Gustavo Romano

By diverting everyday objects or technological mechanisms from their usual function, Gustavo Romano explores the routine and the role of the subject in a society of control strengthened by the new information technologies.
He is an artist and curator who works in a variety of media including actions, video, installations, net art and new media.

He has participated in numerous international contemporary art events such as the VII Biennial of Havana; the First Singapore Biennale; the II Mercosur Biennial; the First Biennial of the End of the World, Ushuaia; Videonale 11, Bonn; Transmediale 03 Berlin; Ars Electronica 97, Vienna; Madrid Abierto; Transitio MX. He has made individual exhibitions at the MEIAC in Badajoz, Spain, the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, the Ruth Benzacar Gallery, the Recoleta Cultural Center, among others.

In 1995 he founded the Fin del Mundo website, one of the first platforms for the exhibition and diffusion of net art in Latin America.
As curator, he is responsible for the NETescopio project, archive of works of net art and digital art of the MEIAC of Badajoz, Spain.

He has received numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Fundación Telefónica Life Award. Born in Buenos Aires, he lives and works in Madrid.

Website
https://www.gustavoromano.org/

ARTWORKS

Channel 01
Net.Art / A.I.

Channel 01 is an artistic project by Gustavo Romano that presents itself as an automatic audiovisual news channel, based on artificial intelligence algorithms and material from the network itself.

Channel 01 offers a fragmented chronicle of mediatised hyperreality, a fractal story with all its multiple variants, all of them feasible, all of them credible. Channel 01 captures, reorganises and projects a cascade of possible worlds, of alternative, dystopian, dreamlike events, resulting in an uncomfortable portrait, no longer of our reality, but of our fears or desires.

Channel 01 operates with a new kind of automatic “writing”: the machinic narrative of hyperreality.

In the near future, it will be algorithms that communicate the news. Machinic “thinking” does not evaluate the facts; whether they are real or alternative, truth or post-truth. The media will talk, narrate, discourse, without evaluating criteria of veracity but adjusting the level of verisimilitude of the message to shield the fictional pact with the receiver.

The project received the Aid for the modernisation and digital innovation of the visual arts sector from the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Sport in 2020. Channel 01 was selected to participate in the international biennial Bienalsur.

Artwork Link: https://4rt.eu/ch01/

Digital Pioneers
Net.Art / A.I. 

Digital Pioneers is a project derived from Channel 01, produced entirely with different AI tools, in which echoes of Russian cosmism, variantology, futuristic utopias, theosophy or even the theory of “possible worlds”, which were accelerated with the appearance of electricity, resound.

Artwork Link: https://4rt.eu/pioneers/