TTN-YOU

TTN-YOU reimagines our responsibility towards the world we live in while identifying in ourselves the answer to fostering better futures. It’s a multimedia video installation that constitutes a move towards a different understanding of the interrelations between subjects and events, and their mutual influence on the world.

Through facial recognition technology, Familiari’s installation renders the audience’s emotions into the screen in front of them; a kind of noise-mirror that feeds on our expressions, modulating them into the everchanging visualization. TTN-YOU is an interactive video work, opening a window to the present, for the future. The screen-mirror is set to react to the movements of our eyes, mouths, body proximity and other behavioral factors.

In its own making as a digital presence and our witnessing of it, TTN-YOU functions as a temporary attempt to recalibrate how we approach the other, underlining the physical and emotional cause and effect correlations between humans behavior, decision-making processes, dynamics of social coexistence and deemotionalizing processes linked to the post-digital era.

Specifically produced for the Next Museum, in dialogue with the Digital Worlds call, TTN-YOU can be experienced from an intimate perspective, and yet remains a reminder for global, collective care, leading the audience into a different dimension while inviting us to reflect on a few questions: how do we relate to the world? How do we influence our relationships with each other? Is there a place where the inner and the outer, physical and digital worlds, meet?

As part of the series Tribute to the Noise (2018-ongoing), TTN-YOU highlights the discrepancy between what we feel and see of ourselves and the society we are part of. The series unravels a wide scope investigation about the potentialities of the noise and its meanings: originally identified as “unwanted signal”, in the series it is instead celebrated as the exception, a proposal against hard determinism, by redefining scales of possibilities, merging and superimposing endless results, in which the creative process is fragmented by and delegated to the medium of the research itself. The entire series is generated by a glsl original script entirely written by Familari. Tribute to the noise is a journey through generative video noise behavior: a timeless immersion in multiple meanings of the noise, where randomity is investigated via the activation of ever-evolving collapsing landscapes affecting, directly and indirectly, all human senses.

Like the series, TTN-YOU is permeated by unexpected color compositions feeding the viewer’s gaze. Once you approach the high screen in front of you, of the same dimensions as a standard human being, the screen becomes a mirror: the closer you are, it starts tracking you, offering back a new image of yourself. Initially appearing as a black and white noise screen, every step towards it, every smile, every movement of your eyes and face, are captured and redirected into the frame: once there, you will start to see the noise changing, and shades of colors appearing. The screen, not anymore static and colorless, will begin to mutate, initiating the processing of a new image of yourself, tailored to your emotions and movements. Your new you will emerge from overlapping patterns and layers of color contrasts alternating between cold and warm, pale and fluo, darkness and light, progressively dismantling hidden tensions towards the recreation of a perpetual, unwinding movement. With one step towards TTN-YOU, you enter a journey in which you alone have the power to exit, by abandoning the installation, or you can choose to stay there and discover how you relate to yourself.

TTN-YOU explores the possibilities of how we can become advocates for new worlds and invites the audience to dive into the depth of (non)human relationships, rethinking new ways of perceiving reality in front and within our shifting selves.

Text: Alice Lamperti

Photo: BenedictSchwarzer

Presented at: Neun Sonnen at Uzwei in Dortmunder U

Curated by Vesela Stanoeva

TTN-YOU is part of the series Tribute to the Noise (2018-2022)

The world is governed by chance. Randomness stalks us every day of our lives.
Paul Auster

During the last two years, Tribute to the noise unravelled a wide scope investigation about the potentialities of the noise and its meanings. Originally identified as “unwanted signal”, in the series it is celebrated as a contemporary proposal against hard determinism, redefining scales of possibilities in the chosen area of analysis, merging and superimposing endless results, in which the creative process and decision making is fragmented and delegated, in time and space, by the medium of the research itself. The entire series is generated by a glsl original script entirely written for the piece.

Tribute to the noise is a journey through generative video noise behaviour in contemporary audiovisual formats. A timeless immersion in multiple meanings of the noise, where randomity is investigated via the activation of ever evolving collapsing landscapes affecting directly and indirectly, all human senses.

In Tribute to the noise, the classical notions of study and exercises in style are borrowed from classical painting to prompt a critical rethinking of the artistic processes in digital practice. It represents an ongoing co-research with and via the medium, from the methodical standing point and of the constitutive progression of the subject in becoming.

Concretising the friction between chance and causality, the series is permeated by exhausted colours compositions feeding the viewer’s restless stare, overlapping with hazy unrecognizable patterns, attracting it to replicate layers of harsh colour contrasts – almost toxic – between cold and warm, pale and fluo, darkness and light, progressively dismantling hidden tensions towards the recreation of a perpetual movement.

The work takes an implied critical look on how, while digital technology allows a theoretically endless artistic potential and development through media and meanings, the systematic demand for new works and fast delivery in the current artistic scene, often undermines the effectiveness of a mature reflection on the artistic medium and its store of significance, lost in the unceasing run-up to the new(est).