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

Author: Ivan Dal Cin

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.

Author: Ivan Dal Cin

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.

Author: Ivan Dal Cin

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.

Author: Ivan Dal Cin

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.

Author: Ivan Dal Cin

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.

Author: Ivan Dal Cin

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."

Author: Ivan Dal Cin

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.

Author: Ivan Dal Cin

During the pandemic, it happened that cinema, understood as art and industry but above all as a place of sharing, has been 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. 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. 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.

Author: Ivan Dal Cin

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.

Author: Ivan Dal Cin

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?

Author: Ivan Dal Cin

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.

Author: Ivan Dal Cin

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.

Author: Ivan Dal Cin

Cattamail was my first mail-art project while studying at the 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.