Dario di Paolantonio

Looking closer at the world of the tick, the eyeless blood-sucking parasite, we are asked to adapt our perspective to a weird realm of nature, one that nevertheless shapes us. At this scale we stumble across an uncanny realisation: we are no less alien to the other than we are to ourselves. The tick’s world seems odd to us and hard to conceive, but the human being might be as well quite unfamiliar. A philosophical reflection through the lens of the microscopic perspectives, The Blind Point ponders on the limits of imagination and representation. Dario di Paolantonio’s visual essay questions the separation that is drawn between humans and non-humans, by taking the viewer through a walk in the forest, or following a tick crawling on skin.

"Tests for philosophy on media" is part of an ongoing artistic research regarding the possibility of doing philosophy through media and narration. Cinema is a valid tool to generate concepts, to let them unfold and talk as they were real characters. Moreover, any artistic practice can be seen as an act of world-building. "Latour litanies" reflects on the practice of making lists of disparate things, made famous by the French anthropologist and philosopher Bruno Latour.

"Tests for philosophy on media" is part of an ongoing artistic research regarding the possibility of philosophy through media and narration. Cinema is a valid tool to generate concepts, to let them unfold and talk as they were real characters. Moreover, any artistic practice can be seen as an act of world-building. "The quintessential object" draws from the meditation of German philosopher Martin Heidegger about a jug and its essence.

The work stages a speculative dialogue between two AI entities – a Discriminator and a Generator – engaged in a discussion about the meaning of reality. Generative adversarial network (GAN) is used both as a building material and as a narrative device for the video. The work addresses the consequences of the usage of new technologies in our society: the rapid achievements in the past decades had transformed the way we spread information and think about politics, shaping alongside even the structure of our reality and the concept of Truth. Whereas technology itself is not to blame, the urgent question is about the methodologies of our practices, and the perils of relying too much on the new “intelligent” tools.

What is Reality? It doesn’t seem the best question to put on the table if you’re looking for a house to live in. But peeking into the metaphysical field can even be a good strategy to find useful toolboxes for survival, and to discover how different worlds interact with each other: not being an ordered stack, but rather an intertwined mishmash. The infrastructures of law, bureaucracy and material city landscapes shape a jungle through which every one of us has to navigate. But we don’t need to stick to a singular layer in order to go on: indeed, every action – or reaction – relates to a patchwork of different planes working and conflicting with each other. A picture on Twitter is not entirely disconnected from European laws. An empty space surrounded by stark walls of bricks is related to communities’ desires and abstract contracts. Knowing that, a group of artists and activists tried to occupy a large building, but since they couldn’t find the way to enter physically in the space, they switched the direction of their efforts towards another, less obvious, domain of forces. Virtual squat is the true, perhaps even educational, story of this attempt.