A FAILED ENTERTAINMENT
Inspired by the dystopic novel Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace, of which A Failed Entertainment was the working title in the first draft, this project links the traditional concept of authorship in the production of photographs and its counterpart: the proliferation of large-scale visual materials available on the internet.
The pieces are presented as a direct result using Google images as a reverse search tool: its algorithm identifies web images visually similar to a starting example. In this case, photographs taken on film between 2012 and 2015 in the city of Milan were uploaded and thus sacrificed, literally swallowed into the overlapping of what the original photographs themselves produced, assuming new shape, consisting of a random number of anonymous photographs. Initially recognizable, the content of the frame is lost in its increasing, potentially infinite mathematical reproduction.
Alessandro Calabrese’s project is part of the group exhibition Archivi del futuro, curated by Diane Dufour, Elio Grazioli and Walter Guadagnini.
