Page:Simonetta Fadda Reality Show.pdf/5

 first television reports, Genova ora zero (1993) is as misleading as Wargames. It shows a chaotic and confused night, with shots and cries. !t looks like a war, but it isn’t, it is instead a celebration night, it is 1992-93 Sylvester Eve in Genoa. The bombing is fictitious: it is just the celebrative fireworks. The celebrations of the Sylvester Eve are transformed into an hypothetical war, with a clear allusion to the opposite process, triggered by the CNN's reports of the Baghdad's bombing during the First Gulf War, just finished at the time. Frayed and trembling, Fadda’s images are far away from the sharpness of television standards. They are low-resolution images. From 1992 to 2001, the artist shoots on hi8 tape and cuts on VHS tape, working on the videotape by distorting the audio materials and enhancing the fluidity of colours, for finally shooting again the assembled images, by placing her video camera in front of the monitor. So, every copy is made in a handicraft way and is different from the others, depending from the differently inserted audio and video data. By 2001, the artist's use of digital technology doesn’t change her conceptual approach, but it allows her more freedom and fluidity, both in shooting and cutting. Simonetta Fadda works on the “live broadcast” idea, exploiting the video camera ability of capturing the instant as it is. But it is a low-resolution, “live broadcasted” image, it is out-of-focus and dirty. By making use of low resolution’s lack of sharpness and by overtly manipulating the audio and video signals, the artist causes the video language to clearly reveal itself and show how much any reproduction of the real pass necessarily through its filter and, therefore, how specious exactness and