This exhibition assembles a complex selection of recent and older interactive computer graphic works, artificially intelligent computer graphic installations and single channel video installations by Dennis Del Favero. These comprise Ellipsis from 2023, Medusa from 2023, and Penumbra 1.0. from 2022 at Cavallerizza, Nebula from 2023 and Slipstream from 2017 at Recontemporary.
What is common to these works is that they deal with the climate emergency in a complex, poignant and scientific way and offer a glimpse into the violent worlds of wildfires and storms that now typify our era. Each work viscerally probes the uncertain relationship between the human and these new terrestrial worlds.
Rather than evoking the impact or aftermath of climate phenomena, they explore the interactive processes than underpin these unpredictable events. This involves investigating how “nature” is an active protagonist in our lives and not a scenographic backdrop. It means probing how we are complicit in the events rather than a passive victim of abstract natural forces. Placing uncertainty at the centre of art, it vivifies how these events and their interactions fundamentally destabilise the predictable existential conditions under which we have historically lived. This means reframing aesthetics from Descartes’ question of “what I am certain I see” to “how do we engage with the uncertainty of the world”. In the computer graphic installation Ellipsis it means rendering how the planetary atmosphere unpredictably perceives and shapes our world through its cyclonic water vapor turbulence. In Penumbra it means animating how a fiery landscape speaks to us as we respond to its unforeseen behaviour.
Underlying the works is how the climate crisis brings uncertainty to the fore in a way that is now breaking our shaping of certainty, whether of experience, concepts or technology. These are complicit in the crisis in that they formulate the climate as the antagonist of human action, the mother nature to be vanquished, the uncertainty to be extinguished. Due to the accelerating breakdown of these certainties, where the climate is responding with deepening unpredictability to our war against its systems, climate science has been rethinking uncertainty as a foundational vector for conceptualising everything that is of the Earth including the enterprise. It is illustrated by the difference between the two questions: “what will happen” which we witness in the nightly weather forecast and traditional climate modelling and “what is the impact of any action under changing conditions of uncertainty”. The works probe how we need to reformulate the questions we ask ourselves. Rather than asking the classical philosophical questions of what it means to be, what it is to know and what it is to see, we need to ask how we can live within these existential and escalating uncertainties.
Brigitte Schenk, Director of Galerie Brigitte Schenk, Cologne. From Viscera, Catalogue Foreword
Works
- Overview
- Exhibition
Project Director: Dennis Del Favero
Curator: Iole Pellion di Persano
Catalogue Essays: Ursula Frohne and Stehi Donald Hemelryk
Funded by the Australian Research Council through its Laureate Fellowship Program, 2021-2025
Cavallerizza Reale and Recontemporary, Turin, 2023