On November 7th, “Thinking the unthinkable”, the new project of the Italian artist Donato Piccolo, curated by Isabella Indolfi will be presented to the public with an exhibition and a conference in the avant-garde spaces of the Youth Educational Center of The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, a department focused on the interaction between art and science, new forms of art and museums. As a space of dialogue with the academic world, the Youth Educational Center opens the State Hermitage Museum to contemporary experiments through the creation of educational and cultural programs for students in diverse fields.
Donato Piccolo, working between contemporary art, science and new technologies, uses writing, painting and sculpture in order to investigate the relationship between artifice and nature, between mechanics and representation of reality. Natural, biological, cognitive and physical phenomena are turned into kinetic installations, emotional states, forms and processes.
The artist plays on technology with a keen sense of humour. Irony becomes a safe method to question the evidence, to demystify the myth of technology, to test the borders of the “thinkable” and to produce those uncertainties useful for revealing contradictions and paradoxes.
“Thinking the unthinkable” is a metaphor, an experiment on human limits and possibilities; it is a study on the cognitive aspects impacting our reality which make it difficult to distinguish what we see from what really is.
“Thinking the unthinkable” is a motion installation that plays on dynamics, physics, and electronic and electromagnetic principles by implementing them on a system of thought that considers the machine only as a pure abstraction of the human spirit, and that brings the human being back to the center of reflection on artificial intelligence. Prostheses, bachelor objects and various shapes will be part of a single dynamic “corpus”, split and wandering on the edge of art and science, modifying our idea of the relationship between subject and object.
This artwork will observe and talk to us, telling the story of a world upside-down: “All we cannot understand is inside our brain / All we cannot see is inside our eyes / All we cannot imagine is our future”
“Thinking the unthinkable”
http://www.thinkingtheunthinkable.it/
Opening November 7, 2017
The Youth Educational Center of the State Hermitage
General Staff Building 47 Moika Embankment
Supported by:
North-Western Branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts – ROSIZO (NCCA)
Youth Educational Center of The State Hermitage Museum
CYLAND MediaArtLab
Galleria Mario Mazzoli (Modena / Berlino – Italia)