ARCA_DNA

Alessandro Zannier ARCA_DNA The artist presents a preview for CIFRA.com of 4 works from the new series of audio/video installations and canvases entitled "ARK-DNA," which reasons about the concept of Habitat - Backup - Extinction. The concept of Backup is the consequential step to that of "Habitat" and is the most closely related to the concept album "Ark" released by the artist in April 2023 and which inspired the title of his interdisciplinary 2023 DVRI artist residency, spread over various locations in Venice. In the album, signed under the musical pseudonym of "Ottodix," the artist stages, designs, and describes with songs and ambient tracks a gigantic imaginary space ark where mankind can escape, aboard a structure inspired by the shape of the turtle Chelonia mydas, also inspired by the first backup of life hypothesized in history; that of Noah and his Ark. The works ascribable to this sphere describe an urgent need for cataloging, digitizing and archiving as much of an environment's data as possible, with a maternal impulse of protection, care and preservation, seeking to ideally bundle entire topographies and mappings, to create symbolic seeds containing within them all the dense webs of human and environmental relationships of habitats. Backup of habitat to be stored in case of catastrophe, seed-capsules designed so that they can one day be sown elsewhere and to re-access as much as possible the deep essence of the lost place, through its maps, its history, its works, its environmental data, its living species and the archives of its individual departments. A black box containing the DNA of a place. Extinction. "According to some estimates, a typical species becomes extinct 10 million years after its first appearance. Extinction, however, is usually a natural phenomenon; it is estimated that 99.9 percent of all species that have ever existed are now extinct." So goes a Wikipedia definition, referring, however, to individual species. Habitat degradation, low genetic variation and declining fertility would be preparing Homo sapiens for population collapse and extinction, according to many researchers. When viewed on a large scale, the habitats of individual places, formed and nurtured within them by a dense system of biological, environmental, cultural and social relationships, have the metaphorical appearance of giant organisms in turn with peculiar characteristics that distinguish them from one another. The artist, in the "Seeds" works, gives them the symbolic form of seeds and thus embryos, placing them in turn in the category of living beings to be saved and at risk of extinction, but he also poses the problem of how to preserve their essence by extrapolating their sound through the sonification of data, since sound waves are vibrations, like the physical phenomenon that moves the infinitesimal strings that make up the entire matter of the cosmos. The ancient Noah’s Ark idea of saving existing life forms from extinction is, in the concept album of the same name, updated to a concept similar to that of data digitization: every species on the planet, ideally, in this case would be saved by translating its DNA sequences into sound waves. Each species of animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, archeobacteria, corresponds to a sound obtained from its DNA sequences. In addition to the sound performances included in the Ottodix Ensemble concerts, the artist has developed in collaboration with programmer Alex Piacentini and Venice Conservatory of Music student Davide Commone, real artistic reworkings of DNA, mutated into soundscapes through the practice of data sonification. It is possible here to listen to the DNA sonifications of some species with special characteristics, such as Armillaria, the world's largest and most extensive fungus, or Deinococcus radiodurans, a resilient bacterium capable of surviving even in outer space for an entire year, or even the DNA and sound of Moa, a New Zealand animal extinct for two centuries, which here reappears in the form of a phantasmal evocation of a lost life, resurrected in sound waves. In addition to these subjects, it is also possible to listen to soundscapes obtained from fragments of sounds from the Venetian habitat, organized by following the rhythm of the DNA sequences of two endangered Venetian lagoon species: the mollusk Pinna nobilis and the halophytic shoal plant Spartinia maritima. These sounds generate unseen video works, visual fingerprints of living beings to be saved. The complete series "ARCA DNA" includes 28 sonifications+videos dedicated to 28 living (or extinct) beings on our planet, divided into 4 series of 7 subjects each, in the categories of Animals, Plants, Fungi and Bacteria. For each audio video work, the artist creates a portrait as a still life using a frame and painting it on a 120x120cm canvas, to make the subject immortal from the risk of digital backup loss, for future archaeologists and historians.