Animal, a video by artist Riccardo Giacconi
OPENING in the presence of the artist: Thursday, January 12, 6pm
EXHIBITION: January 13 to 29, Tuesday to Sunday, 11am to 6pm
The inaugural work of the EPFL-CDH AiR Program Enter the Hyper-Scientific, Riccardo Giacconi’s Animal, is the result of intensive research around artistic and scientific questions at the boundary between human and machine, carried out in EPFL’s robotics laboratories.
Part of Giacconi’s project Rational and Irrational Numbers, the video explores the concept of animation. Creating a parallel between the “uncanny valley” (Masahiro Mori, 1970) of the ancient tradition of puppetry and recent technological developments in robotics and artificial intelligence, Animal is inspired by a series of conversations with scientists and researchers. Footage from the EPFL alternates with images from the Carlo Colla & Figli Marionette Company in Milan and other sources from the artist’s archive. The work enables a leap of faith, a suspension of disbelief, as it reconciles the hyper-contemporary and the ancient in an enigmatic sequence, generating in the resonance and the distance between the two worlds a broader reflection on technology and its scientific and philosophical implications.
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Free access