ALESSANDRO SCALI
BEYOND THE PILLARS OF HERCULES: NANOTECHNOLOGY AND ART
Abstract
The Pillars of Hercules represent a journey to a far-away universe, going beyond the limits of our world, where everything is already known, classified and photographed. It is the desire to discover a new element of sublime surprise: a journey Beyond the Pillars of Hercules of our reality. Even though it is invisible to the human eye, we will discover a universe regulated by completely different laws. The artwork, the first one created by Alessandro Scali & Robin Goode, contains different reading layers and it is representative both of Nanoart possibilities and aims.
The first layer is composed by amazement and astonishment; How It has been possible to create such a small artwork? This is the spontaneous question that any observer do when for the first time see the artwork. We have already answer to this question showing the creation process.
At the first layer we include also what we can seen at a first glance: foot-marks in a black surrounded environments.
In a second level the artwork question on Nanoart itself: what is Nanoart? Where is it? Which are its boundaries? Looking deeper at the foot-marks we see that there is something of mysterious and uncertain: we don’t know where they begin and where they finished, who makes it and when and why some foot-marks are smaller than others. In the end we also don’t know why the foot-marks not draw a linear walking but are so confused. In the third level we try to anchor the artwork to the art history, trying to discover connections, similarities, contaminations that can help us to explain the power of this artwork.
Speaker's Bio
Alessandro Scali, from Turin, Italy, 35 years old, and Robin Trevor Goode, from Cape town, South Africa, 29 years old, begin their artistic collaboration in 2003. Two different cultural backgrounds, two different ways of expression merge together: from one side, the humanistic, litereary, philosophycal approach of Scali; from the other, the visual, graphic and iconographic approach of Goode.
The interest for the merging of those two alternative but complementary visions is the main reason of their union. Scali and Goode shows their first artwork in 2004, in Madrid, at Conde Duque, under the name of Paperkut; in the same year, they begin the experimentation of Nanoart with the collaboration of Politechnic of Turin.
In 2006, the first micrometric artwork – Beyond the pillar of Hercules – is presented at San Fedele Award, in Milan. In 2007, the exibition at Bergamo Science, the publication of the related Skira catalogue and the article published on Nature ratify the official entry of Nanoart, and of Scali and Goode, in the world of contemporary art.