Alessia sanna
SCREEN CITY
From 18th June to 14th September 2019
The Sorbonne Artgallery welcomes the artist Alessia Sanna, winner of the 2018 AMMA Prize and who expresses through her creations the link between users of networks and intrusive systems. Its Screen City is a volumetric installation consisting of 1140 plaster modules imitating the principle of urban sprawl. Her work deals with the ever more constant digitizationof the world, as the concept of Smart Cities shows.
As part of this exhibition, the artist introduces us to an experiential photographic series resulting from his process based on the emergence of smart cities, the Screen City project transmits a poetic and critical look at what the city of tomorrow will be. While citizens' lives are increasingly geared towards dematerialization, a multitude of sensors record various data streams and their digital context every day. Transport, pollution, trafic jam… The city, its flows and circulations are constantly scanned. Screen city classifies these captures and questions this hypercurrent concept of «smart city» in the form of an open archive.
How do data then bear witness to lifestyles in the city’s ecosystem? What do they tell us about what we have become? In this sense, Screen City is like a sensitive map. This involves hybridizing traditional manufacturing processes such as moulding, video mapping techniques in order to propose an original aesthetic of the city.
The urban landscape is thus redesigned by several thousand modules whose heights correspond to a population density scale varying between 25 and 60,000 inhabitants/km². Plunged into darkness, this video-sculpture is an immersive experience where data interpretation, offers a hypnotic escape. A sensory, visual, intellectual, and imaginary stroll at the heart of metropolitan data. Screen city raises the question of the plastic retransmission of information.
It leads us to reflect on the ways that could make us feel today aesthetically the impact of data?