Rosa Binaria


'Albina Mirella D´Urbano Albina Mirella D´Urbano

This project developed from the idea of processing the interrelationship that exists between an object and its representation. It should move within the mechanisms and processes which stipulate the fact that an object only existing for itself transforms into a phenomenon.

At the moment of perception when a human being makes an object his own, inserting it into his range of knowledge, he is transforming it into a means of communications, into a symbol. At this moment the object becomes a message of itself, it becomes culture, it becomes script.

First of all, man tried to make the world of objects his own by reproducing it two or three dimensionally. With an ever increasing abstraction and iteration of the representation of this object, it was translated into writing. In this process, the object was deprived of its visual gestalt-like characteristics. To be more precise, the object was transformed into a series of signs which characterize it. These signs provide the possibility of representing the whole world of phenomena. Writing and consequently an autonomous world of terms and concepts is brought to life, severed from the world of objects. In our present time, this severance has been greatly intensified, particularly by the introduction of electronic information processing. Information has totally emancipated itself from reality by no longer requiring writing in order to be conveyed: it is pure energy flowing within the lines of the electronic labyrinth or in the waves of the air. There are no longer any qualitative and analogous differences, everything can be reproduced by being translated into yes/no, an existing or an non-existing signal within a binary system. Everything can be simulated, man no longer needs the object and its representation: he creates a new synthetic product for himself. In this way information has become a largely independent, almost autonomous system.

Rosa Binaria moves in a medium of transformations, within the relationship between what is meaningful and its meaning, between object and its representation and right to the simulation, and develops like a spiral-shaped parable. A large part of this video has been realized with the digitalization of existing objects or pictures which were then processed using a 3-D animation program. These objects and their different visual languages were subjected to various transformation processes.

The first pictures of the video are simple shots of the object in its natural surroundings: then the computer animation slowly develops from this.

The first stage of alientation consists of cultivated roses which then change into objects that still have the shape of the object but which consist of other materials (plastic, paper, material, etc.), They transform into photos (direct print by the light of reality), which then become hand-painted pictures. Even the colour fades leaving only lines behind: drawings, symbols which change in shape and become script: the word "rose" in different languages of the world. Only at the end of this process, after the journey in the labyrinths of the media does the simulated rose appear, the rose which only exists in the computer.


Produced at Städelschule, Institut für Neue Medien, Frankfurt am Main