“The mathematics of intuition, the pattern of clouds, the modularity of apparently anarchic collective movements, the perfection of the random flight of starlings – that’s what I’m looking for, the crossroads between poetry and iron rule.” For the polymorphic artist Alessandro Zannier, known in the music world as Ottodix, the attempt to explain patterns of complexity, repetitive figures on different scales from the microcosm to the macrocosm finds its epiphany in physics, biology and astronomy. This lends an undeniable structure and credibility to otherwise arbitrary and random artistic research.
This vision has a strong dramatic side, Ottodix says, but also a sublime nineteenth-century flavor, as it explains that even our deepest emotions can be encoded by chemistry, mathematics, and electrical impulses that destroy all of our free will ambitions. . It is scary, disturbing, and therefore gives art an emotional function, even if it comes from scientific ideas. Ottodix likes to explore the dynamics of maximal systems to understand how correlations work. That is why he defines himself not as a painter or sculptor, musician or composer, writer or distributor, but rather as a conceptual artist or, if you like, a filmmaker.
MICROCOSM AND MACROCOSM
“Every time you need a really good topic to keep me engaged and not bored for a long time,” says Ottodiks, “because the preparation, implementation and promotion of my projects take at least three years.”
Micromega, for example, is an installation that he presented in 2017 in Berlin, consisting of 117 sound tracks and the same number of illustrations, with scientific content that can be explored in a labyrinth conceived at 9 magnitude levels of cosmic matter, from microparticles to systems universes. . The work looked for correlations between matter and human social and anthropological dynamics, which for Ottodix is the ultimate goal, a useful return of his work to the collective culture.
“Micromega gave life to a series of concerts in which I first inserted narrative elements and an actor’s reading of physics and educational concepts, took them to museums, theaters and universities,” the artist explains, “but even to clubs such as the Anomalie ArtClub in Berlin, excellent techno club where my exhibition and concert for groups and string quartets took place.
“I abandoned visual art as an end in itself and the self-referential schemes of contemporary art galleries. I wanted to have more contact with the audience, and I turned my research into song and electronic music.” But his training as a visual artist has led him to rediscover the joy of “creating for both eyes and ears” through artwork and shows. The next step was the creation of multi-dimensional works, in which there is sound, and narration, and fine art, and even entertainment. He found the right balance years later, now that he brought fine art closer to science, but more generally to disclosure.
“The right balance,” explains Ottodix, “is to invent new containers for ideas, macrocosms for storytelling, concepts that can be abandoned in visual art, songs, music and information shows that can include the audience and make them think. , using apparently distant tools and disciplines and integrating them into a broader and stronger artistic message that is above all modern and relevant.”
SCIENTIFIC INSPIRATION OTTODIX
The latest series of works and songs Entanglement is inspired by the exciting phenomenon of quantum physics to rethink human phenomena. History of migration, colonization, global economy, web, air and sea routes: global connections presented as a single giant brain, a colony of individuals, becoming one, subject to immediate cause and effect throughout the system, from Italy to New Zealand. .
Entanglement is a great journey to discover the connections between human colonies and swarms. Using a scientific metaphor, Ottodix explains that thinking about ourselves as a single holographic bank, a single organism, gives us a truer and more strategic vision of reality, as opposed to thinking about old cultural or geopolitical differences.
The ENT 6 Continents project is inspired by models for the fair distribution of resources in the natural world. It consists of two pairs of light installations in different locations; the installations show cross-sectional data on human infection in different places on the planet with 3D animation that shows the appearance of a human colony on a large spatio-temporal scale.
Opened in the Italian pavilion of the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale with Oceania (in collaboration with the University of Auckland), this project encourages Zannier to create twinning links with all continents. So far, he has created double installations with Africa (at the Venice Biennale, Cameroon Pavilion), South America (Florianopolis-Brazil) and Asia (Beijing), which were opened in a solo exhibition at the Galata Museum del Mare in Genoa. “North America and Europe are missing, which I hope to do in 2023 when these obfuscation operations are completed,” explains Zannier.
