EvanRoth’s solo exhibition Mondi Distorti(Distorted Worlds),curated by ChiaraDall'Olio, is opening at the FMAV Palazzo Santa Margherita venue at 6 pm on 24 November. The American artist, showing solo for the firsttime in Italy, works in the fields of photography, video, installation and painting.
His artistic research centres around the distortions present in the world of digital networksat both the technical and socio-political levels.Through his works, Evan Roth makes the invisible aspects of communication-related technologies visible to all, thus challenging how they are normally perceived.
The exhibition at FMAV Palazzo Santa Margherita presents works created between 2013 and 2023 that reflect on the relationship between the Internet and society. The exhibition opens with the brand-new work “...”[dot dot dot],made for the occasion:a suspended, upside-down triangular prism made with a tangle of Ethernet cables converging towards the tip containing a wi-fi router to which visitors can connect.
The pyramid image is a nod to both the Kopimilogo and the radio antenna erected by Guglielmo Marconi in 1901 in Poldhu, Cornwall, as a wireless telegraphy transmission station. The first transoceanic radio signal – three dots in the Morse alphabet, representing the letter S – was sent from here. Through this parallel, the aim is to underline the similarities between the Internet and the radio, the first free and effective global means of communication, used for public and private communications and to broadcast independent messages, for example, during the Second World War. Both radio and the Internet use the electromagnetic wave spectrum to transmit data, but while anyone can set up and own their own radio transmitter, in the case of the Internet, even if we have a website or social media profile, we are all users of an infrastructure owned by a few multinational corporations. Radio uses infrastructure – antennas – that is there for all to see; the Internet, on the other hand, has concealed physical structures. At the perceptual level too, everything seems immaterial; suffice it to think of the “cloud”. “The work,” explains Chiara Dall’Olio, “created in 2023, is a complex of concepts dear to Evan Roth, namely, trying to understand how the communications system works in order to prompt a critical consciousness towards it and perceive its distortions. The same concepts are also at the basis of the other works on show.”
