This exhibition assembles a complex selection of recent and older interactive computer graphic works, artificially intelligent computer graphic installations and single channel video installations by Dennis Del Favero. These comprise Ellipsis from 2023, Medusa from 2023, and Penumbra 1.0. from 2022 at Cavallerizza, Nebula from 2023 and Slipstream from 2017 at Recontemporary.
What is common to these works is that they deal with the climate emergency in a complex, poignant and scientific way and offer a glimpse into the violent worlds of wildfires and storms that now typify our era. Each work viscerally probes the uncertain relationship between the human and these new terrestrial worlds.
Rather than evoking the impact or aftermath of climate phenomena, they explore the interactive processes than underpin these unpredictable events. This involves investigating how “nature” is an active protagonist in our lives and not a scenographic backdrop. It means probing how we are complicit in the events rather than a passive victim of abstract natural forces. Placing uncertainty at the centre of art, it vivifies how these events and their interactions fundamentally destabilise the predictable existential conditions under which we have historically lived. This means reframing aesthetics from Descartes’ question of “what I am certain I see” to “how do we engage with the uncertainty of the world”. In the computer graphic installation Ellipsis it means rendering how the planetary atmosphere unpredictably perceives and shapes our world through its cyclonic water vapor turbulence. In Penumbra it means animating how a fiery landscape speaks to us as we respond to its unforeseen behaviour.
Underlying the works is how the climate crisis brings uncertainty to the fore in a way that is now breaking our shaping of certainty, whether of experience, concepts or technology. These are complicit in the crisis in that they formulate the climate as the antagonist of human action, the mother nature to be vanquished, the uncertainty to be extinguished. Due to the accelerating breakdown of these certainties, where the climate is responding with deepening unpredictability to our war against its systems, climate science has been rethinking uncertainty as a foundational vector for conceptualising everything that is of the Earth including the enterprise. It is illustrated by the difference between the two questions: “what will happen” which we witness in the nightly weather forecast and traditional climate modelling and “what is the impact of any action under changing conditions of uncertainty”. The works probe how we need to reformulate the questions we ask ourselves. Rather than asking the classical philosophical questions of what it means to be, what it is to know and what it is to see, we need to ask how we can live within these existential and escalating uncertainties.
Brigitte Schenk, Director of Galerie Brigitte Schenk, Cologne. From Viscera, Catalogue Foreword
Works
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Ellipsis 1.0 & Ellipsis 2.0, 2014, 2023
(Single channel video installation, monochrome, stereo, 3.40 minutes in duration, also available as a 4K single channel video)
Ellipsis is inspired by the Meditation on First Philosophy of 1641, by René Descartes. It uses the Meditation as a way of questioning the concept of perception as a human attribute. It meditates on the water vapour enveloping the Earth as a type of inorganic ‘perception’, a system that actively sees and shapes the world. It utilises rarely seen single frame satellite data, captured from 33,000kms above sea level, in the three-month period of January to March 2011, during Cyclone Yasi that devastated the North-Eastern Australian coast. Converting this data into a video stream projected across the floor, it reveals a mass of turbulent currents that constitute the vast atmospheric rivers that sense, sustain and refashion life.Artist & Sound Designer: Dennis Del Favero
Programmer: Alex Ong
Funded by the Australian Research Council through its Discovery Program -
Medusa, 2023
(3D stereoscopic single channel computer graphic installation, monochrome, stereo, 4 minutes in duration, also available as a 4K single channel video and NFT)
Medusa takes its title from Théodore Géricault’s the Raft of the Medusa of 1818 and uses extracts from Georg Buchner’s Danton’s Death of 1835. It re-imagines the experience of climate refugees from the perspective of the ocean itself as they desperately flee across the oceanic waves in search of a new life. The waves transform into increasingly larger oceanic walls and immerse the viewer in the interior of their motion, a seismic effect of melting Antarctic and Arctic ice. A haunting voice invites the solitary viewer to watch the unfamiliar oceanic terrain from the top of a two metre high viewing platform. It questions the viewer, as if their certainties are pushing the oceanic walls around them closer.
Artist & Sound Designer: Dennis Del Favero
Programmer: Alex Ong
Music: Kate Moore
Voice Over: Sacha Horler
Funded by the Australian Research Council through its Discovery Program -
Penumbra 1.0 2022
(3D stereoscopic single channel artificially intelligent computer graphic installation, monochrome. 5.1 sound, 8 minutes in duration, also available as a 4K single channel video)
Penumbra is adapted from Georg Buchner’s Lenz of 1836. It allows the viewer to interactively navigate a software generated extreme wildfire, using real-time motion tracking of the viewer’s gaze and movement. Extreme wildfires are an entirely new paradigm of fire, unprecedented because of their unpredictable behaviour, monumental scale, extraordinary speed and ability to create their own weather system. This was particularly evident in Lahaina, Hawaii, this year, which was assaulted by three fire storms from different directions. Rather than watching these wildfires as a news thread, Penumbra takes us into the heart of a wildfire and allows it to speak to us with its own powerful voice, full of sadness and trepidation as it immerses us inside our problematic future. Based on real world wildfire data and a geolocated landscape, Penumbra forms a very small part of a much larger five-year project titled Burning Landscapes funded by the Australian Research Council.
Artist, Sound Designer and Writer: Dennis Del Favero
Artist & Sound Designer: Dennis Del Favero
Music: Kate Moore
Voice Over: Leanna Walsmann
Funded by the Australian Research Council through its Laureate Fellowship Program -
Nebula 5.0 2023
(3D stereoscopic single channel artificially intelligent computer graphic installation, monochrome, 15 minutes in duration, also available as 4K single channel video)
In the light of the current re-conceptualisations of human induced climate change, attention has been drawn to the inadequacy of representing the landscape as a distinct and separate backdrop to human activity. Using a particle-generation graphics engine, Nebula allows the audience to evocatively interact with the subatomic processes of these landscapes, by interactively assembling clusters of mutating AI particles into a range of topographies and vistas. While immersed in these vertiginous terrains, we hear a voice challenging us to explore these unknowns, while the voice struggles against an unknown which threatens its sense of identity. As we attempt to herd the independently minded particles into recognisable landscapes, the undulating interactive imaging suggests how we and the landscape are fundamentally co-dependent.
Artist: Dennis Del Favero with Elwira Skowronska & Peter Weibel
Sound Designer: Dennis Del Favero
Script: Dennis Del Favero & Stephen Sewell
Programmer: Alex Ong
Music: Kate Moore
Voice Over: Sacha Horler
Funded by the Australian Research Council through its Discovery Program -
Slipstream, 2017
(Three Channel video installation, monochrome, stereo 4 minutes in duration, also available as 4K single channel videos)
Slipstream explores the spatial and temporal dynamics of human and urban interaction in Hong Kong, London and Venice. In each ninety second trailer the camera weaves in and out of choreographic human clusters and architectural habitats to performatively embody their unexpected symbiotic dynamics.
Artist & Sound Designer: Dennis Del Favero
Music: Kate Moore
- Overview
- Exhibition
Project Director: Dennis Del Favero
Curator: Iole Pellion di Persano
Catalogue Essays: Ursula Frohne and Stehi Donald Hemelryk
Funded by the Australian Research Council through its Laureate Fellowship Program, 2021-2025
Cavallerizza Reale and Recontemporary, Turin, 2023