Page:Simonetta Fadda Reality Show.pdf/13

 Wargames (2004) is one of the two video and light box installations, which constitute the exhibition Reality Show (Care of, Milano, 2005). The other one is Stargate (2003). Although the cityscape is always the subject of these “live broadcast” reports (the fire-fighting planes on Savona, in one case; the industrial remains near the shore, in the other), compared to her television reports, these images get a level of abstraction that wasn’t much perceived, before. Near to painting, these images are a beating body of visual and sound incitements, saturated colours, trembling pixels on the screen surface, like it was in Seurat’'s painting, with its vibrating light, as McLuhan reminds as regards the audience perception of the television mosaic. Simonetta Fadda places again her video camera in front to the events with no comment, but the reality acquiring body on the screen is more and more wrong footing and unrecognizable, as if it were given back by a false mirror. To the quick, rapid time of Wargames corresponds the slow time of Stargate. If in the first case there is a live-broadcasted report, subjected to such a medium manipulation to be deceptive (the war that there isn’t), in the second, it is something other what is happening. Stargate is a wharf on the sea, a gate on the nothingness, a sign forbidding the way forward, where there is just the water. The video camera makes only one movement, a zooming, which slowly enlarges our visual field. The final image reveals the remains of an ex industrial building, no more in use, next to the shore. The sea’s dull and monotone'sound sharpens the sense of suspended time. About photography, Walter Benjamin speaks of optical unconscious, of a “nature which speaks to