Argo, 2024
curated and with a text by Sineglossa

The project has been realized thanks to the support of:
SIAE
Ministero della Cultura


and in collaboration with:
Palazzo Ducale, Genoa
Chemistry Department of the University of Turin (Dr. Andrea Jouve)


Exhibiton venues:
Fondazione Home Movies (Sala Refettorio ex Chiesa di San Mattia), Bologna, 2024;
Fondazione di Palazzo Ducale, Genoa, 2024.


Graphic design:
Eleonora Rossi

Press:
Juliet
ATP Diary
Mangrovia [ITA] [ENG]
Exibart

Photo&videos:
Manuel Montesano
“With Argo, Paolo Bufalini continues his investigation into the remediation of biographical materials through technological devices, which began with the projects Land of Nod (2023) and beloved (2023). The project applies generative artificial intelligence tools to a series of datasets made up of the digitalisation of the artist's family albums. Once the datasets were created, the artist used them to train text-to-image generative models capable of reproducing the likenesses of the subjects represented in the albums. The result is the generation of an augmented past, a photographically credible representation of something that has not been, but might have been, in an ambiguous overlap between what's factual and what's imagined.

The family albums provide an opportunity for a more general reflection on archives and their power to open windows onto parallel worlds through a dizzying knowledge that redefines the linearity of time. The result is a series of syntographies in which the artist's family members are depicted, at different ages of their lives, in the pose of sleepers. The ambiguity of sleep, where the subject is both absent and present, reflects the more general uncertainty of the image and recalls the dreamlike dimension underlying the entire project.

Argo, from the very title, is intended as a journey - a journey through time and through the artist's personal history, but also a journey into the technological unconscious, that space containing data that cannot be directly interpreted (in computer science latent space) on which generative models process images through associations precluded to humans. By customizing generative models with biographical and emotionally invested materials, Bufalini operates a poetic re-appropriation of the technological device, subjecting those same materials to the unpredictability of statistical correlations.

The sculptural work that completes the project declines a similar idea of latency on a more processual level, presenting flasks containing a stirring acid solution in which second-hand gold jewellery is dissolved. The chemical process places gold in a condition of ambiguous presence - it is physically present but invisible and reversible in its original state -, opening up a hypothetical dimension of new generative possibilities.”
Sineglossa

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