Italy

Fabio Lattanzi Antinori born in Rome, lives and works in London and studied under Marina Abramovic at the PS1 in New York in 2012, graduated from Goldsmiths (2013) with a Master in Fine Art and Computational Technologies, and has exhibited at prestigious art institutions. Selected exhibitions comprehend the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Vienna, Victoria and Albert in London, Kaunas Biennale, New York University, Guest Projects, Open Data Institute, PiArtworks Gallery, Watermans Arts Centre, Beers Contemporary and Shenzhen Contemporary Art Terminal. Public collections include the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Open Data Institute. He has been in residence at SPACE, the Guest Projects and the Florence Trust. Fabio was awarded the A-N Bursary for Exceptional and Inspirational Research in 2016 and the Artist International Development Fund from the Arts Council and the British Council. He is preparing a solo show at the MoCA Shanghai Pavilion and a duo show at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery in London with artist Jeremy for September 2016.

Lattanzi Antinori’s work therefore often starts with the manipulation of raw financial or commercial data — the share price of banks or the descriptions of goods on eBay and develops questioning the common ground of faith and trust in data, testifying his interest on the strong connections between the world of Financial Systems and that of Global Branding, and his fascination with the way language can be commodified, and put to use in the context of the market. His works become an invitation to glimpse behind the system, to meditate and make space for a critique with regards to the way data, products and brands are becoming increasingly important for our society.

Dataflags deals with the notion of failure and bankruptcy in the corporate world and it focuses in particular on the raise and fall of Lehmann Brothers, the financial institution that was thought to be too big to fail and which instead filed for bankruptcy on the 15th of September 2008. Much inspired by corporate flags, which serve the purpose of glorifying the identity of companies worldwide, Dataflags is a screenprinted large sheet of paper, printed black on the front and gold on the back, to allude to the old standards (gold and oil), which served as reference to the financial market, up until the Bretton Woods system was abolished. It is a flag, but one of failure and bankruptcy.

The artwork depicts a different insignia, one that might reveal the innate fragility of trust in a system that is entirely based on faith and common agreement, as after all the whole idea of money and credit, like novelist John Lanchester described it, is “a collective act of the imagination”.

Dataflags uses a database of the historical share price data from Lehmann Brothers, in order to narrate, through the voice of a soprano singer, the ups and downs of the company; in so doing, Dataflags questions the authority played by data in decision making scenarios, with a particular relation to the unpredictable financial system, by highlighting the risk of seeing data as the oracle of absolute truth and data analysts as the new prophets.

The paper, which was screenprinted by hand by carefully layering Bare Conductive Electric Paint and non conductive ink on a sheet of Somerset paper, contains conductive areas, which act as sensors and actuate the interaction; when the audience touches the surface of the flag along any of the large sensors and on any of the two sides (front or back), this in return tells the story of Lehman Brothers, by singing the share price of the company at a specific moment in time, starting from 15th of September 1998.

Every time it is touched one set of data is sung, every five times it is touched, a day of trade is being narrated. The archive of data created for the artwork allows for it to sing until 15th September 2008; the pre-recorded voice of the singer is being assembled in real-time, through a custom code written in MaxMSP, which gives the impression that a singer is singing each one of the thousand data entries, each time the surface of the work is touched.

Dataflags, by using a language that is known only to a few experts in the field of finance, but which strongly influences and shapes our everyday life; the presence of a soprano voice transforms this story into a contemporary take on a tragedy of our times.