Carlo Zanni, Oriana.us (Altarboy), 2004 - Sculpture, server, aluminum case with LCD, code.

PRESS

Altarboy / Oriana.us is currently on view at the Chelsea Museum, New York.
Opening reception: Tues, September  14, 6-8 PM

- Press Release: http://www.chelseaartmuseum.org/projectroom/2004/passageofmirage/

- For HiRes Images (300dpi) please inquire. MAIL: cz (at) zanni.org

THE WORK

Carlo Zanni, Oriana.us (Altarboy), 2004 - Sculpture, server, aluminum case with LCD, code.

Website: http://www.oriana.us

If not online, please visit http://www.zanni.org for further info.

The Oriana sculpture (part of Carlo Zanni's series Altarboy) consists of a customized, portable aluminum case. The bottom shell sheet of the case contains a little transparent glass box with fresh rose petals, pointing to the ephemeral nature of the object. The sheet itself is also covered by fresh rose petals. Embedded in the top shell is a 17" LCD screen showing a portrait of writer and journalist Oriana Fallaci. The pupils of her eyes consist of images gathered through live search engine queries; the images returned by the query are resized as 1x1 pixels and linked to a thumbnail of the same image (images are being refreshed every 90 seconds). Users remotely interact with the piece and launch the images in the pupils at the website www.oriana.us. The right pupil of the portrait is filled with images that users gather through queries at the website. The left pupil of the portrait is filled with images that are the result of a query for the words "Cu Chi" on the Google search engine. The Cu Chi tunnels were one of the most famous battlegrounds of the Vietnam War and  are one of the country's prime tourist attractions today. Fallaci wrote about the Vietnam war, most notably in her Vietnam journal Nothing, and So Be It. Oriana constructs a physical object and portrait as a "living process" that contains a multitude of other possible portraits and takes its shape through the choices of users in a real-time networked process.

ChristianePaul

Director, Intelligent Agent; Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts, Whitney Museum

Zhang Ga

Director, Netart Initiative; Professor, MFA Design and  Technology program, Parsons School of Design

AUTHOR’S BIO

Carlo Zanni (La Spezia, 1975) is an Italian born artist living between Milan and NY whose work is focused on the intersection of computation and representation. He paints landscapes and he programs portraits. In the past three years his work was shown in many venues, among them: P.S.1 Museum NY, 3rd Biennale de Montreal, Canada, Analix Forever Gallery - Geneva and Borusan Center for Culture and Arts - Istanbul. During Artissima X he presented a sculpture-server called AltarBoy (Altarboy-Cyrille): a sculpture and a "physical way" to sell Internet based works.

Carlo Zanni has been recipient of the "2004 Rhizome at The New Museum commission".

More info: http://www.zanni.org