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Mattia Casalegno
Pronouns
He/him
Date and place of birth
b. 1981, Naples, Italy
Current location
Brooklyn, NY
Year(s) of residency and/or fellowship
2015, Project Resident

Mattia Casalegno is an Italian interdisciplinary artist, live-media performer and installation artist working in a broad range of media.

Casalegno’s work explores the physical and sensory perceptions of its viewers, evoking experiences that are fully immersive, sensorially embodied, and psychologically heightened.

His art practice draws from the most disparate disciplines such as anthropology, ecology, biology, neurosciences, informatics, and focuses on the relations and tensions between Nature, society and technology.

Casalegno’s work is been exhibited extensively in institutions such as MADRE, MACRO Museum, Auditorium, RomaEuropa Festival and Netmage in Italy, Mutek Festival in Canada, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan, International Symposium for Electronic Arts in S.Korea, Update Biennial in Belgium, SVA Gallery, the Satellite Fair, James Beard Foundation and LACMA in US.

Casalegno has received a number of awards and fellowships including the Lumen Prize (2018), NEW INC – incubator of the New Museum in New York (2019-2020), the Center for Cultural Innovation (2013), a NYFA – New York Foundation for the Arts fellow (2017), as well as residences at Budafabriek (2014), Eyebeam (2015), the Chronus Art Center (2018) and Asia Culture Center (2019).

He is currently an assistant professor at the Department of Digital Arts, Pratt Institute in New York, and critic at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, Rhode Island.

 


 

Eyebeam Project Resident (2015):

Sexy Beautiful Girl Webcam Chat Part. 3

A site-specific installation consisting of a series of upward vertical structures composed of anodized aluminum profiles lined on the wall: hinged in each structure, a thin, glossy screen displays pixelated close-ups of people, appearing and disappear
with irregular pace. Above each screen, blue and red indoor growing LED strips – the kind of lights used to grow plants in extreme environments and possibly on the surface of Mars- irradiate a purple glow projecting otherworldly shadows on the walls.

Find Documentation of Sexy Beautiful Girl Webcam Chat Part. 3 Here

 

This work was featured in an Eyebeam group exhibition – Reversing Art and Technology: Outside/In

Outside/In showcases the work of Mattia CasalegnoTorkwase Dyson, and Nancy Nowacek.

Lines not only demarcate, they reveal intimacies between that which is bounded and its complement. This exhibition highlights three artists whose work explores the porousness between the outside and inside, by examining how digital and other technological means tend to re-map spaces, both inner and outer. The sculptural installations of Mattia Casalegno, Torkwase Dyson, and Nancy Nowacek diagram the subtle ways these re-mappings occur.

Casalegno builds frames which integrate live webcam exchanges between strangers. They examine radical transformations of social relations in emergent digital platforms. Dyson presents a wall that doubles as a research station, in which she will examine local histories, from Wall Street’s slave market to the Seaport’s trading docks to the Financial District’s banking power. Nowacek creates deconstructions of the built environment. She nestles contemplative screens into arrangements of rough construction materials.

These works by Eyebeam Residents are examples of technology in an expanded sense: they are physical and conceptual tools by which we navigate and ultimately transform our contexts. This show will be followed by an exhibition Inside/Out, opening mid-November, which further examines the intricate geometries that link technology, culture and society, focusing on the externalization of that which is hidden.

Eyebeam models a new approach to artist-led creation for the public good; we are a non-profit that provides significant professional support and money to exceptional artists for the realization of important ideas that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Nobody else is doing this.

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