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Giuliano Obici
Screen Utopia Audiovisual installation with screen wall, subwoofer (2020)  

Screen Utopia is an installation for multiple screens stacked-up to form a colored luminous wall. It explores the color light flow emitted by the screens as raw material to produce sound. 
Inspired by the festival name, the installation articulates two levels of dystopia. First, as a claustrophobic spatial experience. Second, as a catalyst for paradoxical sensorial experience: »see with ears« and »hear with eyes«. The dystopian spatial experience stands in contrast to the inaccessible utopian place. Utopia is there, in the future, 
out of sight, beyond the line of the horizon, where sunlight comes from. Dystopia is here, in the present, right in front of your eyes, where the screens form a vertical, dazzling wall, that feigns to lift the darkness.
The reversal of sensorial experience is generated by two processes. On one side, the sound waves operate the color features on the screens; on the other side, the color signal is converted back to low frequencies. The monochromatic signal on all the screens is identical, but the slow color flow and the material differences between the monitors produce subtle color variations. The light that fills the room is transformed into body frequencies.
Perhaps it is our archaic fascination for light that has lead us to the era of Screen Utopia, heralding a flatter, listless, and dystopian world.

Giuliano Obici (BRA/ITA)
(*1977 in Maringá) is a sound artist and researcher with an academic back- ground in arts, communication, and psychology. He won the Giga-Hertz-Preis (ZKM, Karlsruhe and SWR Experimentalstudio, Freiburg), the Red Bull Station artistic award (São Paulo) and research grants from DAAD, FAPESP, and CAPES. Since 2015, he is an adjunct professor at the Art Department of the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro where he organized SOMA RUMOR: Encontro Latino- americano de Arte Sonora in 2019.
www.giulianobici.com

Giuliano Obici