The exhibition is in partnership with Associazione DIG and sponsored by the Pro Helvetia Swiss culture foundation. It combines elements of fiction, documents and real data, still and moving images, films and archive research in one big site-specific installation revealing the paradoxes contained in the systemic logic of social monitoring.
With his work, Vitale shows us how the society we live in is increasingly coming to resemble an airport, with public life subject to ever greater levels of surveillance and security checks. “The recent technological and political developments are a prism that reveals where we are headed in the future,” says the artist.“We are getting used to being monitored, observed and spied on by various eyes and types of sensors, handing over personal information that is exploited by government and commercial bodies.Crises and states of emergency are generally used as justifications to adopt surveillance technologies without the due transparency and the public debate that there should be.Even when in digital form, power is still power and to see it you need the right tools, without which we are lost in the dark, incapable of seeing the reality around us.We accept it, without asking any questions, because it’s easier that way.We are flying on autopilot.”
So his project invites us to reflect on the dematerialization of bodies transformed into biometric data and the possible counterstrategies that we citizens and political subjects can undertake to promote more transparent systems to regulate society and model individual codes and behaviours.Decompressed Prism has been produced in various countries (Poland, Holland, Switzerland, Great Britain and Italy), each of which will present a specific case study that illustrates various aspects linked to the topic in question.
The installation created for Palazzo Santa Margherita includes a brand-new two-channel video accompanied by six-channel surround sound (including voice, ambient sounds and music) and a Plexiglas sculpture, set up to build a coherent but not linear narrative.The idea of the installation is to imagine surveillance becoming a normal part of everyday life like a new realism.The project, accompanied by some texts by contemporary philosophers and sociologists which reflect on the topic of surveillance and artificial intelligence, aims to demonstrate how security and omnipresent surveillance, together with their impact on human behaviour, are becoming normal in ways that should make us rethink the processes in which the individual and collective consciousness is built.
