It got underway at MAXXI L’Aquila a new exhibition dedicated to virtual reality. It’s about Second Order Realityan exhibition hosted in the project room of Palazzo Ardinghelli in which Carola Bonfili explores the possibilities of building new narratives using different media. First of all, precisely, virtual reality. Edited by Ilaria Gianni e Daniela Cotimbothe project was carried out with the support of the 2022 edition – the ninth – of theItalian Councilthe international promotion program of Italian art of the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, and will be open to visitors until July 28, 2024. Furthermore, the project will become part of the MAXXI art collection, a space for the destination of works and for the valorization of Italian creativity in the visual arts.
Promoted by the smART Foundation and already presented in preview in the past months in Barcelona and then in Ljubljana by Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Second Order Reality arises from the artist’s specific interest in the perceptive states that characterize the experience of navigating virtual worlds and that are inherent in children’s “magical thinking”. At the heart of the project, in fact, is the ability to enter and exit different subjectivities, for example, or the interest in liminal spaces and temporal gaps and thresholds. With a plot developed through different languages, from a CGI video with the function of a trailer, an immersive VR environment and a series of sculptures, Second Order Reality aims to create a video game whose protagonist, the monkey M’ling, sees some parts of her body turn to stone and embark on an initiatory journey in search of healing. Every aspect of the story is the result of a careful construction that combines different languages and eras: from nineteenth-century literature to brutalist architecture, from contemporary comics to generative artificial intelligence.
In particular, in the video The Stone Monkey and in the VR Level 1 installation, Illusions that we should have, but don’ta chain of mysterious events moves the narrative dynamics by constantly shifting the point of adhesion to reality. The sounds, created by Francis D’Abbraccio, consist of “sound objects” and amplify the disturbing character of the entire experience. The sculptures, however, crystallize images of the story and translate them into physical elements, amplifying the deliberately fragmentary nature of the project: thus, the reproductions of the main characters coexist which recall the action figures produced in the gaming sector, and the series The Stone Monkey’PBR, spherical sculptures developed from physical renderings (digital objects used in 3D modeling to show texture samples). In the end, The Multicrane recovers the technique of Walt Disney’s first animations. This is a tribute to an artisanal way of doing things that persists as a method in its approach to digital.
Carola Bonfili’s project, to which a special event will be dedicated publication edited by NERO Editionscounts as a partner Aksioma (Lubiana) and as cultural partners Geneva Contemporary Art Center, Green Parrot (Barcellona) e La Capella (Barcelona)beyond Hypermaremma (Tuscany). The technical sponsor of the project was HTC VIVE Artswhile Distritti Ecologico contributed to sponsoring the video.
info: maxxilaquila.art
