FLATLAND - SILVIO LORUSSO

Digitalisation of an analogue content implies an acquired plasticity, as the « digital nature » allows to reshape the original in many different forms. The content, in fact, becomes data and code, and so it can be reprogrammed at will. With books, in particular, this process can be pushed well beyond the mere faithful representation of the original, using software to effectively reinterpret its content. Silvio Lorusso, artist and passionate researcher about the multiple relationships between print and digital in art, has interpreted contemporary publishing as a gesture that can bridge the traditional artists’ book form with brand new digital perspectives. His Flatland is based on the homonymous famous satirical novel from 1884 written by Edwin A. Abbott’s. Flatland was a story about a bi-dimensional world, crowded by geometric figures, where, for example, women are line-segments and men are polygons. Lorusso skews the digital version of the original book in an isomorphic perspective, with a turning of the pages going on endlessly on a loop. This digital re-embodiment (with a graphically appealing interface) conceptually redefines the original work maintaining its essence, in a way that after 130 years since its first publication it is contemporary again.

Silvio Lorusso is an Italian artist, designer and researcher. Currently he investigates the intersections between publishing and digital technology from the perspective of art and design as PhD candidate in Design Sciences at Iuav University of Venice. He regularly collaborates with the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam. In 2011 he graduated in Visual and Multimedia Communications. Subsequently, he spent a period of study at the Networked Media course of the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. He took part in exhibitions, festival and events such as Transmediale (Berlin), Unlike Us (Amsterdam), Fahrenheit39 (Ravenna). Some of his works are included in the Rhizome ArtBase Selection. He has written for blogs and magazines such as Progetto Grafico and Doppiozero. He recently initiated the Post-Digital Publishing Archive (p-dpa.net).
https://silviolorusso.com/about/