TECNOCOPIA is a performance for the metaverse. It is a virtual photocopying machine that people can use to make virtual photocopies of their virtual face and then stick the virtual photocopies (made of virtual paper) on the virtual walls of the virtual venue. A photogrammetric copy of the real physical venue: the two spaces coincide.
It was also a performance and an exhibition that lasted from June to September 2022 in Adiacenze, Bologna. Curated by Andrea Tinterri.
TECNOCOPIA is a project about the anarchic relationship that emerges between a visitor, a metaverse and the objects with which he or she can interact, and between his or her real and fictional identity.
TECNOCOPIA is a reflection on the loss of function of a virtual object that mimics an object with form and function in the real world. A house in the metaverse no longer functions as a shelter, its roof does not protect us from the rain, which cannot get us wet, but is pure form, abstraction. Its walls do not hinder the entry of thieves who no longer have anything to steal.
TECNOCOPIA speaks of the inter-penetration of bodies. The result is sexual tension, anatomo-vouyerism, aggressive-passive invasion, cold intrusion.
Andrea Tinterri for the exhibition:
TECNOCOPIA is a project that investigates identity as an unstable form, Alessandro Sambini develops an archive of faces, some created by an artificial intelligence and others taken from volunteers’ photographs, which at the moment of restitution (the photocopier acts as a photographic device) replace the real one, cracking the perspective of the self.
The action of retrieving the image of the face and hanging it on the wall echoes Franco Vaccari‘s experience at the 1972 Venice Biennale with his work Esposizione in tempo reale no. 4. Leave a photographic trace of your passage on these walls. In both cases, the work takes shape through the viewers themselves, thanks to their intervention; ‘photographs’ witnessing an action accumulate on the walls.
But in TECNOCOPIA, the experience is individual, as if the discovery of a new identity could not be shared, was a necessarily solitary and maieutic experience.
In this way, the gesture eschews the collective ritual of the great exhibition to concentrate on the epiphany of the face, a random correspondence that changes the identifying connotations and rewrites the rules of representation. A form of rewriting further fostered by the possibility, in virtual reality, of inter-penetration of bodies; the photocopier is a great photographic device that our face can pierce through.
This interaction rewrites the returned face, the surface not appearing regular but deformed by the superimposition of subject and photographic medium, as if the former was exploring a further, otherwise unfathomable dimension.
Cut faces that over time (duration of the exhibition) accumulate on the wall, building a hybrid archive (the memory goes to the encyclopaedic work of August Sander) born from the collaboration between artificial intelligence and the sampling of reality. But unlike the circumscribed and ephemeral time of any exhibition, TECNOCOPIA postpones its deconstruction by remaining inside the headset (an Oculus Quest 2, ndr)), as if this was a time capsule, an archive guardian of memories, of a collective portrait. (2022)
The exhibition was divided into two spaces: a waiting room, and an installation room. In the waiting room there was an actual real photocopying machine, totally unplugged. A sort of statue. People could wait there before their turn.
They familiarized with the same space they were going to soon inhabit, with the same walls soon to be transformed into pixels, and the same machine, soon to become totally functional.
Thanks Irem Baskan for the amazing work and help in the developement of the project.
This project would not exist without Studio Evil from Calderara di Reno (Bologna) for their patience, first of all, and their great work in the developement of the actual VR experience, and yes: it’s Unity and not Unreal.
Thanks also to all the 60 donors (some are here..) who got a portrait out of a new photocopying machine that is able to also do colors!