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MANUELA CORTI | videography from 1994 to 2006

"The world arises from thought, not from vision. It is not the spectacle of everyday nature that makes visionary but the apocalyptic motion that grasps nature"
email: info@manuelacorti.net
UNTITLED 2006 – DEATH OF MARAT
March 2006 - DVD 4’ 00”
Concept and Direction: Manuela Corti.
Camera Work: M.C., Digital camera PANASONIX NV-MX8
Post production: I-movie with MacG4, Manuela Corti

The video is dedicated to the “Death of Marat” in the version of the pre-Romantic and neo-classic great painter Jacques-Louis David. Here the reference to Caravaggio is well known and in particular the abandonment of the arm compared to the deposition of Christ by Caravaggio but also the use of the palette and the environment "scenic" and the use of light.
HATE SHOWING TACT - “ODIO CON TATTO”
August 2005 - DVD 4’ 26”
Concept and Direction: Manuela Corti.
Camera Work: M.C., Digital camera PANASONIX NV-MX8
Performers: Manuela Corti, Carlotta Actis Barone.
Actin Voices: Gianni Actis Barone.
Lyric by Lorenzo Stecchetti from ‘Postuma’ 1877 ‘Il Canto Dell’odio’
Camera Work: M.C., Digital camera PANASONIX NV-MX8
Post production: I-movie with MacG4, Manuela Corti.

The Il canto dell’odio (the song of the hate) it’s a courtly hate poem.
The stanzas echo like an auctioneer’s exhortations. The song, gathered with one’s own family, or at the tavern, resounds deeply to reveal, not a lost love but a love, may be, thought or rejected.
People sustain themselves as they are at the Coffee Bar, drinking wine and eating small cakes, all free from that grotesque frenzy passion. People look at and are looked at. They dress up to the nines for the matinée. The other one, the television, watches and reflects (Ionesco way). It comes to the light a dialect song.
The dialect, with his song, enlarges the rancour of the song.
Not warm, then, but unable to break the family balance of the breakfast, until to the burst out laughing of the listeners.
LAVACRO
1st April 2005 - Video-installation
Concept and Direction: Manuela Corti.
Performer: Manuela Corti
Camera Work: M.C., Digital camera PANASONIX NV-MX8
Post production: I-movie with MacG4, Manuela Corti

DVD, 3’ - Monitor A - Big Monitor or TV

This video is broadcast from a big screen television put on a big table, while beside, on the same table, or on another one as big as the previous one, there is another small television beside the big television, almost fasten. The small television must be one quarter of the big one. But people cannot see at once that it is a television. Actually around it there is a wooden box that covers it and arrives until the front edge of the table. The box is like a front projection of the small screen of the television. In front of the open space of the box there is a double curtain, U turned upside that hides the screen of the small television and to watch the video people must bend down and watch it inside.

Monitor B - Small monitor or second television - Here enclosed DVD – Lavacro Monitor B – to broadcast in loop.
All the installation represents the washing of blood and sorrow inside the common lieu.
PHOTOGRAPHS FROM VACATION AND SOMEWHERE ELSE;
2003 - DVD 3’ 00”
Concept and Direction: Manuela Corti.
Performer: Manuela Corti
Camera Work: M.C., Digital camera PANASONIX NV-MX8
Post production: I-movie with MacG4, Manuela Corti

“Photographs from Vacation and Somewhere Else” is a tour, a revisitation of many places I have been or I imagined I had been. The marks I add to the images are the tracks of my passage and of that action I wanted to circumscribe, and which return the deceptive tridimensional perspective of the postcard back to two dimensions.. They are places of remembrance, but also places unknown. Places, therefore, where memory imagines other places, or the action on a single space, that wants to contain them all.
SICK BACCHUS
2002 - DVD 3’ 56”
Concept and Direction: Manuela Corti.
Performer: Gianni Actis Barone
Music: Matteo Licitra
Camera Work: M.C., Digital camera PANASONIX NV-MX8
Post production: I-movie with MacG4, Manuela Corti
Video-installation with loop projection from DVD

Reconstruction of the "Bacchino Malato", the Sick Bacchus (Galleria Borghese, Rome): it is a work that highlights "the scene" of the historical figure of Caravaggio, almost autobiographical, and that deliberately teases a kind of contemporary living. The image of Caravaggio’s “Bacchino” is revisited as if on the set of a movie. Images become plastic and are affected by remaining faithful to the original.
VIDEO EXHIBIT POLYPHONIX 40 : irony, territoriality, wonder
2002, October 3rd, 4th and 5th - Theatre 2 Center Georges Pompidou
VIDEO ART, ANIMATION, SHORT FILMS: Video and Multimedia section coordinated by Manuela Corti in collaboration with: Paola Barbara Sega, Raphael Cuir, Enrico Lunghi, Daniel Alegi, Madeleine van Doren, Chris Kennedy.

I chose the themes of irony, territoriality and wonder because they are linked to lightness.
Lightness intended in the widest of senses, as that sensitive and open nervous system embodied in the actual process of receiving information. I chose these themes because they seem linked to supra-structures that have always coexisted with art. I am flanked by capable critics, organizations and art galleries because they have appreciated and supported this project with enthusiasm. Lightness has also given me this great illusion, of living in all places at once. These works reveal how inherent to art it is to interfere, to shake the heavyness out of society. (Manuela Corti, 2002)

Artists & Video Maker:
IRONY - Mini DV compilation, 2 h 30 min:
Imre Juhazs, Tate Bunker, Christine Khalafian, Guido Santi, Mark Escribano, Mike Ott, Joseph Hilsenrad, Roberto Donati, Brian Belefant, Tibo Pinsard, Alexandre Louis, Inguine.net (Giovanni Barbieri, Gianluca Costantini, Marco Lobietti e Alessandro Micheli, Ipnos Asteri, Andrea Cotignoli), Gianluca Costantini, Orlan, Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby, Mark Kenneth Woods, Joël Hubaut, Valérie Mréjen, Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil, Joséphine Faure, Gilles Barbier, Charles Dreyfus, Carla Della Beffa, Nark Bkb, Camillo Capolongo, baseterra.org, Jemima & Dolly Brown, Sabrina Sabato, Sylvie Blocher, Manuela Corti (with Gianni Actis Barone et Matteo Licitra).

TERRITORIALITY - Mini DV compilation, 2 h 45 min:
UltraLab (avec: P.Nicolas Ledoux, Fréderic Bortolotti, Pascal Béjan, Jean-François Dingjian, Oliver Lebrun), Guillaume Leblon, Simone Decker, Headspace Studios, Lydia Schouten, Jerome Symons, David Smithson, Peter Rose, Christian Rainer, Carla Della Beffa, Marcello Maloberti, Pieter Schoolwerth & Miguel Abreu, Stefania Galegati, Massimo Bartolini, Luca Curci &Ioannis Mexis, Pierre-Jean Giloux (with Raphael Kuntz), Nick Fox-Gieg, Inguine.net, Alberto Alvoni, Diego Perrone, Mikael Berklund, Dorian Ahmeti, Dementavicius & Gunnarson, Paolo d'Avanzo, Yosuke Kodani, Josh Steinmetz, Kirill Mikhanovsky

WONDER - Mini DV compilation, 3 h:
Paolo D'Avanzo, Daniel Alegi, Andrea Leuteneker, Heimo Wallner, Roberto Cuoghi, Deborah Ligorio, Italo Zuffi, Fabio Doctorovich, Regis Cotentin, Jean-François Cherman, Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby, Kelly Richardson, , Patrick André, Joachim Montessuis, Fabrice Bertran et Jean-Paul Berrenger, Charlotte Aberg, Alberto Sorbelli, Simona Spaggiari & Maximiliano Czertok, David Thorpe & Brian Cyril Griffiths, Gina Tornatore, Simone Berti, Laurent Grasso.

CANADIAN CULTURAL CENTER, Paris
Video Exhibit: IRONY - TERRITORIALITY - WONDER
October 4th, 5th & ALL NIGHT October 5th as part of "Sleepless Art Night".
Videos and shorts projected at Center G. Pompidou on October 3rd, 4th, 5th was on display again on video monitors, to permit repeated vision of works presented.
MASQUE DE BONTÈ
2002 - DVD 3’ 56”
Direction:Manuela Corti
Concept: Lorenza Franzoni and Daniela Rossi
Performer: Lorenza Franzoni with Alessandra Rossi
Camera Work: M.C., Digital camera PANASONIX NV-MX8
Post production: I-movie with MacG4, Manuela Corti

Video clip made for the competition 'Eurocioccolate, Perugia 2002' and ranked among the finalists. A naive lady enters into what he believes to be a beauty salon, but it comes out, surprise, adorned like a chocolate cake from a skilled master chocolatier.
UNTITLED 2002;
2002 - DVD 3’ 00”
Concept and Direction: Manuela Corti.
Performer: Manuela Corti
Camera Work: M.C., Digital camera PANASONIX NV-MX8
Post production: I-movie with MacG4, Manuela Corti

Video-installation with loop projection from DVD
Jumping as an effort to lift oneself above one’s stature. As trying to raise oneself above one’s own capabilities. As a reiterated greeting, as the power of gravity reminding us of the useless effort of possible levitation. But also as a dream, when the body disappears in the final leap, leaving behind a part of ourselves that belongs to us, but perhaps is not a part of us.
Therefore, even jumping as irony, as an irreverent vital rite.
IS ONE OF US MISTAKEN?
2002 - Video-installation
Two synchronized videos, each 5’, in loop from - 2 DVD – 5’
Concept and Direction: Manuela Corti.
Performer: Manuela Corti, Gianni Actis Barone.
Camera Work: M.C., Digital camera PANASONIX NV-MX8
Post production: I-movie with MacG4, Manuela Corti

The heads tossed in an imaginary baseball game and hit with a bat (a carpet beater) that is the symbol of homemaking are not metaphors of violence or rhetoric.
They represent the engagement of the viewer and the waiting of the actor champing at the bit to shoot the scenes, music that makes one feel good until the chosen product will be taken as champion of victory over the daily suffering of the order giving joy. Multicolored heads, made to look like rag dolls. In this way it is possible to exalt our capacity for living.
Once more the engagement in social issues is translated into the engagement in the smallest satisfactions which every day comfort us.
THE FIVE SISTERS
2001 - VHS pal – 17’ 00”
Concept and Direction: Manuela Corti.
Performer: several
Camera Work: M.C., Canon UC9 Hi camera
Post production: camera, TV, Mac
CULTURE, NATION, RELIGION.
1999 - CD10’ 00”
Concept and Direction: Manuela Corti
Performer: several
Camera Work: M.C., and collaborators, Canon UC9 Hi camera
Post production: camera, TV, Mac

Presented at the 48th Biennial Modern Art Exhibit in Venice, Italian pavilion and Gardens. Video Performance in Action.
RECIPE FOR GRAFTING EGGS
1998 - VHS pal12’00”
Concept and Direction: Manuela Corti.
Performer: Manuela Corti
Camera Work: M.C., Canon UC9 Hi camera
Post production: camera, TV, Mac

SYNOPSIS
The video shows a series of operations performed in the preparation of a recipe, just like given on the radio, in a repetitive manner. It deals with eggs, that are boiled and then grafted, with a 5 procedure in between cooking, engineering, and agriculture. The eggs, using some screws, are grafted to a plant and, like the radio itself says, the plant will have, at ripening time, one more characteristic in addition to its own. One then will be able to use the plant to exploit the vegetable advantages of the new hybrid.

COMMENT
The techniques of implant and grafting, in a word, hybridization, fecundation, and new cloned bodies are part of a reality that fascinates and scares us at the same time. Delegating everything to science and technology is not a new thing, but understanding the mechanisms at the basis of such genetic transformations and new information is. Thus a normal organ transplant does not impress much, and just with a “noble” organ (the heart) the adventure of the “spare part” has started publicly. Research, after all, has sanctioned vegetable cloning for quite a while, and this transformation strengthens even in an aesthetic perception the human desire of being gods. A world, then, which can generate de novo other forms, similar to our, which can affect our life expectancy, old age, sickness, youth. So, with the aid of the oldest, by now, contemporary communication medium, the radio, one will be able to make home-made grafts of non-homologous organisms to obtain new forms, new functions, in a daily increase of passive acceptance of the monstrously new, and active rejection of the “monstrously” different.
SATORI DRAMA
1998 - CD audio 10’
Text and Direction: Gianni Actis Barone
Performers: Gianni Actis Barone e Manuela Corti
Sound Edit – Power Macintosh 8500/180 A/V
Digital recording, post-production and CD production: Manuela Corti
REAL GAME ONE
1998 - VHS pal – 4’
Concept: Gianni Actis Barone.
Digital recording, post-production: Manuela Corti
Sound Edit – Power Macintosh 8500/180 A/V
Performers: Gianni Actis Barone e Manuela Corti
Camera work: M.C., Canon UC9 Hi camera
Post production: M.C., Adobe Premiere – Power Macintosh 8500/180 A/V

This is a typical mystery plot, where the culprit avoids being recognized by people. There is a voice saying help, but it is a written voice. There is a man, a policeman, searching at random, a little like a ball bouncing in a videogame. The truth, that is, the solution, is given, maybe, by chance. As if in the search one should consider the whole universe. The mind of the policeman wanders without emotions because everything is trusted not to the search, but to the fact that the search meets it. The video game is a head start with catches, the typical head start of the short everyday, the one like: in a minute. And the video game ends with the name of a new catch, or maybe of an unexpected solution.
VIDEA
1998 - Video show - VHS pal– 60’ 16”
Women’s video selected by Manuela Corti
Videos by:
Valentina Avon, Rosangela Betti, Manuela Corti, Ginestra Calzolari & Carmen Esposito, Caterina Davinio, Lorenza Franzoni, Daniela Rossi, Luisa Sax, Francesca Semeria.

“VIDEA” is an exhibit collecting video works by nine women: women poet, women artist, women computer expert, women comic, women VIDEA, who, by debunking the old superstition that women are removed from the use of technology, show how “women VIDEA” use the electromagnetic medium independently from their artistic actions, as an effective and suggestive medium to communicate their work, their memories, their being women.
PASSAGES
1998 - VHS pal – 32’
Post production: Manuela Corti
Voices: Manuela Corti and Gianni Actis Barone
Concept and production: Manuela Corti
Video-Demo for Internet viewing of the site “Passages”:
http://www.passiopea.net/passages/index.htm
A VEGETABLE TRAGEDY
1998 - VHS pal – 6’ 30”
Concept and Direction: Gianni Actis Barone.
Performer: Gianni Actis Barone
Camera Work: M.C., Canon UC9 Hi camera
Post production: M.C., Adobe Premiere – Power Macintosh 8500/180 A/V

Anxiety of the everyday is sublimated in daily chores. Repetition, necessary for existence, becomes enormous until it takes on a role that displaces everything else. The role of the character handling a few potatoes while he is watching TV is that of waiting. He waits for another character, his wife, to complete her role in the kitchen. During this wait, and up to the final crisis, every other thought, every object is transformed in the focus of that one preoccupation, of that predominant daily wait. The whole video accelerates towards the redefinition of its own role, the everyday becoming necessary reality, the surrounding reality emptying of meaning, because what counts in life, the character seems to tell us, is a continuous cadence, devoid of breaks, where time, individual and objective, is marked by great physiological rhythms. There is no void all around, because those rhythms fill everyone of its crevices. And there is no way out because not only physiology does not allow it, but the mind itself, nodding off in the necessary hypnosis of repetition, cannot see a path other than the one already marked by its past.
And the present remains suspended in memory: I will live as long as someone makes me a meal, a bed, gives me diversion, work. Unless this certainty is there forever, I will not live forever. Actually the uncertainty itself already drags me towards chaos, towards death. This is all there is in the world.
LIFT FILM
1997 - VHS pal – 5’ 00”
Concept and production: Andrea Renzini
Performers: Andrea Renzini with Giacomo and Francesco Martinengo.
Music: Gianfranco Basile
Costumes: Evangelisti theater tailors
Camera work: Manuela Corti, Canon UC9 Hi camera
post production: Manuela Corti, Adobe Premiere
Power Macintosh 8500/180 A/V

Video and Video installation, continuous cycle.
Ercolani Studio, Bologna & Galleria d’Arte Contemporanea (GAM), Bologna
Everything revolves around the figure of the elevator operator (the artist Andrea Renzini) who, dressed in his uniform, takes real/virtual travelers along a mysterious path.
LIFT FILM, a hallucinated narrative of a temporal passage, avails itself of the contribution of Manuela Corti, computer-graphic artist always brilliant in her work, for digital editing. The video revolves around the figure of this elevator man that multiplies and reproduces under different forms
(Daniele Perra, Bologna 1997).
TRANSUSTANZIA AZIONE
1997 - Video environment - Promotrice delle belle Arti (Torino, I)
Performer: Manuela Corti and Gianni Actis Barone
Concept and production: Manuela Corti
Camera work: Canon Uc9 Hi camera
Post production: M C Adobe Premiere - Power Macintosh 8500/180 A/V

Video environment.
6 monitors with 5 videos 5’ 00” long and one video 50’ long (continuous cycle),
Music: Mozart’s Requiem
2 prie-dieu, incense.

Transubstantiation is the act of transformation of the substance of bread and wine into that of Christ’s body and blood, by virtue of the Mass, with the appearance of the consecrated matter remaining unchanged.
Transustanzia Azione, on the contrary, keeps distance from the act of transubstantiating because the transformation into something else unique and inseparable is not there, while its dissociation is.
The action of eating and drinking does not become one, but remains distinct facing the image of Caravaggio’s basket.
There is a mythical, mythicized idea of the eternal masterpiece. It is there: forever lasting. It does not have beginning or end, because the idea of beginning, that is, of the action which created it, is lost in the final result. In practice it is as if the basket has always been; it is the happening of the work, nature rendered by the eye (and to the eye) as such. The basket thus takes on a connotation above linearity (of the vanishing point) and mimesis. It becomes an indecipherable simulacrum, a legend, almost a miracle. From this icon the idea of the mystical rite and of the consummation of the rite are born.
Western man lost its ability to measure himself with nature, to go back within himself: rite is a border threshold which one crosses alone, backwards, erasing Westerness. But rites, ceremonials, are scientifically valid if considered as a tautological procedure. Every gesture can be repeated infinitely as a scientific experiment. But gestures contain in themselves an immeasurable physical value, which in turn recalls another one, strongly metaphysical.
Everything gets pulverized and then comes back, accelerated, for the quest of Being. This ‘Transustanzia Azione’ is the fragmentation of rite, the loss of the univocal. It is the rejection of accepted knowledge, of Westerness. It is a spy that does not accept the neo-manicheistic idea of the “not being” as if it were the space between two letters on a white background.
LUPUS
1997 - VHS pal 2’
Concept and production: Manuela Corti
Performer: Carlotta Actis Barone
Camera work: Canon Uc9 Hi camera
Animation: Director 4.0 – Power Macintosh 8500/180 A/V
Post production: Manuela Corti - Adobe Premiere

This video represents the slipping of the famous Hobbes thought towards the indifference of actual positivism where not even the aphoristic scheme takes value from or gives it to language. The aphorism changes into uncertainty because everything stands for everything, and therefore nothing for nothing. Sentences do not have a primitive value, and their analysis becomes objectual, that is solid and almost incomprehensible, because it is the analysis of annihilation.
IO CHI SONO? (WHO AM I?)
1997 - VHS pal 5’
Concept: Camillo Capolongo
Animation: Director 4.0 – Power Macintosh 8500/180 A/V
Post production: Manuela Corti - Adobe Premiere
Post-production: Manuela Corti, VideoFusionTM 1.5.1
Camillo Capolongo, illustrator, organizer for handicapped people, mental patients, inmates, and disadvantaged persons, founder of “Match” magazine, of the International Match festival, of “I Nopolitani con la o” (Nopolitans, with an o), of two museum foundations, renown poet, artist, theater figure, interviews the patients of a Naples mental hospital, who improvise a little concert for him. From the amateur video reporting of this experience, Manuela Corti produced a video highlighting the sad and sincere humanity of these patients, whose marginalization from society derives from not being able to attribute to themselves just one identity.
BYE BYE MOVIE
1997 - Video show - VHS pal 60’

The show Bye Bye Movie, curated by Manuela Corti, proposes different languages: from the figurative or visual one to the one in which words are prominent over images. All of them under the peremptory restriction of brevity, so that the image transforms into spoken language, and vice 9 versa. The temporal limit is generated also by the need of expressing such languages in a synthetic form. Then the videos are not an attempt at competing with the more classic cinematographic instrument, but at presenting, in a totally separate way, a sort of artistic zapping between micro-history and analysis, even only hinted at, of an event. It is thus that Bye Bye Movie becomes a happening for the observer: what is happening there, really happens in our “reality” at every which corner. A great happening, where the alienation is in the event itself, happening on a monitor without ever any effort or rhetorical attempt to give sense to every action (even if it were possible) or to every complete message. What happens, life’s happening, happens without ever ending, and sometimes it ends before the act, rather than the action, is completed. From this meaning or from these explanations one also can derive the title of the show. Cinema is not far away only for economic or historical reasons; imagination is but one of many spectators. The voyage into the show is made with th senses and it makes the perceptive intent of every happening explode: Bye Bye Movie is real or virtual perception; it is an event which is also an action.
Videos are produced by: Gianni Actis Barone, Alessandro Amaducci, Andrea Rossi Andrea, Valentina Avon, Marco Bragaglia, Bondage, Brigata Es, Federico Bucalossi, Ginestra Calzolari, Camillo Capolongo, Antonio Caronia, Manuela Corti, Caterina Davinio, Franco Duranti, Emilio Fantin, I Gommisti, Rosanna Guida, Gerd Holzwarth, Roberto Lucca Taroni, Marco Montanari, Giovanni Nicolini, Giacomo Verde, Fabrizio Sabini.
PUNTO DI VISTA
1996 - VHS pal 1’
Concept and production: Manuela Corti
Text: Dante Alighieri, Vita Nova
Reading Voice: Gianni Actis Barone
Animation: Director 4.0 – Power Macintosh 8500/180 A/V

The video “PUNTO DI VISTA” (point of view) consists of the generation or presentation of points of light that are born as gashes in a hypothetical empty universe, or better yet, in a hidden universe full of light.
The holes self regenerate, but also close so as to modify each time the observer’s point of view, following a sequence devoid of a spatial or hypothetically aesthetic sense. In this continuous flow of openings and closings rests the duality or winning polarity of the luminous eye which becomes an image, even though it is not, on a background that therefore remains not only unprevailing or insignificant, but also serves as a shroud for each gash. The ending is, as all surprise endings, intentionally ironic, like a gift package, like a simplistically artificial dream. However, it disappears as well, and closes itself into that same universe which earlier included it. Not an objectual or symbolistic yearning, but a return to the physical, if you will, intended as a ludic or perhaps categorical moment, an ending with a capital E.
Poetry is also part of this dreamily romantic universe, where the generation of dreams is already its own interpretation. Poetry which repeats itself like a universe that, unstable by epistemological definition, repeats itself in an unstable and fragmented manner giving instability, experience, the flavor of continuity always identical to the previous phenomenology. Not by chance the choice of Vita Nova is a citation of the heaven of fixed stars, almost as if poetry folded upon itself for reasons of asyncopated repetition like the universe that contracts, here more, here less, that expands not only in relation to the first mover (the big bang), here more, here less. And it is the point of view, missed in this case, that repeats the poetic refrain as a background to the other interpretation, the one which is heard even through a constant hubbub, a prearranged and scientific echo. Just like the epistemological theory that accompanies it and the medium that distinguishes it.
T R ’ A R T E
1996 - Video show - U-matic – 40’

REVIEW OF VIDEO-ART-POETRY curated by Manuela Corti.
This show presents different languages of approach to the visual. It is not visual poetry, because it does not define by itself an established model, but rather a possible one. These languages are tied by a video which transforms a word, in fact each letter of a word, the title of the show, into an image. The image as a representation of oral language, which then transforms the meaning into new and possible significances. The eight videos comprising “TR’ARTE” were produced by: Gianni Actis Barone, Federico Bucalossi, Ginestra Calzolari, Manuela Corti, Caterina Davinio, Carmen Esposito, Giacomo Verde-Lello Voce.
LES LAMENTATIONS DU MUR
1995 - Video environment - Galerie J&J Donguy, Paris - VHS pal – 6’, loop.
Concept and production: Manuela Corti
Sound sampling: Marco Montanari
Animation: Director 4.0 – Power Macintosh 7100/66 A/V

With “LES LAMENTATIONS DU MUR” (lamentations of a wall), an interactive installation, the viewer enters inside a physical environment, exposed to the rain of an artificial thunderstorm. The digital image of rain is created and animated by computer, and the noise made by the water comes from a synthetic sound which is real at the same time, comes together in the physical space, and changes according to the frequency and number of spectators. In a room the artist located a spiral on the ceiling, made of water pipes. Upon this spiral, by means of a hidden liquid crystal projector, the image of a digital wall is projected, oozing tears of rain. The viewer, using an umbrella with sections of different transparency, sees the image of falling water as if it were coming from a video, and at the same time real rain falls from the spiral. It is a sort of extreme mixing between real and artificial, generating an experience necessarily and naturally multisensory. A sheer act of suspension, of reflection. The water, a purifying element, is contaminated, dirtied by human presence. The footsteps one leaves indicate a taking possession of the place which is continually (re)generated:. The viewer is thus interacting with an artificial image created by computer and the real rain falling in the physical space he paces, in an interaction which the artist herself likes to define “synthetic”, because it does not develop between man and machine, but among the “medium becoming environment in contact with man (medium-environment-man).” (Daniele Perra, 1995)
VIDENSEMBLEMATIQUE
1995 - Video show - Betacam sp 50’

The exhibit VIDENSEMBLEMATIQUE, curated by Manuela Corti and presented at the Italian Culture Center in Paris, is comprised of the works of three artists from Rome (Caterina Davinio), Bologna (Manuela Corti), and Milan (Federico Tanzi Mira). It consists of seven videos epitomizing a different and significant contribution of Italian post-production and video art.
The seven videos, selected not only by a visual criterion, summarize artistic exploration of the perceptible recapturing and questioning the value of synesthesia in art.
MIXED MEDIA
1995 - Video environment - VHS pal 5’ 00”, (continuous cycle)
Concept and production: Manuela Corti
Animation and A/V filters: Adobe Premiere
Power Macintosh 7100/66 A/V

Visualization of sound waves is not a new thing. Examples being specific instruments used for this purpose, not only for radio but also for sound waves broadcast by other bodies or instruments. For instance, it is normal that a heart beat be visualized as a wave, and this specific wave show different traces according to physiological or pathological variations in the heart. The same can be said for every voice, which carries within itself particular tones and modulations generating particular waves, specific to the voice itself. Therefore a means of identification, if you will, a sound wave paternity. To say nothing of seismographs, echographs, etc.
In Mixed Media a sensoriality is identified, which then generates other sensorialities and makes them intelligible, so that their meaning can be understood beyond the physical act, and they can be reproduced just as we saw and heard them, or even so that their decoded message can be distorted into another message which, then, also in the physical terms of movens, acquires a meaning and a sound, and therefore a different wave.
Sensoriality: the ability to understand through the senses or through one sense the language of another sense, opposite or different from the first one. But also with the aid of or through electronic instruments, the capability to modify the first mover, the primal indication with manipulated ones, which alter what the senses had perceived at first. The ability to manipulate the natural by artifice, to make it again as if it were natural. Here the electronic medium has possibilities as wide as the number of programs it has, and thus radio waves can not only be visualized, but also rarefied or compressed or distorted, and therefore take on in its rebroadcasting those manipulations that were given to it in a lasting manner, and therefore deceivingly reproduce a reality which reproduces an artifice.
ORLAN ET ORLAN
1995 - VHS pal 2’ 45”
Concept and production: Manuela Corti
Performer: Orlan
Animation: Morphi and Director 4.0
Power Macintosh 7100/66 A/V

This is a video produced with Orlan’s permission (famous French artist who is working on the transformation of her body by numerous plastic surgery operations). She also gave her voice for the sound track. The video was produced by morphing, starting from an old image of Orlan, and showing, in synthesis, some of the various transformations which characterized the artist’s “flesh” art in these past years. The final image appears undefined, waiting for further interventions.
EIGHT HOURS A DAY
1995 - VHS pal – 8’ 30”
Concept and production: Manuela Corti
Performer: Carlotta Actis Barone
Camera: Sony Video 8 Handycam
Post production: Adobe Premiere
Animation: Director 4.0 – Power Macintosh 7100/66 A/V

Subject: this performance is the parody of gestural urbane repetition, almost Body-Art of rituals, of making sure of oneself by touching and retouching one’s own body.
Intents: it is a parody, yes, but not a metaphor, because here the individual, in this case a young woman, reviews herself again and again inside and out, and discovers not the unknown, but the methodical.
This enlarged methodicalness shows a caricature of itself and it is a parody in that others do not see anything strange in dedicating a good part of one’s existence to taking care of and making up something that, in itself, seen from the outside, does not change because it is compared to itself. Therefore repetition is also a necessary punishment, one that makes us smile and every time, in fact, makes us smile at ourselves.
ANTIPERFORMANCE
1995 - VHS pal – 3’ 00”
Concept and production: Manuela Corti
Performer: Maria Pia Corti
Camera: Sony Video 8 Handycam
Post production: Adobe Premiere
Animation: Director 4.0 – Power Macintosh 7100/66 A/V

The video “ANTIPERFORMANCE”, produced in Paris, appears to be the interview of a performance artist, done to order and in absolute secret.
Images and sounds have been processed, deformed, and edited by computer by Manuela Corti, who is the author of the text and did the filming.
The work was presented for the first time as a video-installation at the HIP HOP gallery (Bologna, May 1995). Later, as a video, it was inserted in many video-art and video-art-poetry exhibits, among which “STRUMENTI A VOCE” (International Symposium and Festival on new sounds in poetry, Theater “La Soffitta”, Bologna, May 1995), “ARTE VIDEO TV” (FUORI ORARIO – RAI 3, June 1995), “VIDENSEMBLEMATIQUE”, an exhibit curated by Corti, presented at the Italian Culture Institute in Paris (November 1995), “VIRTUAL LIGHT” (Bari, March 1996), POLYPHONIX (Paris, April 1996).
In ANTIPERFORMANCE only the questions posed by the interviewer are understandable; the answers, through a sound sampling procedure that inverts their sequence, acquire the flavor of a magical and archaic language with unknown and suggestive sounds. Even the subtitles run in reverse, while the image is transformed into a sort of tragic animated icon of which only short fragments are distinguishable, showing wounds on the body of the woman being interviewed.
The viewer is therefore forced into a total sensory and emotional participation.
In this video, then, a critical investigation of performers’ corporal investigation is carried out. One goes from an exasperated study of the body, from body-art, to drow-art (where drow is word reversed). That is to say, the inverted performance of the word.
The subject is the final remnant, the decaying heap of a long series of experimentations which eventually took away the meaning of understandable language. The inversion signifies detachment from any further possible contact, and dialogue can only happen through reflecting surfaces, where the performing body-artist contemplates his own last experimentation, that is, the attack on his own language and tongue.
COMMEMORAZIONE
1995 - VHS pal – 3’ 00”
Concept and production: Manuela Corti
Post production: Adobe Premiere
Sound sampling and filters: SoundEdit
Editing&Animation: Director 4.0 – Power Macintosh 7100/66 A/V

The video “COMMEMORAZIONE” (commemoration) is the implantation of the memory of death.
The steps of the inhumation hidden by a shroud of words are the remembrance of death which is hidden in the daily necessity of living. The romantic celebration is emphasized here with the opposite of its ancient and original message. There are no dramatic displays of pain or dismal rediscoveries in front of impassive Nature. There is only a sequence of gestures, despoiled of their ritual significance, for the discovery, even amused or curious, of a past which did not belong to and cannot reside in objects, in remains.
Words, or rather the word commemorazione acts as an emphatic covering of what is happening, and music follows the same Messianic anti-ritual.
FINE
1995 - VHS pal – 3’ 00”
Concept and production: Manuela Corti
Performer: Ginestra Calzolari
Post production: Adobe Premiere
Sound sampling and filters: SoundEdit
Editing&Animation: Director 4.0 – Power Macintosh 7100/66 A/V

The video “FINE” (end) represents the discovery of trying to identify oneself. The ensuing of broken sentences stands for an inexpressible dream, a dream involving being awake as well. Self identification as an internal state is continuously distracted by a mass of background words and whistling which hinder its formal reconstruction. Our identity, therefore, proceeds in starts, but such starts are continually referred to themselves, and therefore, formally, it does not proceed at all. Steps, words, screams, yelling are the wall against which our far from serene conscience has to have a confrontation, spurred by remorse to advance, but wounded in its eternal proposition.
REALTÀ
1994 - VHS pal – 3’ 00”
Concept and production: Manuela Corti
sound sampling and filters: SoundEdit
Editing&Animation: Director 4.0 – Power Macintosh 7100/66

The video “REALTÀ” (reality) is a representation of the artist’s world, where one finds his/her themes of papering objects thus creating different ones which emphasize either a familiar space or object (a ceiling, a cube, etc.). Intent: even though the video shows the artist’s work, it is not just a compiler, but a work of art in itself. In fact, the works shown are installations that are born with the video, such is the case with the work “PARQUARTE” (interactive environment video produced for the Marche award – Ancona, October 1993), or that the video can modify “as point of view”, such as in “CARTADAPARARTE” (environment produced for "Pescheria Art Gallery" in Cesena, May 1993), or that the computer can modify, such as “DADARTE” (an interactive work in multiple parts, produced for Patchworking – Bologna, June 1993). All this taken in a linguistic context in which words, or rather the language, trying to explain itself in synonymous or tautological forms, can only make every noun or adjective alienated from itself. The meanings change according to the context. The meanings are known, but taken separately they lose their attachment to the context that generates them, and take on a new meaning, bringing the visual and aural dimension to have a confrontation on different grounds. Figures are but fragments of actions; words and language follow actions in a rather different manner.