METROPOLIS:
Part I-III
CATTIVA LUCE (BAD LIGHT), Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi, Vencie, Italy
The Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi hosts an evening of screenings organized by TBD Ultramagazine, with a selection of short and medium-length films exploring, through the moving image, the productive, political, and narrative dimension of natural and artificial light, its uses, and how it is exploited by contemporary technology. The selection is introduced by the editorial staff of TBD Ultramagazine. TBD, which stands for “To Be Defined”, is a publishing project that since 2019 publishes thematic books and organizes cultural events on topical issues.
Programme of the screenings:
Chris Howlett, Metropolis part I-III, 24’20 / Haig Aivazian, All of the Stars are but Dust Under my Shoes, 17’33 / P Staff, On Venus, 13′ / Valentina Furian, Centauro, 4’37 / Diego Marcon, Monelle, 16’02 / Clement Cogitore, Morgestraich, 4’10 / Samson Young, Sonata for Smoke, 15’49 / Grazia Toderi, Orbite Rosse, 10′ / Agnieszka Polska, The New Sun, 13’45 / Giulio Scalisi, A House for a Gentleman, 17′ / Pedro Torres, Distant Light, 11′ / Natalia Trejvalová, Isle of the Altered Sun, 19’30.
CHRIS HOWLETT, Metropolis: Part I-III 2009, 1-channel, High Definition Video, PAL, Surround Sound. Ed of 5 +2 AP, 24:20 mins.
TBD Issue Information – Trilogy: DARK, SHADOW, ECLIPSE
On November 9, 1965, the Niagara Falls Power Plant went haywire for reasons still unknown today. In a few minutes, around 5:30 pm, New York state and the Manhattan peninsula were engulfed in complete darkness; it is the first blackout recorded in history. Unlike what one might imagine, the dark streets of the Big Apple remained calm: it is said that crime decreased and, curiously, that the birth rate, nine months after the accident, recorded an increase. During “the most beautiful night in the city” – as the then mayor of New York Robert Wagner defined it – the darkness seems to have paused the rhythms of the place which, par excellence, never sleeps, forcing its inhabitants to stop and making themselves unproductive and freeing them from the obsessive rhythms of that urban grid which, for the sake of light, has given up the stars.
BAD LIGHT, fourth issue of TBD Ultramagazine, investigates the productive, political and narrative dimension of light, both natural and artificial. Consisting of three volumes, BAD LIGHT is a trilogy that focuses on the ways in which light is used, contained and exploited by technologies in the present and on how its use is imagined for the society of the future.
DARK!, the first volume of the trilogy, reflects on the social control exercised through light, on the capitalization of sleep and rest. The night, a moment of suspension from everyday life, a blind spot that escapes the demands of control and the production needs imposed by work, has been canceled by the modulation of artificial lighting in inhabited spaces, by the constant use of apps that operate a collection of data biometrics and the use of infrared thermal cameras, in favor of a constant visibility regime and the order of the day. Light, which has always regulated the biological and social rhythms of human beings and other animal species, becomes matter with changing meaning when technology allows its reproduction on a large scale. In the history of lighting devices, for example in urban environments, it has frequently been suggested that an illuminated place is a safe place. Above all, it is a place suitable for socializing and consumption practices, well beyond the limits imposed by sunlight. In the contemporary world, light is literally used across a broad spectrum, from visible to the naked eye to infrared, inaugurating an era in which it becomes increasingly complex to avoid both symbolic and concrete lighting.
DARK! wants to investigate the processes of exploitation of light, the critical positionings proposed and traversed by the artistic practices that employ its functions, emphasizing the way in which art and technologies have reasoned on the ability of light to shape places and political bodies.
On July 18, 1689, lightning struck the bell tower of the Church of the Holy Savior in the French village of Lagny-sur-Marne. The strong light passes through the vaulted ceiling of the church and falls directly on the missal, at that moment open on the altar to the pages dedicated to the rite of the Eucharist. After the accident, whoever arrives to remove what remains of the book comes across a strange spectacle: in striking him, the lightning imprinted some of the letters on the cloth covering the altar. The words of the Consecration are clearly legible on the white fabric. However, there is a gap where the central message of the Last Supper ritual is written: hoc est corpus meum (“this is my body”). The lightning “spared” the words of transubstantiation. What was in fact one of the first photographs is then inevitably interpreted as a miracle.
The writing of light has continued to undergo changes and evolutions over time, to the point of inhabiting the contemporary world with ghostly, hologrammatic and algorithmic entities. The history of photography and early cinema is closely linked to that of mediumistic sessions and paranormal experiences in nineteenth-century living rooms, as well as to that of spiritual illusions (from the magic lantern to the various forms of phantasmagoria). It is no coincidence that today there are new and varied phenomena of digital religiosity and techno-animism, as well as a general tendency to consider even the functioning of commonly used devices as opaque and magical.
Shadow, the second volume of the BAD LIGHT trilogy, investigates the privileged relationship that has always linked technology and the supernatural: on the other hand, there is nothing more technical and traditional than magic, a passionate faith in the exact effectiveness of knowledge practical, made possible by precise instructions and refined recipes. The medium is at the same time a technological means of communication between humans and the person who lends his body to the spirits, to allow them access to the world of life. In most cases the medium is more precisely the medium: with the excuse of giving voice to ectoplasms, women have found a safe and literally fantastic method to express their demands for freedom, even violence. Perhaps for this reason, experts in the art of reading destiny and predicting the future, they were among the first to oppose the spread of cameras and video cameras, managing ahead of time to clearly glimpse that their mechanical and threatening eyes would soon replace them, stealing their work.
Given the progressive spread of the image in all areas of everyday life, our intimate relationship with the afterlife has consolidated. A photograph is always the image of a dead person, which at the same time crystallizes and kills what is living (immortalizes it) and therefore puts us in contact with what is no longer there. The contemporary is the result of the stratification of a great variety of memory traces, we live immersed in more past than present: a portrait of me fixes in time what I no longer am and the same goes for all forms of recording, texts and vocal messages, pret-a-porter oracles from the recent past.
Contemporary homes are homes inhabited by techno-ghosts and the metallic voices of the voice assistants we rely on for the most basic tasks. The devices that we carry in our hands or that we keep on our backs, backlit, noisy, vibrating, seem to be ready for total communication with their owners, they appear in simple to interpret interfaces that facilitate action, images that are easy to read. On the other hand, while it shows the screen it hides, it guarantees the machine a gray area and generates a membrane that excludes and protects its user. The most intimate and profound mechanisms that determine its functioning are opaque to most people. This opacity corresponds to an aura of mystery which, given that we carry out most of our activities digitally, in fact rests on almost every commonly used object.
The shadow is suspended between deep darkness and the full light of the sun. The shadow is a compromise, the middle ground. It is the medium par excellence, which opens up to the Other, to the unknown, to the alien. Like the fairy tale, the shadow is false and true at the same time. It’s scary, it can cheat, but it’s also the perfect context to take time, shady, but pregnant, where life is teeming, an undergrowth.
In particular, Ombra focuses on the magical and mysterious dimension that characterizes the production tools of the contemporary image, since their birth. The volume is composed of seven theoretical essays, two contributions of a visual nature, an unpublished translation – extract of a performative script – a critical text that accompanies the cover artist and a special collaboration, born from the meeting between TBD and the Casa Mollino Museum.
A total solar eclipse occurred on April 8, 2024, visible from North and Central America, lasting four minutes and twenty-eight seconds at its peak. The astronomical phenomenon has mobilized hundreds of thousands of people interested in witnessing it, and has provided the opportunity for countless conspiracy theories. Conspiracy narratives have gone from the story of Masonic rituals to plots to avoid Trump’s re-election, up to hypotheses linked to the ignition of the new Large Handron Collider at CERN in Geneva and the launch of three new NASA satellites which took place on the same day as the eclipse.
In a sort of obsessive eternal return of the same imaginative mythologies, humanity – even that which lives in the age of hyper-connectivity and hyper-information – cannot help but turn to paranoid hypotheses as an explanation for such spectacular natural phenomena , a corollary that is sometimes preferred even to the sciences that do their utmost to study them. Indeed, in the contemporary myth, which by definition attempts to give an account of what is not known, can quickly transform into a conspiracy as it crosses the space of social and new media with the speed and violence of an arrow.
On the occasion of the publication of Eclissi, the third and final volume of the BAD LIGHT trilogy, TBD compares mythologies, theories and superstitions that gravitate around the Sun, proposing both texts and visual operations that seek a meeting point between narrative and scientific research.
On the other hand, narrative and science have long been mixed within complex solar theories, which attempt to adapt to a majestic and elusive protagonist, necessary and fearsome, according to some even divine, like our Star. Below we propose our translation of a short passage from the collection of lectures Through Magic Glasses and Other Lectures: A Sequel to the Fairytale of Science, written by Arabella Burton Buckley in 1890, and in particular from the sixth chapter entitled “An Hour with the Sun”. The text, intended for a young audience, combines a playful and imaginative style with the most accredited scientific theories of the time, generating a peculiar informative product, in which utopia and precise physical descriptions are expertly mixed. Since it perfectly recounts the Sun’s insistence on the limes between science and mysticism, we propose here the reference to the work of Burton Buckley as a prelude to the texts of Eclipse:
“Before introducing the topic of today’s lesson I would like to tell you about a big puzzle that occurred to me when I was a child. I had come across a little book – I remember it as if it were yesterday – a small square green book called World Without End, with on the cover a picture of a golden fence, bordered by trees. That’s it. I don’t know what the book was about, in fact I’m pretty sure I never opened it or looked at it again, but both the style and the title World Without End left me very perplexed. What was beyond the fence? If I could have climbed over it, I would have found myself in a world without end, what would there have been on the other side?
But precisely because it was an endless world, how could there be another part? You must remember that I was very young and felt confused and bewildered as I imagined going over that fence again and again and never, ever resting. I finally decided to ask my best friend, an elderly man who tended my father’s garden and whom I considered very wise. At first he seemed almost as disconcerted as I was, but then he brightened up. ‘I tell you what, Master Arthur,’ he said, ‘I don’t know quite what happens when there is no end, but I know that there is much to discover in this world and I think it is best to learn everything about it first, and maybe some of these discoveries will help us understand the other too’. You will wonder what this anecdote has to do with the Sun – I will tell you.
Last night I was on the balcony and looked at the stellar depths of the midnight sky, marveling at the infinite stories of the countless suns that we discover by increasing the power of our telescopes or whose faint rays we capture when we cannot see them, causing them to print their image on photographic plates. And, while I felt oppressed by the thought of this infinite expanse of suns and of my smallness, I suddenly remembered the little square book from when I was a child, its golden finishes and my elderly friend’s advice to learn first of all what we know. it’s closer. So today, before traveling to the stars, it is best that we inform ourselves about what is known about the star relatively close to us, our glorious Sun, which transmits light and heat to us, which causes all the variations in our atmosphere, which extracts moisture from the soil and returns it in the form of refreshing rain, which makes our crops ripen, which makes vigorously sprout seeds and dormant plants and which, in a word, brings energy and life to our Earth.
Yet even this star, more than a million times larger than Earth, and so linked to us that a single convulsion on its surface causes a shiver in our atmosphere, is still so far away that we can only get to know it better by examining the solar rays it sends towards us. of us. […] Let’s see how photography can help us learn more about the Sun. This diagram (Fig. 46) shows a photograph of the Sun taken by Selwyn in October 1860. […] In it we can observe at least two things not visible in the drawings. The spots, although in a different position from the one in which we see them today, have the same appearance, but around them we can also see some bright streaks called faculae, or torches, which often appear in solar regions where spots are forming, while the entire face of the Sun appears speckled with more or less luminous spaces. If you look at the Sun with a telescope the mottling appears sees even more clearly. The lighter spots have been called many things, but are generally known as ‘grains of light’, one name is as good as another.
This is what photography can tell us, but the disk, called the photosphere or luminous sphere, is by no means the entirety of the Sun, even if it is the only part of it visible to the naked eye on a daily basis. Whenever a total eclipse occurs and the dark body of the Moon comes between us and the Sun, covering its disk, a bright white halo, called a corona, can be seen extending thousands of kilometers around the darkened globe. The shape of the halo varies greatly, sometimes forming an irregular square, sometimes a circle with offshoots – as in Fig. 47, which shows what Major Tennant saw in India during the total eclipse of 8 August 1868 – and other times long jets of pearly white light alternating with darker parts. The shapes of these granules vary periodically. When sunspots are few, their extensions are equatorial; but when the face of the Sun is covered with many spots, the latter become diagonal and move slightly away from the equatorial areas. In addition to the corona, the edge of the Sun is surrounded by curious fiery projections that appear as soon as the Moon overlaps the luminous disk. In the diagram (Fig. 47) the spots are on the left side at the moment in which the Moon is exceeding the limits of the photosphere and is extinguishing the strong light of the Sun, causing a total eclipse.
They can then be seen better from the other side, before the Sun is discovered while the Moon continues its journey. The spots are bright red and take on all sorts of strange shapes: sometimes they look like fiery hills, sometimes they look like giant spikes and scimitars, sometimes they look like fiery trees. Before their nature was fully understood they were called prominences and this will probably remain their name. However, it would be better to use another term such as ‘glowing clouds’ or ‘red jets’ since it is now clear that these are jets of gas, especially hydrogen, which constantly gush onto the face of the Sun, even if they are only visible when the main light source is covered. […] This description helps us complete the image of the Sun or at least what we know about it. There is indeed a strange and faint zodiacal light, a pearly glow visible only after sunset or before sunrise that extends far beyond the region of the corona, but we know so little about it that we cannot be certain that it belongs to the Sun itself.”
