Publishes,
Deep Time Receiver, Vittoria Di Stefano
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Proposed was a model for maps in real- time and real-space: non-stop geographies. Growth machines, electric fields. Machine visions underpinning fenestration patterns. An architecture of maps. It never had legs.
Maps that monitor, that manifest growth and decay. Growth as decay. Those few cities left could seem like derelict circuit boards, pulled from machines, ejected during some event or another, with their host discarded and these few components and connections then left to live on in new and unintended circumstances. Future upgrades functioned better as future ruins. And with all power shut down, no incidental heat resulted to drive away moisture. Disassembled, deconstructed circuitry and crystal defects. Where there was moisture and voltage around, inevitable contaminants conjured a battery. Dissimilar metals in the company of electrolytes formed them. Currents leaked causing corrosion and failure. Inductive noise coupling was never far behind.
We were wrong however to think things had stopped. We simply stopped seeing it. Components still insulated, propagated, replicated; substrates as semiconductors or insulators. Dendrites meant corrosion. Dust, rust, fog, flood. The airflow soon clogged and the machine overheated at power-up.
The voltage buckles and hisses after the event has long gone, committed to re- connecting components, desperate to make a whole again. The imperative is always
to remake the machine or make a new machine. We stop and there is no panic. And then we look again with the thing as it unfolds in the circumstances of the world, no longer looking behind it for originating intentions. Haunted circuits, accidental batteries, dislocated like ruins or robot body parts: resistors, transmitters, potentiometers, inductors, oscillators. Febrile with fevered electricity. Ghosts of things and the persistence of ideas. Entropic not stopped.
Dr Julian Harris
Vittoria Di Stefano
“Deep Time Receiver”
09.05.18-02.06.18
Vittoria Di Stefano’s research centres on material investigation as a method for examining notions of liminality - or transformative in-betweenness - in sculptural practice. She employs temporal, marginal and contingent processes to investigate a range of materials as a means to explore the alchemical and transformational properties of the sculptural object.
As well as traditional sculptural materials she employs gendered substances associated with the transformation of the body such as salon waxes, soap and lipstick, transgressing their use value to disrupt approaches to making and viewing. She considers the forces of attraction and repulsion through the inclusion of magnets in her work, and investigates the possibilities of growth and decay through the use of crystals and industrial waste. This choice of materials reflects an interest in the collapsing of binary considerations and a desire to explore the relationship between form and formlessness.
Di Stefano has taken part in solo and group exhibitions nationally and is currently undertaking a PhD at RMIT University, where she also lectures in Art History and Spatial Practice. The artist would like to thank Julian Harris and Richard Walsh for their generous contributions to this project.