Art can be created with the most disparate mediums, including light: different creative minds developed a dialogue with lights in the history of art, from Lucio Fontana to Nanda Vigo or Dan Flavin.
Yet there are also artists, such as Brazilian Ricardo Carioba, who combine lights with sounds to reward visitors to their exhibitions with innovative sensorial experiences.
Milan-based independent museum FuturDome is dedicating to Carioba an event opening this week, "Non Linear Spatial Normalizations", the first monographic exhibition focused on the artist's work in Europe. The event features fifteen mesmerising audiovisual installations, including photographs and an unedited work conceived for the exhibition, displayed over more than 1,500 square meters.
Visitors can walk through the immersive installations and ponder about the relationship between sound and image. Rather than using light structures that physically occupy a space (think about sculptures made with neon lights), Carioba mainly works with pure and immaterial light and musical environments.
For this show he experimented with sound, visuals, physical phenomena and mathematical notions. The title of the exhibition refers to the Spatial Normalization technique, performed in research-based functional neuroimaging, and aiming at finding common brain activation across multiple human subjects. Medical image registration often involves Non Linear registration to cope with deformation of the subject (due to breathing, anatomical changes and so on).
There is a comparison between spatial normalization and the artworks of Ricardo Carioba as the artist also employs in his practice measurements.
The main space at FuturDome displays audiovisual projects that test the limits of perception by visualizing the invisible data streams that permeate our world.
On the underground floor, the relationship between sound and image is amplified: Carioba engages visitors through these mediums, inviting them to go beyond the foundations of spatiality and perception and discover sound and light frequencies, space, image and narrative.
The video on the underground floor is projected using a circular structure divided in two parts that starts an experimental dialogue with the two hemispheres of the human brain and asks visitors to consider the independence of both eyes in vision. The video analyzes sound in real time and creates a state of latent synchronization between frequencies.
But there is more to explore in the FuturDome spaces between artworks consisting of moving images and sounds that explore how abstracted views of reality are used to encode, understand and control the world, large-scale installations such as the series "Nervo" (2017), employing an intense white light as a sculptural material that radically transforms public locations.
The installation "Horizonte Negro" (2013) incorporating quadraphonic sound and three-channel video projection, is instead a reflection on mathematical and geometrical speculations and ties in with modern debates about the acoustic dimensions of architecture.
Science and art are combined as concentric, solid circles of waves roll, collide, and combine, producing nodal points and interference patterns. These experiments are particularly intriguing as light refractions are manipulated in terms of speed thanks to the position of the hole in the centre of each artwork, creating as a result, infinitely variable registers of sounds.
Carioba develops through his works a visual grammar in which language is presented as an arrangement of non linear spectro-graphies, and mathematical and geometrical speculations are combined with acoustical dimensions of inner landscapes.
"Non Linear Spatial Normalizations" by Ricardo Carioba, is at FuturDome, via Giovanni Paisiello 6, 20131 Milan, Italy, from 10th October 2019 to 23rd November 2019,
Image credits for this post
1. Ricardo Carioba, Èter, 2011, sound and video installation, variable dimensions, loop
2. Ricardo Carioba, Hidden factual, 2018, sound and video installation, variable dimensions, loop
3. Ricardo Carioba, Lapso, 2014, sound and video installation and mirrors in a black room, environmental sizes, loop
4 and 5. Ricardo Carioba, Untitled, 2014, sound, light, video and light filter installation, variable dimensions, loop
6. Ricardo Carioba, Horizonte negro, 2013, installation of quadraphonic sound and three-channel video projection, environmental sizes, loop
7. Ricardo Carioba, Perspectiva sobre fundo negro, 2010, sound and video installation, variable dimensions
8. Ricardo Carioba, Organic Decline, 2018, Sound, video and light filter installations, variable dimensions, loop
9. Ricardo Carioba, Nervo, 2017, sound and light installation, environmental sizes, loop
10 and 11. Ricardo Carioba, Suposto ausente, 2011, sound and light installation, environmental sizes, loop
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