SKINNED

written, directed and animated by Francesca Fini
music by Pandacetamol (freemusicarchive.com)

Most digital images courtesy of
Rijksstudio - Rijks Museum public domain collection

A Dadaist collage that plays on the concept of identity, elaborated through impossible selfies taken by the protagonists of famous masterpieces in the history of portraiture and self-portrait. What do you hide under your skin, flayed by the toxic radiation of mobile phones? What would Leonardo da Vinci or Andy Warhol have done with this evil device?

SKINNED

/S)CONFINAMENTO
Networked digital performance for live webcam & synth // 2020
Francesca Fini
 
The Italian squares are now silent and deserted, while life in quarantine is hidden invisibly inside the houses, inside the silent buildings that harmoniously surround them. And so the loners adventuring in the confined city are narrative elements of a dystopian and cinematic story, which the artist spies and pursues avidly, through motion tracking technology, transforming each movement into generative visual and sound in real-time.

The Italian *piazzas* are framed by a webcam system that broadcasts online the flow of their chaotic daily life. A cold, indifferent look, in the sun or in the rain, which does not change in the midst of changes. Those squares are now deserted, while life in quarantine is hidden invisibly inside the houses, inside the silent buildings that harmoniously surround them. The webcams today collect the testimony of a surreal event. Daily life, once feverish, has become a fleeting and ephemeral circumstance: the squares are manned by police vans, enlivened by the flight of a seagull, by a flag in the wind, by a runner's bicycle, by a couple wearing masks while walking the dog. In the silent void, these short passing lives, these solitary adventures of the confined city, are narrative elements of a dystopian and cinematic story, which the artist spies and pursues avidly, as if she was at the window of one of those buildings. Through motion tracking technology, Francesca Fini steals the webcam feed and transmits it to a software, specially compiled for this project, which records and visually tracks the movement of people, vehicles, and animals, turning the data flow into a concert for synthesizer: movements generate sounds, modulations, graphic visualizations, digital effects. Finally, the artist returns everything to the network, through live streaming on Facebook, in a creative ring of real-time manipulations and interpretations.

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Francesca Fini