Tails addresses the issue of network infrastructure and its environmental impact. Acronym for The Amnesic Incognito
Live System the exhibition takes its name from the software Tails, that erases any trace of the use we make of our computers.
The title suggests “an exploration of the dark matter of the immaterial”.
A sculpture generated from an image produced by an artificial intelligence system, create in Spazio Murat a performative rhizomatic landscape that feeds on the traces that we leave in our daily interactions and invites people to stop and listen to the sounds inside. A tangle of tubes reconstructs on a scale of 1:2000 the cables that cross the seas of the planet. At the beginning of 2023 the estimate of submarine cables using fiber optic technology in order to power the system of virtual connections was about 552 for a total length of 1.4 million kilometers. Often perceived as an invisible and immaterial system, cables resurface in the exhibition space to remind us of the material and immaterial pollution of global communication networks.
The theme of digital memories and the digitalisation of our lives that Vetturi has been exploring since 2015 emerges here through the use of papier-mâché, a material that is the protagonist of the local tradition. Papier-mâché is in fact endowed with the particular quality of taking a shape whose memory disappears once immersed in water.
Tails, as Vetturi writes, “feeds on opposing movements of thought: the infrastructure that allows the creation of permanent numerical memories dialogues with the fragile temporariness of the memory of papier-mâché. At the same time, the immateriality of digital experiences is translated into a material experience, which reveals a large hidden architecture. And so, the connections that daily sculpt our lives are translated into a sensory landscape in which papier-mâché dialogues with sound, the exhibition space and the people who pass through it. Tails evokes the sea as the connector of our digitalised lives, an ecosystem permeated (saturated) by telecommunications networks”.
