storytelling’.

Another instance of this research on light and colours conducted this year is the filmYellow Message, composed of three shots featuring the observation of atmospherical changes. How lights changes over the course of an hour? How is it refracted when the leafs are moved by wind? How it encounters the textile of a flag upon which the shadows of a nearby tree are cast? This film combines footage that I took in Sansepolcro (IT) during a period of study to learn the practice of flag waving, with two other different recordings made in a little swamp situated in the south of Rotterdam. The three scenes that forms the short movie are formally associated by the presence of the colour yellow, while the main subjects are light, wind and their way of interacting with different materialities.

Throughout this two movies I am exploring concept as opacity, and transparency, and how these physical dynamics of overlaying and overlapping construct images. These are for me metaphors of an approach oriented toward the appreciation of phenomenas that take place all around us, from site-specific locations to synthetic landscapes, from the light emitted by the sun to the one rendered by computational engines. Our life is full of rituals determined by the time of the day and the time of the year, the seasons and the recurrent festivity: my appreciation of light is an attempt to further engage with celebrative rituals, the coming together in a place to act, or watch or listen.

Both light and sound acts in the range of a spectrum of waves, the first through electromagnetic waves, the second through acoustic waves. As composer, in the past years I have been working with sounds by developing my own software to compose music through DSP (digital signal processing) techniques as filters, reverbs, resonators and distortions. This year I developed a new sound performance (you can listen to excerpts of it with the mp3 file Live Electronics @ Sonoscopia) where I treat sounds recordings of a french horn being played by musician Luca Medioli as if they are light waves filtered by prisms: the sound waves are filtered and displaced. Inspired by the music made by composer Phil Niblock, based on sampling techniques of musicians, and more in general by drone music, I am expanding my research toward the creation of audio and visual explorations that creates slowly evolving atmospheres.

In similar ways, this year, with For Seven Times We Woke Up, I have been working with light as I would with sound: through digital filters that alters the perception of an original image. My workflow on this project started with the mathematical task of putting together pieces of code - with these I was enable me to manipulate and alterate sounds and images in expressive ways. After this stage, I explored the combination of these techniques and composed the piece by tuning the parameters that defines the system behaviour. In this way I was able to create a score composed of different settings, and to move between these through smooth evolutions of automation and movements. I first started to compose and build instruments in this way back in 2018 when collaborating with choreographer Ariella Vidach on dance pieces that involved, other than dancers, the combination of different medias - sounds, light, videos, robots.

Exporting high quality images proved particularly challenging, as the computation efforts required by high resolutions settings is too high for a computer to be able to compute, let’s say, 24 frame per second. For this reason I came up with my own code to render the video output in “non-real time”. This means: instead of generating 24fps or more and recording the result, the computer computes each frame taking all the time it needs for it to be properly exported. I could then combine the resulting series of frames together inside a video editing software. This is a workflow that I am working on since two years and during the creation of this movie I reached a stage of usability that gives me a good base for further use and development.

As a continuation of my research in the field of digital animation, and with the desire of combining it with a narrative structure, I am planning on working on a project that combines all these aspects. In particular I want to continue a research started with with the installation Enter the ♥ that I presented last summer in Bruges (BL). This is an animation movie composed of a looping video installed in a white cube and it is inspired by the “Pentolaccia” tradition, mostly known as Piñata. The Pentolaccia is a container filled with treats that is broken as part of a celebration that occurs in different cultures for different occasions. The essence of this practice is that of celebrating abundance. With this movie I wanted to talk about the story we hear so many times: there is something to gain by excavating value, or, there is something to loot by breaking containers. 
The movie that I produced ended up being a visual and sonic journey (see the video for a reference of how it looks and sound like), an experience without words and meaning being conveyed, and I now feel to have the awareness and the tools required to tell the story behind it - as much as the desire to do so. Three years ago I was watching my brother playing a video game wherein one of the main features is that of building up the power of your avatar by finding rare items that you can wear, from weapons to armors and gems, traversing dangerous dungeons. The boss fights (fights against particularly strong characters) would resemble the ‘Pentolaccia’ celebration, as the body of the slain opponent, often monstrous, would spill coins and precious artefacts as much as graphic blood: treasures and treats all around, labeled with color codes that highlights the rarity of these items. Developing this project I want to relate with our dreams of being heroes, of making great deeds and slaying monsters, as much as with the sensation, felt in developed countries, of having more than enough. We fill the jar for month and then we brake it to make a party, but when there is no effort, no work, no struggle to gather and save, what do we have to celebrate (Han, 2020)? (See the script in the text folder for further explanations: camera movement, characters, scenes). During Kate Briggs seminar I found relevant, between others, our talks about Le Guin (1986) on the carrier bag theory, which advocates the need to gather bundles rather than casting arrows, and led me to further feel the need to work on this project about the pentolaccia, understanding it as an object that conveys this urge.

Similarly, I am now working on the finalisation of a short movie inspired by Gilgamesh epic firsts tablets, wherein the hero set out on a journey to slay Humbaba, the forest spirit, being critical about this need of beheading deities and subjugating natural forces.