After the restoration of the Venice Pavilion in 2011 which represented the recovery of a symbol, an important place for the historic city but also for the community, the Alberto Peruzzo Foundation in 2018 participated at “Knowledge Space” a project of the Pavilion for the Biennale Architettura 2018, with a shared and open management of knowledge and data concerning the city and the realities that shape it.
The Alberto Peruzzo Foundation supported the Pavilion’s project for the Biennale with “Human Architecture“, an artistic project straddling research, data and social commitment, implemented with the contribution of the European Commission through the programme called STARTS – Innovation at the nexus of Science, Technology, and the ARTS. The work, conceived by the artists Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico along with the Human Ecosystems Relazioni research center, explores the human architectures generated by the interactions of people on social networks vis-à-vis the Biennale – compiling public conversations in 54 languages – transforming them into visual and auditory forms of architecture. The data, anonymised and aggregated, constitutes the heart of a cultural initiative targeted at engaging with schools, artists, researchers, designers and citizens. Far from the scandals of this early part of the century, Human Architecture promotes a new vision of data, created “with” people rather than “on” them, in which science and technology emerge from the seclusion of the laboratories to live at the center of society through art, design and architecture.
Probably is the first time in the history of the Biennale that an artistic project processed in real time the comments made and the data shared by visitors, alongside their impressions, etc;.thus interpreting on the one side the theme of the sharing data in a human and creative way and on the other side, the desire to provide an interpretation of the global conversation, that an event like the Biennale manages to generate from a specific time and place. This is what Human Architecture aims to achieve.
The displays
For the event, Human Ecosystems Relazioni has produced 3 artistic displays that are specifically designed for the Venice Pavilion.
- Architecture. Or rather, the architecture of conversations: how the themes of conversations, through correlations, form three-dimensional pieces of architecture.
- Influences. Or rather, how the themes covered in conversations are reciprocally influential: the more the waves move in synch, the more the themes in question are correlated.
- Idiom. Or rather, the languages in which the expressions are revealed. The more intense the connections between the languages, the more they are interacting with each other (either directly, when people exchange comments in different languages, or indirectly, when they discuss the same themes).
A publication covering art, science and data encapsulated in visual and analytical form the information compiled, making it legible and usable, and providing a new encapsulation of the life of the Biennale as a global phenomenon.
A cultural programme was conceived and designed in collaboration with the STARTS programme. In this spirit, the Alberto Peruzzo Foundation has contributed to the growth of Venice Pavilion and the City with a contemporary project of strong social and artistic inspiration of a European dimension, providing tools for investigation and awareness of the life of the Biennale in the world.