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PROGRAMMED MACHINES   (1988-)
An interactive installation which everybody can modify by using a cell phone. Art Palace, Cairo, 2008. Thirty years ago Maurizio Bolognini began using computers to generate a flow of continuously expanding random images (Programmed Machine series). Hundreds of computers were programmed and left to run ad infinitum.

Macro-Museo di Arte Contemporanea, Rome, 2011 "I do not consider myself an artist who creates certain images, and I am not merely a conceptual artist. I am one whose machines have actually traced more lines than anyone else, covering boundless surfaces. I am not interested in the quality of the images produced by my installations but rather in their flow, their limitlessness in space and time, and the possibility of creating parallel universes of information made up of kilometres of images and infinite trajectories. My installations serve to generate out-of-control infinities......" (MB)

More time more space (Machine Art), Galerie Depardieu, Nice, 2006. Hundreds of persons who draw in the air.

 SEALED COMPUTERS   (1992-)

Post-screen works (since 1992). Sealed Computers, Atelier de la Lanterne, Nice, France, 1992-98
In 1992 Bolognini began to "seal" his machines (Sealed Computer series) by closing up the monitor buses, in such a way that they continued to produce images that no one would ever see. Most of these are still working today. "The project series Sealed Computers by Maurizio Bolognini points us to what might form the most significant line of force in the field of software-based art......"  Andreas Broeckmann "Bolognini's cryptic universe is silent and inaccessible as a galaxy. [...] Generating images that would cover a surface area of approximately four square miles a day, the installation could feasibly cover every inch of the world."  Lily Faust (NY Arts Magazine) "The 'instructed' machines  [...] continue on their own, involving the temporal and spatial dimensions, tending towards a geographical vastnesss in which the image, the sign, become a process of measurement [...] between the real and the illusory dimensions......."  Angela Madesani	"From Manzoni's Linea Infinita to On Kawara's One Million Years, from Anselmo's Infinito […], the attempts to arrest in an image or in an idea the elusive dimension of space (and thus of time) is a thread running through the artistic research of the latter half of the twentieth century which, in these and other artists, makes use of the categories of the metaphor and the symbol.  Maurizio Bolognini's out-of-control infinities located (provisionally) at the end of this path, where there is a movement […] from the virtuality of the idea to a reality where space and time are truly (although only potentially) infinite......."    Sandra Solimano "Bolognini's work is often referred to as the conceptual side of artistic research linked to digital technologies, both because his installations take up some themes of conceptual art (space, time, infinite dimension...) with new means, and because, in many cases, they consist in the realization of self-sufficient devices, activated in a minimal and abstract way....."

 INTERACTIVITY   (2000-) 

"Maurizio Bolognini revises the very notion of a digital device to encompass hardware, software and the public. Postdigital artists see digital devices as enmeshed in social processes and patterns. [...] New modes of participation offer a variety of possibilities for digital art in which there is a shift from weak modes of public interaction to stronger modes that promote democracy and public decision-making. To be sure, digital art in the future will utilize participatory technologies and mobile communications to a greater extent. It is the pervasiveness of digital technology in our everyday lives that underpins the postdigital character of art.... ” (C. Hope, J. C Rian, Digital Art: An Introduction to New Media)

SMSMS-SMS Mediated Sublime from interactivity to democracy: "In 2000, I began to connect some of these computers to the mobile phone network (SMSMS-SMS Mediated Sublime, and CIMs-Collective Intelligence Machines). This enabled me to make interactive and multiple installations, connecting various locations. In this case the flow of images was made visible by large-scale video-projections and the members of the audience were able to modify their characteristics in real time, by sending new inputs to the system from their own phones. This was done in a similar way to certain applications used in electronic democracy. What I had in mind was art which was generative, interactive and public......." (MB)     CIMs  (2005). Interactive, multiple installations made up of various locations, distant from each other, coordinated across the mobile phone network..  ICB-Interactive Collective Blue The interaction structure of the CIMs was also used in ICB (Interactive Collective Blue) to define a series of Democratic Blues.                  ICB/Round 144, 42 x 64 cm, 2006.

 

 TECHNOLOGICAL SUBLIME

"Maurizio Bolognini's work is located in the narrow edge zone that separates the subject’s acceptance of, and surrender to, the preponderance of technology, from the residual determination to strive against it, which remains after all jubilatory human-centric self-illusion has been laid aside [...]. He is in perfect harmony with all our work on the aesthetics of communication and the  technological sublime."   Mario Costa "This limit of consciousness at the edge of the anthropic principle is demonstrated in Maurizio Bolognini’s Sealed Machines (1992). Described as a key development in software art, the work consists of a collection of computers, set to generate images according to Bolognini’s programming, with sealed monitor bus ports. The complete inaccessibility of the vast quantity of visual imagery created by the work references a technological sublimity of the void beneath the digital world........ " Benjamin Garfield

Untitled (Room #11), 2007, incisioni laser su libro (Olanda), cm 28 x 25 x 3 Untitled (Room #11), 2007, incisioni laser su vari oggetti (MAMBO, Bologna, 2022)      Sealed Computers, MLAC, Rome, 2003 Sealed Computers, WAHCenter, New York, 2003     Sealed Computers, MAMBO, Bologna, 2022 Sealed Computers, GAMEC, Bergamo, 2023

 
MUSEOPHAGIA   (1998-99)   

MPT (Museophagia Planet Tour), 1998-99 Galleria Cavellini, Brescia 1998   Sandra Gering Gallery, New York, 1999 Musée Gauguin, Papeete (Tahiti), 1999   About Studio, Bangkok;  Archivio Cavellini, Brescia;  Archivio Gualco, Genova;  CACTicino, Bellinzona;  Galerie Air de Paris, Paris;  Galleria Neon, Bologna;  Galleria Cortese, Milano;  Galleria Leonardi V-idea, Genova;  Galleria Minini, Brescia;  Galleria Persano, Torino;  Gering Gallery, New York;  Gitte Weise Gallery, Sydney;  Jennjoy Gallery, San Francisco;  Musée Gauguin, Papeari, Tahiti;  Museo Bunkier Sztuki, Kracow;  Studio Morra, Napoli;  Telles Fine Arts, Los Angeles

Museophagia Planet Tour was an action which spread from the Cavellini Gallery in Brescia (1998) to art galleries in many other cities, including Paris, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Papeete, Sydney, Bangkok... reached by going on a trip around the world (Museophagia Planet Tour, 1998-99). The artist took pieces of furniture and objects from each of these galleries, putting together a travelling collection which was transported from one gallery to another and from one continent to another........." "Museophagia, the name says it all, means the tendency or habit of eating museums. It is something that the Internet is beginning to do right now, or at least it is taking nibbles. The first evidence of museophagia, in fact a kind of digital bulimia, was the attempt of Bill Gates, through a company called Corbys, to gobble up by fact of digitization and scanning all the contents of museums and galleries that Corbys deemed fit, to regurgitate them on line, at a cost, of course, via proprietary channels.  Museophagia, the website and the subject of this book, is more modest in its intentions than those of Bill Gates, it merely purports to consume via digitization objects (furniture, fixtures etc.) that Maurizio Bolognini took from art galleries of various cities, during a world tour starting from the Cavellini Foundation Gallery. Fair game........"  Derrick de Kerckhove

MAIN WORKS -  Computer sigillati / Sealed Computers (1992-) -  IMachines (IMs) (1988-) -  WMachines (WMs) (1988-) -  Maps / Mappe (1988-) -  Room #11 / Stanza 11 (2007) -  Game Addiction (2017) -  Demoscopic installations / Installazioni demoscopiche (1997-99) -  Altavista (1997)  -  Antipodes (1998) -  Museophagia (1998-99) -  E-gouttoirs (1999-) -  SMSMS (SMS Mediated Sublime) (2000-) -  Machine Art (2006-) -  ICB (Interctive Collective Blue) (2006) -  Extratime / Extratempo (2014) -  Flesh (1989) -  Interferenze (1992-) -  Interactive Ascii Self-Portraits (1995) -  Schermi firmati / Signed Screens (1996) -  NAA (Nikkei Assisted Art) (1997) -  Oltrearte (1997-) -  AIMS (Artificial Intelligence Mediated Sublime (2001) -  thevirtualgallery.org (2003)..... |intro  index|