Active Art

Art becomes political “lato sensu”, when it manages to provoke the viewer’s awareness grasping his attention, engaging him to react to a repressive, lethargic apathy, transforming him from a passive consumer of the image to an active and functional participant, inviting him to reflect and consciously resist an imposed aesthetic uniformity, giving away some of his time - being more implicated in the work - as an instant compensation to the artist’s agony.

The defunct technologies are intrinsically linked to the conceptual and political concerns of my work. The machines I use are objects out of commerce, found or given. They are mainly the relics of an older technology, more tactile and easy to use, reflecting the aesthetics of their eastern European origins. Some of them were toys, customized and reintroduced, some home cameras and projectors. Rarely addressed to professionals, their character of a certain familiarity metamorphoses these items to indispensable parts of each piece, as humanized art objects.

Roughness, randomness and rawness eventually shape the work, as the viewer is called to actively perform operating the machines, moving them in non-real time.

I appreciate the some times low-tech effects not only aesthetically, but as a sign of complicity and co-alliance: perfection is not human.
CV
elenifoti@mac.com

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