Images suck
2022 - image that sucks
After two years of working on the concept of value and self-esteem in the post-internet world, I decided to widen my focus to the issue of the image. Images are bad. They don’t have the same purpose as two hundred years ago anymore. Their only purpose is to advertise something and trick the viewer into desiring the object, the situation they depict. The bad news is: you will never have the thing in the image. Not entirely because this is about capitalism devastating us with endless needs, but because when we take a picture, when we paint a painting, when we make a video, we create yet another layer in the hyperreality.
2022 - image that sucks
The imitation of a croissant is so much better than the croissant itself, the croissant itself will never satisfy us as its representation. Today the world is infested with images of everything. We consume billions of images every minute and none of them can make us happy in any way. Images of cute kittens are made only to make us desire to pet a cute kitten. Images of our loved ones give us nostalgia. Images are only about desire, they can only make us feel hungry, angry, or alone. Images pollute.
2022 - image that sucks
We are used to thinking of images as ethereal objects, with no weight in the real world. That’s not true. Enormous warehouses full of incandescent servers, hidden in the coldest places on earth are needed to let them exist and circulate as spores of a skin fungus.
2022 - image that sucks
3D print, hydro-dipping, led frame
30x38x10cm
3D print, hydro-dipping, led frame
30x38x10cm
Complimenti!
2020 - 2021
150 x 150 cm
2021 - 2D animation, found footage of a french carbonara
1080 x 1920 pixels
Stereo Sound
51 x 67 x 29 cm
55 x 64 x 23 cm
2021 - 3D print, gold spray paint, synthetic velvet, fake flowers.
45 x 45 x 22 cm
512 x 512 pixel
70 x 100 cm
2020 – Tin, synthetic velvet.
70 x 120 cm
2020 – Tin, synthetic velvet.
40 x 120 cm
2021 - Artificial Intelligence, 2D animation
60’’, Full HD, Stereo sound
24 x 18 x 8 cm
2020 - Didò, metal wire, string
25 x 25 x 22 cm
2020 - Metal wire, string
36 x 22 x 12 cm
Soft Spam project
(Un)Luckily Soft Spam Project is OVER (fucking finally)
What was that??
SSP was an artistic mailing list project. The people who agreed to receive SSP have been indexed in a database comprising name, sex, and age. For one year, once per month, an email has been sent. The content was standardized but slightly customized to seem tailored for each receiver. The content? Each mail was a fake toxic love letter, from a different anonymous made-up character that seems to know you well. The last email, on the other hand, was a true expression of personal admiration (when possible) from the writer, me.
Issue n.1 - April 2021 - Female - ENGWhy all this?
Every day we receive hundreds of unrequested emails. They look harmless but they’re not. Not only they enormously pollute the planet (since 5 emails that weigh 1Mb pollute as 1Km made by car), they also pollute our perception of the world and of ourselves. Marketing has become more and more aggressive in the last years. To get noticed in the devastating chaos of visual communication on our devices, companies are forced to play with our insecurities. ASOS sending you compliments about your look, Spotify admiring your tastes in music, Linkedin sending inflated numbers of imaginary people secretly admiring your professional life... Every spam email we get is trying to harass us by flooding us with corny compliments. Even if we know that they’re programmed to automatically fit each target, in the corners of our self-esteem, they feel so real...
Issue n.5 - August 2021 - Male - ENG
The reactions to Soft Spam were very different. Some people felt like answering each one of the emails would have been fun. Some, less prepared, got very angry about some of the contents, thinking that the email was written specifically for him/her. Some must have moved the emails to the spam folder, where they belonged, and never read them again. When the last email has been delivered, most people couldn’t say if it was real or not. After being teased and harassed for one year, once a real compliment arrived, the receivers did not accept it.
Who knows, maybe in my spam folder there’s that one love letter that could have changed my life.
Issue n.12 - March 2022 - Nicholas
Some numbers:
Soft Spam Project started in April 2021
After one year SSP received 42 subscriptions
At the current date, 450 Soft Spam emails have been sent
Since Soft Spam Project has been launched, 0 suicides have been reported among subscribers
Soft Spam ended in March 2022
Stepped in late? If you want to receive past issues just send an email to softspam@gmail.com. You will be provided of all the past issues you’ve been missing right away.
