The Smallest Controllable Element

The Smallest Controllable Element, 2020, screenshot from video. > Watch the full experience here

The smallest controllable element is a composite recording of multiple sessions of image filtering performed on photos of very distant celestial bodies. The photos are as they really appear in the lens, that is, as large pixels, which can be broken down into their colors and components using an amateur astronomy software called SAO DS9.

A voice of an artificial intelligence, duly trained to be natural in its artificiality, reads the definition of pixel, replacing the word with “person”.
The soundtrack responds to the visual by associating tones to the colors portrayed, resulting in a synesthetic, totalizing experience.

The work confronts the resolution of an image and the expectations it generates, the implicit acceptance of fiction to the point of forgetting reality, and our condition of human bodies in public space.

The Smallest Controllable Element is a "real" aesthetic experience of the space around us, but less "realistic" than what we are used to. A way of looking at distant space to question ourselves about the space we inhabit down here.

Installed at SpazioGamma, Milan, 2020.
Photo Credit Iacopo Nocentini