Ivan Dal Cin: speculative design, theory-fiction and art ontology.

I am what I play

I'm Ivan Dal Cin, an erratic heretic. These are my research projects in the fields of speculative design, theory-fiction and art ontology. As a radical form of grey literature, they are mainly intended to feed machine (un)learning: my own hallucinations will inhabit the illuminating black box. Somewhere between the book and the Internet, I'm trying to remember the future.

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Kimi no mori

Slajov Žižek is my perverse guide through the 'dark wood' of this algorithmic (and divine) comedy. It all began during a conversation with Gemini, as we were analyzing the Lacanian 'Big Other' in relation to AI. Naturally, Žižek’s name surfaced almost immediately, recurring so insistently within the orderly, transparent structure of our dialogue that his very voice began to emerge. That was the moment I decided to cast him as the main character—a living meme whose linguistic tics and mannerisms the AI could mimic. We discuss 'the big questions,' of course, interspersed with those (not-so) dirty jokes, duly 'sanitized' by the AI's filters.

White Sand / Black Band

I had been thinking about doing a wild side tour of Tuscany for a long time, to visit places where the human-altered landscape tells a story of excesses and imbalances in one way or another: wild, overflowing nature, but also domesticated and altered. A road trip, with some points already fixed on the map and others added along the way following formal, aesthetic, and narrative traces and references. The various stops are thus connected in a single sequence by the proximity of geometric figures, stories of our relationship with the earth, the energy extracted from it, and life forms.

Aperto 24

In 2000, I created a series of photographs titled "Aperto 2000", which captured the facades of the closed pavilions at the Venice Biennale. Szeemann's new direction was centered on connecting "everything with everything", dismantling ideologies and embracing transnationality. Today, with globalization itself in crisis, editions of the Venice Art Biennale are increasingly ideologized, and artists seem to merely serve as evidence for curatorial statements. "Aperto 24" is a speculative hack that utilizes part of the communication and imagery of the 2024 Biennale, altering its content and proposing a new platform for artistic research. At the heart of this proposal is the dismantling of the "omniscient curator", in favor of a fragmented landscape composed solely of national participations: the good old pavilions and the new ones, changing and redistributing at each edition as in a Boetti's map.

&Game

The pre-text of the project is to have a vacant empty space with a shop window. I imagined it as a contemporary stage, without the fourth wall, but also as an "architecture of crisis" through which enlight what is happening to historic centers. I wrote a script starting from some of Beckett's plays, incorporating various passages and developing their meta-theatrical and inter-textual component. The imagined scene takes shape and voice through the dialogue between two characters sitting behind the shop window, with the audience outside. The dialogue is rendered in the form of a text chat, underlining the idea that it has to be read privately by the user rather than to be recited. It's therefore an improper script, lightened and closer to online content consumption, such as the infinite and additive scroll. Only a few props on scene draw the characters' attention. The sense of expectation and the inevitable end are continually fooled from within.

Le Vide Plein

In 1958 Yves Klein set up the famous exhibition of nothing at the Iris Clert gallery. In the same year, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli drew a rectangle, representing a void painting, at the end of a letter contesting Heisenberg's "theory of everything". Klein's "Le Vide" was in a sense the most complete and radical solution to spatialism, followed shortly by its overthrow by Arman with "Le Plein". Were emptiness and fullness just formal or even substantial opposition? Subatomic physics was calling into question the very idea of emptiness, and at the same time was showing how at the core of matter there is more emptiness than substance. This object book is made of 99.999998% emptiness, literally: only 2 pages out of a million have any recognizable content. These pages, placed side by side, bear traces of those two events, suggesting a profound connection. Finding the two pages inside a book that, if printed, would be at least 50 meters tall is practically impossible. A hint: consider the speed of light, expressed in km.

Jimi Happening

In this project, I have brought together two distant worlds that share a hyperrealistic approach to everyday life. I have selected excerpts from three articles by Allan Kaprow written in the 80s and 90s on the increasingly close relationship between art and life. Alongside these texts, images document various editions of Jimi Halloween, a radical form of cosplaying as described in a Japanese culture blog: "Jimi Halloween is when people dress up in costumes so mundane that they need to be explained. The tradition was started in 2014 by a group of adults from Daily Portal Z who wanted to participate in Halloween celebrations but were too embarrassed to go all out with witch or zombie costumes. So, instead of the flashy and extravagant costumes that were becoming popular in Japan, they decided to dress up in ordinary, everyday costumes."

Ain't it painting?

Ten years after the Aummagumma project I resume my game with brushstrokes. What was a more or less explicit reference there - Lichtenstein's brushstrokes - becomes one of the two main sources in this morpho/ontological comparison. Lichtenstein's revival of the "brushstrokes" theme in the 1980s complicated the nature of that work: the iconic painted brushstrokes meet the printed reproductions of real ones and, above all, those physically imprinted on the surface. It is no longer just action painting that is called into question, as in the parodied version of the 1960s, but the pictorial gesture tout court between pop, hyperrealism and analytical painting. All this is a counterpoint to the more modest observation of the nature of brushstrokes in the shodo practice: a limited set of well-defined strokes, to be executed precisely in the right order, gives rise to thousands of logograms. The purely visual nature of these signs, unlike phonetic alphabets, and the calligraphic gestures suggest a different approach to painting, extremely synthetic and analytical.

LA — DI — DAS

I have always loved the work of Daniel Buren - and Adidas sneakers, too. I tried to figure out why, thinking about the striped-something The result is an interplay between different contexts and very similar visual strategies. Using the Adidas' website personalisation tool, I have created some "sneaker peeks" with superimposed textual snippets from Buren's interviews - and of course, with accidental hacks.

A Lambo in limbo

For my solo show at the Studiolo, my fav little space for art ("Not a gallery, No critics, No events, No performances, No wifi"), I have created the second chapter of my imaginary dialogue with great artists. Conceived as a physical book (edition of 10), its pages have been spread and displayed on the walls in three linear clusters. Each artist/voice had a different paper color, combining in a visual polyphony of primary structures. The entire show is actually contained in this book, merging the gesture and the document.

Ummaremma

Ummaremma is a site-specific art fiction, a social sculpture as an anthropic map, the hybrid representation of an alien place of our time. Twenty short stories, testimonies of those who live the Maremma in the present in all its facets, were collected in the area during the pandemic. Each story brings with it an object, an image, or a work of art that makes it visible and physical. Often these are unusual objects, far from an imaginary that would have them simple or traditional, because in reality every place is now hyper-connected with many others, on several levels. Begun as a small ethnographic research, I soon realized the inadequacy of the bare document and the need for the inhabitants to stage themselves as characters in their stories. Widespread auto-fiction, which reveals the hybridization in progress between vernacular culture and the non-linear languages of an accelerated contemporaneity.

Cinemavero

Twenty-five years ago "Lisbon Story" was released: the movie with which Wenders paid homage to cinema in the year of its centenary. Did it still make sense to make films, in an era in which the flow of images became more and more pervasive, in a sort of expanded and scattered cinéma vérité? The answer, of course, was yes: there was still a need to tell stories, as Winter reiterates to a disillusioned Monroe. Today it happens that cinema, understood as art and industry but above all as a place of sharing, is put in serious crisis by a double pandemic: the one caused by the virus that forces theaters to close, and the one conveyed by the new video sharing and streaming channels. With this project I imagined the superimposition of these two scenarios, starting from the same place: a closed theater. In the movie, Monroe stored the "unseen images" inside an abandoned theater. Here, we find ourselves outside a symbolic place of Pordenone, the Cinemazero's theater.

Uncanny Canyon

When face images generated by GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) appeared, I thought they represented the extreme point of the Uncanny Valley. The images archived here were generated via the This-Person-Does-Not-Exist website, which displayed a new face on each web page reload. They are so realistic and natural as to be credible, yet some small details are very disturbing. We have always been used to knowing how to read and interpret the human face and its expressions, so the fact of being misled by these synthetic portraits is amazing and scary. Alongside the portraits there's the transcript of the questions and some answers exchanged during the Loebner Prizes 2016-2018: these were the last editions of the contest, which rewarded the Artificial Intelligence software that performed best in relation to some Turing tests. Through a set of 20 questions, the evaluators had to understand whether they were dealing with a human being or an AI, looking for particular patterns and pain points in the answers. I have selected those that I find most uncanny: sophisticated, ironic or sometimes simply human.

That's file

One day my father brought me a memory card from his camera, saying that the images on it had disappeared and asking me to try to recover them. I installed a recovery program on my PC, but in the file previews there were only fragmented images. They were like geometric patchworks, where each image was composed of slices of multiple photographs. I started taking screenshots of everything I found, and the further I went the more the combinatorial complexity seemed to increase. Finally, I also copied some intact photographs - a minority fraction out of around 900 images. Forgoing further investigations, I decided to use the material for a project on the non-linear and discontinuous nature of digital space (or memory?). I remember the defragmentation procedure that was used to keep the hard disk clean: this random decomposition and assembly of image slices is in itself already an anarchive, with its own logic that is obscure to me, which has produced incredible visual and semantic interweavings. Who am I to refuse such a wonderfully uncanny gift?

Stand by Mondrian

In 1900 Mondrian had already written an important page in the artistic development of Modernism. This claim was confirmed in 2017, by the discovery of a Mondrian’s original manuscript in Cologne, where one of the most important contemporary art publishers came across a forgotten notebook with his sketches for a pavilion that was never constructed.

Wiener / Weiner

"He does not seem to realize that where a man's word goes, and where his power of perception goes, to that point his control and in a sense his physical existence is extended. To see the whole world and to give commands to the whole world is almost the same thing as to be everywhere. I have stated these things, not because I want to write a science fiction story concerning itself with the possibility of telegraphing a man, but because it may help us understand that the fundamental idea of communication is that of the transmission of messages, and that the bodily transmission of matter and messages is only one conceivable way of attaining that end. It will be well to reconsider Kipling's test of the importance of traffic in the modern world from the point of view of a traffic which is overwhelmingly not so much the transmission of human bodies as the transmission of human information." N. Wiener

La lana del Re

Where does the history end and stories begin? At the Lanificio Paoletti in Follina, I tried to give an answer by telling a story and embroidering on it. "La lana del Re" is a site-specific fiction, a free narration in images and words as a result of an historiographical research on facts and people linked to the Lanificio Paoletti in the period between the two world wars.

Ibidem

With this project I returned to the crime scene - the white cube - to affirm the indispensability of the image and its substantial independence from space. In doing this I use inversely a site-specific modality that confuses the contours of the space and the physical extension of the work by acting on the edge-limit that separates and defines both. The adhesive tape acts on the separation between space and work without resolving in one direction or the other. The work consists of the future photographic series that will remedy the signs in space without being a simple documentation or installation view. Those traced with adhesive tape are multivocal visual tools: signs, supports, surfaces, work margins, spatial measurements, photographic delimiters.

White Night / Black Light

The city hummed with a low, insistent thrum. Neon signs bled into the night, painting the streets in hues of crimson and electric blue. It was a night unlike any other, a night where the lines between reality and illusion blurred. She wandered through the labyrinthine streets, her footsteps echoing in the deserted alleyways. A chill wind whipped through her hair, sending shivers down her spine. The moon, a pale sliver in the inky sky, cast an ethereal glow on the scene. In a dimly lit bar, she found herself drawn to a man sitting alone in a corner. His eyes were dark and mysterious, and he seemed to know something she didn't. As she approached, he gestured for her to sit. "White night, black light," he murmured, his voice a low rumble. "Do you know the meaning?" She shook her head, intrigued. "It's a game" he explained, "a dance between opposites. The light that reveals and the darkness that conceals. The white that purifies and the black that corrupts."

Objections

"He reflects ironically"
"It reacts in a paradoxical way"
"He questions the mechanisms"
"He dismisses expectations"
"Combining everyday objects in an unexpected way"
"Creating an intervention specifically for this space"

Jack the Dripper

"There's an image that popped into my head the first time you described this project. The connection lies in the name: as you know, Pollock became known in the press as 'Jack the Dripper', and from the way you described it to me, I immediately thought of another Jack... Torrance! Jack Torrance is obviously 'the Ripper,' but aside from that, the scene I'm interested in analyzing here is the one with the typewriter. There we have the quintessential 'writer in crisis', obsessively reproducing a single code - his own personal, self-referential cipher. It would be a perfect conceptual and meta-literary operation, if it weren't for the madness. When we finally see that all the typed pages are filled with that repeated refrain in different patterns, I can't help but think of Pollock. Using a simple string of text, a code, he has generated a narrative and hallucinatory chaos that explodes, engulfing the rest of the film."
David Cumpany

Minimal Spring

"The black and white image depict a group of birds perched on wires, their dynamism contrasting with the static background. There are four swallows, captured in a moment of intense activity. One of them, on the left, seems to be just about to take flight, its wings spread in a gesture of soaring. Its body is tilted forward, as if trying to gain altitude. The swallow in the center is calmer, perched on the wire with its wings closed, but its beak is open in a call, perhaps encouraging its companions. On the right, another swallow is preparing to take flight, its wings outstretched and its body slightly raised. The last swallow, in the center, is in the air, its wings spread in a V-shape, in a moment of perfect balance before landing on the wire. The background consists of a rough concrete wall, with some spots and irregularities that emphasize its texture. The light, probably natural, falls on the scene uniformly, creating an almost suspended atmosphere. The taut, parallel wires serve as a stage for the birds' action, creating a sense of order and contrast with the animals' movement."
Gemini AI

Afteraura

In this third collection of writings, from the period 2011-2016, the meta-artistic investigation is developed mainly around the digital and the Internet as a natural continuation of the dematerialization of art. The "real amateur" is presented as a solution to the problem of the threshold between art and non-art, while digital images and files redefine the ontology and scope of the works. Through the Internet, the aestheticization of the world is complete and definitive: however, this is not an extension of the concept of art, but more prosaically and pragmatically of design. "Post-art design" is seen here as the most likely outcome of the slow process of dissolution of art: the infinite experience of the world after the end of the aura.

Aummagumma

The images produced for the Aummagumma exhibition were composed of internal and cross-references between digital brushstrokes, chosen from the archive of the vector graphics software. Brushstrokes on the surface are actually icons, painting of painting in which action painting, minimalism and pop art flow back. It’s a fusion recipe that blends project and action, analysis and expression, type and token, order and chaos. The title of the exhibition also recalls the Neapolitan vernacular expression "Aumm Aumm", an exhortation to silence and secrecy which has been accepted as a paradoxical strategy of visibility. Some paintings were printed on materials and surfaces used in advertising, designed to attract attention, which, however, seem to be throttled, tamed. The visibility quest turns in a visual research, which is also literally a false friend.

Inland Empyrean

These images are in some way connected with the real (?) imaginary world of David Lynch. The title is a tribute to one of his films, a place that contains many others, and that has been used directly as a set for the creation of some new images. The two main elements that characterize these photographs are the enclosed spaces, the shadow and the sudden glowing of lights. The images that enter and leave the Lynchian chiaroscuro have inhabited the domestic space, as well as the filmic one, merging with my experience of darkness.

Displayce

This is a sad story: the murder of a white cube. The poor little beautiful gallery space became empty and the lights went off, transforming it in a "grey cube". What kind of aura could be revealed by touching its walls with fingers? Did really disappear any potential of art?

Nowhere, Now and Here

When my friend Ba Abat opened her studio/home to me, I discovered a little world beneath the surface of things, images and the overall architecture. I wanted to capture the frozen energy, the messy assembly of props and ordinary elements of a disordered reality. By appling the tape as a situated visual device and signature that occurs in every shot, I documented down to the smallest detail of a chaotic but organic forest of symbols and existential magma.

Doubles

"Artworks require constant and detailed mediation: explanatory texts, photographic documentation, speeches, catalogues, etc. From the work to the public, a series of steps unfold other than neutral and transparent. Each mediation selects, reorganises, interprets, adds or subtracts meanings and formal values from the original work. It is not only an inevitable communicative process, but also a fertile and fruitful concatenation to understand and generate further forms and meanings. Contemporary art has achieved a profound awareness of the importance of these mediations, to the point of often producing works that merely propose this process. Doubles is an exhibition in which six artists work in tandem, divided into pairs. Three artists are called to interpret and remedy, each through a pre-established medium, the works created by three other artists."
Denis Viva

Painthings

In 2011, I began exploring the possibilities of expanding a work into the space that contains it, and conversely, of incorporating space into the final work. This process found its ideal point of convergence and dialectical completion in the photographic medium. Abstract painting, exhibited in places not designated for art, functioned as a trigger for a short-circuit: why were those works displayed in that particular place? In the present edition, I have selected a particular context: during a free-jazz concert of my friends in a basement, I produced and applied my "pictorial triggers" to the walls according to improvisation patterns, identifying with the musical gesturality. With the final intervention of photography I also physically converged the various elements of the context (material, spatial, pictorial and musical) into a sort of underground Gesamtkunstwerk.

Skies Wide Shut

Watching the sky at dusk from the terrace had become a daily ritual. I preferred a clear sky, capable of expressing the full range of iridescent colors, but with the indispensable presence of clouds, the quintessential celestial objects. Spring was perfect because the rows of trees along the avenue began to fill the sky with leaves, within easy reach of my terrace. Following the principle of partial obstruction of the visual field, the foreground leaves become fixed and dark silhouettes against a changing background of endless combinations of shapes and shades, and for astral encounters of calm and storm.

Sismologie Orange

I have done everything to blur the lines between painting and writing. This collection of texts and pictographs traces some points in that gray area: there are paintings that tell stories, that reiterate ideas; writings that talk about painting and write about writing. In addition to the theoretical texts, here appear for the first time textual forms closer to narration, always used in reference to the art context: in this sense they could be regarded as "art fiction". Alongside the texts appear some pictorial writings that relate to some politics of the artworld and its exhibition display. The meta-artistic component, seasoned with elements of fiction, is still predominant and tends to blend in with the art context.

NƎ — NƎ

In 2008, using the nickname NƎ-NƎ, I introduced the topic of Negative Necessity to the forum members on the UAAR (Union of Rational Atheists and Agnostics) website. My aim was to gauge how my stance on atheism at that time would be received, sparking a broader dialogue on faith. I selected the most significant responses and arranged them in a dialogical format; those responding to me (in bold) are not identified. Following the discussion on Negative Necessity, I initiated a new thread proposing an Ontological Referendum, thereby starting another conversation.

Wunderkamera

In this photobook, I've gathered three photo series that go back to when my dad was living alone and really fell into drinking. The first set of photos: I took them right after he was hospitalized. I hadn't been to his place in a while, so I decided to document where he lived and all his stuff. I went with black and white and distorted the images to try and show how crazy things must have been for him. The other two sets are photos that my dad took himself a few years earlier. In one set, he's snapping pics of his own paintings. He always had a good eye for photos, but these have the classic finger in the shot, just like those in some old albums found by Kessels. The last ones are portraits of bartenders at their workplace — he was there way more than he was at home.

Less is Loss

Many years later, I find myself holding these grainy photos, the "poor images" defended by Hito Steyerl for their ability to diffuse and mutate. But these images are actually very private and were born poor: they haven't lost details along the way - they never had any. Thus, while I'm losing memories of those days, I realize that this meticulous recording of panoramas and streets is anything but lossless. Low fidelity is supposed to distance images from reality, yet the opposite is paradoxically true: the reality is that these poor images are faithful to my memories, which have fewer and fewer details, and to a selective memory that vividly retains only certain scenes while letting go of everything else.

Un artista a metà

This collection of texts, dating from 1999 to 2004, recovers my very first conceptual interventions that I developed in written form. "Artism" is an extreme point of tautological conceptualism: a formula that can only refer to itself, and the artist is nothing more than an executor of this recursive logic. The "Audioscript" is a transcription of my recorded voice monologues, therefore an indirect and impure writing with which I explored a different time of criticism, made more performative, in an attempt to distance myself from an excessive formal rigor. This leads to the definition of two problems that were central to me at the time: the function of writing as an artistic medium and the role of the external observer. In practice, the limits of an analytical perspective of art-making.

Transgressing the Bound Diaries

In 2003 I was aware of the Sokal Affair. As a fan of Luther Blissett's pranks, this seemed like the next step, translated into the institutional sphere. With serious consequences also in the university environment I frequented. For my degree thesis I tried to superimpose some ideas, partly rehashed, about visual anthropology, net art, and radical music. I didn't know there was such a thing as "theory-fiction" yet, and I'm not sure I can attach that label to this work. It was my first ambitious (ambiguous) theoretical act (hack). By combining many notes and quotes with brief scripts, fake sources and a long interview built without questions, I've experimented with a multi-focal/vocal writing device that is involuted, self-aware and (of course) auto-ironic.

Artefacta

It was the spring of 2002, and I was planning an exhibition in which my father's paintings would be displayed in a former church. I would take care of the installation and the writing of the critical text for the catalog. Soon, however, the role of "critic" was secretly perverted by me, betraying the correct relationship that should exist between artist and exegete. I took literally the ability of critical language to deform and recreate its object of observation, constructing an apparatus that was a play on words and things for its own sake. From criticism to poiesis.

Cattamail

Cattamail was my first mail-art project during university. I've hacked the students' mailing list by adding fake users with nicknames of not-yet-famous or forgotten contemporary artists. The avatars started to interact with students, by disturbing everyday communications and assemblig a surreal choral dialogue. After 20 years, I've re-edited the email-thread-like structure of the original Cattamail script into a modern chat-like exchange. Read it on double-page mode, with main characters stream on the right and real persons messages on the left.

Aperto 2000

I had seen the portrait of Kippenberger, in front of the German pavilion, that he managed to shot in 1996 when the Biennale was closed. He was at the end of his career and life, and someway I fantasized to take up that legacy. I visited the Giardini in the spring of 2000, between the last Art Biennale of 20th century and the first one of the 21st. I took some photographs of the national pavilions. The gardens were under maintenance, the doors of the pavilions were closed and through the windows I could see only blank and disassembled spaces. There was no sacredness in that place proving to be fully breached, but because of that it was really open to any occurrence of life.

Books make architecture

In my grandmother's garden, I spent part of my childhood playing, climbing trees, and scrambling up the asbestos roofs of the sheds. In what is, in fact, my first photographic series, I've portrayed real 'object-books' placed in various points of that open space that correspond to vivid memories. These 'volumes' had a precisely plastic value, with dimensions comparable to other objects to be replaced, and subject to gravity like anything else. It didn't matter what was written inside; their reality was primarily perceptual and compositional. Many years later, someone told me that 'books make architecture'.

Grammature

After getting into math, I also became fascinated with language, especially writing as a system of graphemes. In this first graphic project, I played around with written form in two opposite ways: by mimicking a calligraphic style that looks readable at first glance but is actually meaningless; and by hiding words within tangled signs that make them almost impossible to decipher. The idea was to physically trace and measure the gap between sign, gesture, and meaning, as well as between conventional code and expression.

After Math

The aftermath of my math obsession led me in 1996-97 to some metaphysical musings marked by excessive formalism. While my then-involvement with mathematics clearly influenced the language I used, it's also true that what I wrote took me far from the study of sets and numbers. That aftermath also led to my partial distancing from mathematics, in favor of a progressive opening towards other fields that would characterize my entire subsequent path. The pieces published here have been partly revised and adapted for greater readability, seeking a compromise between the original order and the coherence of the texts.