Carola Bonfili
The Flute-Singing
2021, 6min 25
Since her early research, Carola Bonfili has always shown an interest in the construction of symbolic landscapes and emotional spaces that interrupt the flow of thought in an absent temporal substratum.
With The Flute-Singing, Carola Bonfili leads us into the universe of a videogame intended as a spinoff of the story of one of the mythological creatures present in a larger video game project called: SecondOrder Reality, which is currently in production.
The Flute-Singing is a video modelled in CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery) which, through the reinterpretation of landscapes and symbols, takes the narrative construction of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and has it disassembled by an Artificial Intelligence designed for role-playing games. The different stories—as well as different inputs inserted as an impromptu response to the program’s reaction—are used to influence the software, which in turn constructs others, based on pre-established algorithms that aim to build plausible narratives. A contrast emerges between a classical, epic narrative, structured to transcend, the result of a highly advanced cognitive, experimental and spiritual background, and the re-elaboration of the data by a new order of reading. This material outlines the psychological profile of a being who feels nostalgia, but does not know what for. The artist’s intention is to use humans as a universal repertoire of behavior, and to apply it, boned and deconstructed, to a creature that questions its being in the world.
Carola Bonfili (b. 1981) lives and works between Brescia and Rome. Her work was presented in various institutions both in Italy and abroad, including: MAXXI, Rome; La Triennale di Milano; Milan, Italian Institute of Culture, Los Angeles, Ludwig Museum, Budapest, GNAM, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, MACRO, Rome, American Academy in Rome.
She has won several awards and acknowledgments: Rome Prize, American Academy, 2008-2009; Premio LUM, 2011 (finalist); Premio Strozzina, Florence, 2009 (finalist); Re-Humanism, Rome, 2021 (finalist). She participated in a residency with the American Academy in Rome in 2007 and MACRO in 2012. She has collaborated with the journal NERO since 2004 and in 2011 began her publication Names of Numbers; a series of monographic books about drawing.