Fabio Paiva (he/him)
Fabio Paiva is a visual artist and designer with an interest in post-photography, particularly generative image processing. He focuses on presenting mundane everyday life in unfamiliar and strange ways. Searching to find new perspectives, forms of narrative and ways of experiencing the relationship between the virtual and the physical world.
His work incorporates the concept of technological determinism to interrogate the use of machines, increasingly governing the way we see, think, and live.
Cameraman 2.0 (work in progress)
In our digital age, our image of the world and the structure of our expectations are changing. When we forfeited all metaphors suitable for recognising reality and live under a flood of ever more similar images, making reality appear to us totally subjective and meaningless. The subjective/ objective framework has been dismantled and the digital image is descendants of a modern era oriented ideologically by reality and objectivity.
We are inundated, more often than we contemplate images, we consume them on TV, magazines, newspapers, posters, films, social media and the internet on our mobile devices, and as a result, we are dealing with a subjective and fictional side of art and entertainment. Consumer culture centres on the manipulation of desire. Also reflected in photography in general where the desire to access the electronic copy can be revived at anytime, anywhere and in any form with any content.
My interest in automated image-making systems reflects the excitement of exploring a new virtual world. The world captured by “Cameraman 2.0” appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of an objective, unbiased recording, and even the vastness of its recordings. This method became a fundamental tool for recording data in which it facilitates the purpose to simply capture everything from a neutral point of view, making the process accurate and continuous. However such mechanism requires a critical look, questioning the meaning and function of these images and what are their implications for artists and image-makers. At first, it seems to restore the appropriate balance between photographer and subject, on the other hand, it encourages transgression of rules on which we have come to rely. The detached eye of the automated camera can lead to a feeling that we are observed simultaneously by everyone and by no one, transmitting the contemporary experience, in which we are bombarded by fragmented impressions and overwhelmed with data, but that often see too much and register nothing.
Persuasive System
The boundaries between the physical and the digital world are blurred. To recognise them, we must make a cognitive effort. We must find new ways of narrating the world.
“Persuasive System” is a network of technological camera devices that incorporate experimental methods of image capture designed to change the visual perception and behaviours of the users through human-computer interaction.
This installation explores the dynamics behind systemic monitoring and surveillance, digital privacy, and image distribution as a pragmatic attempt to investigate the flows of information that influence our social and political opinion within the public sphere.
The emphasis is set on interactions, narratives and conflictual potentials triggered by video surveillance systems. Mechanisms of control are unveiled, rendered visible, re-contextualised, appropriated, questioned, dismantled.