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Interview by Anna Yudina

January 2003

Published on Monitor Magazine #17, March 2003

1. Carlo, you claim to have a penchant for observing and registering changes: what do you think of the evolution of desktop landscape? Is the desktop imagery aestehtics changing?

Icons seem becoming smoothed loosing their minimalist elegance and also their lo-fi but powerful abstract impact owing to the classic "squared corners".
Desktop GUI (Graphic User Interface) could be pushed till 3d environments… but I think desktop as "personal place" has already lost its "political" and "economic" revolutionary value. In fact, it was the desktop GUI that -together other specs- allowed data input based machines to become something user-friendly, thought for the masses.
I think outdoor wireless infrastructures could really change again our behaviors, human and digital, pushing people to rethink such "absolute" concepts as home, office, computer and also desktop. Following this way, I think the desktop could be redesigned as a kind of headquarter (personal graphic server) to synchronize all the Wi-Fi personal portable devices we use. After a decade during which the "productive private isolation" -gained through email and web services- has been considered the proof of our progress and civilization, people could populate the streets again.
We became active peers of a global grid and we are updating us as "active-mobile" peers of that grid.

2. Replying to an Internet quiz (Sara Tucker - Quiz - for Mudam Museum) asking you to remember your early days on the net, you said: "I was fascinated by the aesthetics of spamming, bored by data chaos art works, mesmerized by the first Altavista mountain logo."
We offer you the same question regarding the present times: what fascinates, bores and mesmerises you now?

I still love spamming.. I mean, it is something I understand to appreciate every time I'm alone, my PC is in recovery and ther's no way to be connected. I consider it as a tax for my psychological stability.
I am bored by theories and works supporting the thesis that "interaction" is something related to freedom, participation and rhizome.
I am mesmerized by Fresco handbooks

3. A quote: "His paintings are precise and impersonal reproductions of desktop's icons, software's logos and other images taken from the contemporary landscape: the computer's screen."
How impersonal they really are - in your opinion?

At a quick glance, people think my paintings are a simple copy -in a bigger scale- of those icons you can find on your desktop. In truth they are painted as our eyes see them on the screen, and not as they really are. I paint them with shades appearing due to the distance from which we look at them instead of copying them as they are programmed, pixel by pixel. I have inverted the process used by Pointillism/Divisionism during 19th-20th centuries. It is an aesthetic choice that hides a precise concept and aim: all my paintings are related to the subject of perception. The perception of the world filtered and mirrored by our desktop experience.
Following this process, I look at them as really intimate paintings, which can evoke personal emotions and private memories in people's mind.