Alessandra Draghi is a Berlin-based, Italian artist who is eager to merge with technology and “dreams of having an Artificial Intelligence as BFF/assistant/curator/life guru” in her words. Unveiling the theories and influences that support her work, Draghi talks of the queer subject, 3D renderings, feminism and “seductive artefacts”. Starting from the contemporary status of images, as a multifaceted and always-evolving entity, her practice unfolds into an uncanny imagescape for a collective memory to be affected by.

What’s your artistic background? Tell us a bit about yourself!

I was born and raised in Milan and I currently live in Berlin. I moved here in 2021. Ah, I have told no one that I’m living in Berlin. I have been telling myself for a while the phrase “cross the sea without the sky seeing you”. In Milan, I was surrounded by a community of Millennials born in the early 90s. Young people with an Oedipal complex, Mediaset, MTV, the first LGBTQ+ coming out. We used to go to community centres. Tekno raves were allowed (sometimes): that was my weekly go-to event. Independent art spaces were expanding like wildfires, indeed with wild and ruff spirit. I could no longer stand Italy in the past few years.

That is why I moved to Berlin. Right now I am overproducing. I love to work and I collaborate with about ten professional friends in different fields. Berlin has a sculptural attitude and exhibits the most contemporary researchers. You feel no need to go to the Venice Biennale if you live here, I can assure you. I am a contemporary artist embodying prevailing individualism and fascinated with images; increasingly disconnected from human relationships; eager to merge with technology and dreaming of having an Artificial Intelligence as BFF/assistant/curator/life guru.

When did your fascination for technology and images come about? How?

"Abandonment and neglect are among the conditions that my training and personal inclination have taught me to deal with." This is a quote I often steal from Gordon Matta-Clark. To reverse the old saying "Man is the measure," Gordon wrote, "You are the measure." This phrase particularly resonates with me too. I think I always had too many images in my mind. Advertisements, movies, animated series, comics, books, magazines, theatre, and dance, allowed me to imprint new ones. I would later draw them in my room so that I could remember them to the point that I acquired a certain talent for reproduction, which ensured a more or less linear path for me to take, culminating in a Master's degree in Image Science and Photography.

For this reason, I couldn’t but draw from my personal Cloud to initiate research. I have produced numerous images over the past years. My entire early research phase is permeated by the continuous production of images: artificial, analogue or digital they were all images after all. My studies in image theory required me to question every medium I used. My interest wavered. Like hordes of artists and designers, I headed into the unknown and the abandonment of matter, in the territory of technology, science and progress. I turned my attention to Japanese anime culture, which had already reached very advanced formal milestones. I caught up with animation classics such as “Ghost in the Shell”, “Paprika”, “Akira”, “Evangelion”, “Attack on Titan”, “Death Note”, “Fullmetal Alchemist”, “Inuyasha”, “Trigun”, “Vampire Hunter D”, and many more. I also got into Western science fiction films and novels such as “Blade Runner”, “Star Wars”, and “I, Robot”. Director David Cronenberg and authors such as J.Ballard and Isaac Asimov were my pillars. Some passages in Ballard's novels particularly influenced me. American artist Robert Smithson was obsessed with Ballard's novel “The Crystal World” (1966).

The author describes a crystalline forest where time petrifies and shatters, coating all living material in prismatic, glittering encrustations. The crystals grow and flourish, becoming organic material in constant mutation. One explanation of the phenomenon is provided by the character of Captain Radek, who likens crystalline proliferation to a temporal mutation "It is as if a sequence of images of the same object, displaced but identical, were produced by refraction through a prism, but with the element of time replacing the role of light." This is to say, my fascination with technology and image responds to a need: imminence and the desire for repetition.

How does the image or the photographic thinking intervene in your works?

I’ve imposed rules on my images. They must be created with instinct and be simple in composition, complex in layering, and not immediately recognizable in technique. My primary purpose is to convey a subject endlessly, as if capable of inhabiting a multiplicity of mediums and increasingly able to penetrate the viewer. In marketing jargon, the subject of the image is the brand of my series. Hyperflat and saturated renderings are pursued throughout my practice.

Thus, two fundamental concepts that mediate the formalization of images emerge technological deception and the photographic. Technological deception is simulated by the constant re-presentation of three-dimensional images through 2D flat screens. Two-dimensionality is the fundamental characteristic of techniques used such as printing, video and digital projection, drawing or embroidery. Takashi Murakami's images, like Japanese anime themselves, have radicalized volumes of animated characters, machines, environmental spaces, and architectural constructions by elevating them to digital perfection. However, their fruition occurs only in the form of a two-dimensional image.

There lies the inherent technological limitation. By juxtaposing 3D patterns on super flat backgrounds and patterns, my works turn into simulated displays. From the studies purely related to the photographic technique, I have discarded everything except the two fundamental elements of spatial construction of an image: shadow and light. These are the elements that help me sculpt and volumize my 3D models. Further reiterating the discourse is digital illustration. Some works contain a recurring figure: three lines tracing a corner of a hypothetical room and simulating three-dimensionality.

How do you work with 3D art and how have you started?

My works aim for the autonomy of meaning before becoming an image again. The first 3D scans I produced were of Carnival masks carved from wood and deer antlers. Successively I experimented with scanning discarded food, peels and leftovers from my meals. The resulting 3D models possessed an autonomy of their own by revealing the deadly flavour that such a past brought with it. Decadence is not denied in regenerated forms. Like the two-handed work by Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno: “No Ghost Just a Shell” (1999-2002), the process I implement is always the same. The 3D model becomes the protagonist of the series. It gains autonomy in one medium and then gets reproduced again in another medium, from digital image to embroidery, from video to sculpture, etc.

To realize my models, I alternate between using Apps on cell phones for scanning, and Organic Modeling Software from scratch. The App awkwardly registers the object, and compared to how I light it, the shape changes. Photographic manipulation is very much like this manipulatory process. I consider my 3D models as unique and unrepeatable bodies, generated by an infinite process of layering that makes them polymorphous and timeless. My works function as recording and exhuming machines. In the process of appropriation and modelling, I feel like a science fiction writer like Ballard in search of the perfect technology to bring my crystalline landscape to life.

What are you currently working on and what’s inspiring you theoretically speaking?

The uncanny has emerged more and more in my recent production of work. A great uncanny valley is what I see in it. Sometimes the image or sculpture I produce seems to belong to the sphere of the biological and vital. Organic matter creates more connections with those who enjoy the work. But being similar generates the anguish of substitution. I think all my works are imbued with a sense of restlessness and existential inquiry. Almost as if the masks in my works are me. A virtual embodiment of myself; although I could not answer the question of whether it was initially desired or sought after: it suddenly came. As contemporary women, we are no longer bound to our bodies. Hybridization, in Donna Haraway’s terms, allows us to go beyond the boundary of the natural. The body is a territory of experimentation and emancipation, a protagonist of alteration and modification. Haraway's thought expands to animal studies, formulating the theory of multi-species alliances, in which she combines scientific and technological studies and natural and cultural sciences.

The protagonists of my recent series of works are 3D models of birds and wearable carnival masks, as signs of freedom and identification, which sometimes come alive and speak. An insignificant nail and the deep crevice of a manhole cover. Three windmills on a hill. Some abandoned cilantro on the ground. An elegant vase. A steel totem pole. I would not use the word “metaphor” to describe them, but that of “figuration”. It is a term that Haraway deliberately substitutes for metaphor because figurations need to be both inhabited and situated. A deep communicative need regarding issues of gender and feminism emerges from my recent works. Inevitable that my personal Cloud would not show the concerns and torments of a female artist, and that there would be no archetypal symbols traversing the history of female artists around the world. That some of the techniques I use, such as hand embroidery, would not linger on centuries-old traditions handed down from woman to woman, neutrally repurposed in works of art as a sign of economic and political emancipation. The series of masks I am working on now are all female versions. They alternate with bird masks with open or closed beaks. These masks are repurposed with a very specific formalization: they look like cyborg faces.

Cyberfeminism has an extremely positive view of the future, given the realization that patriarchy is to date doomed. Haraway calls on women to acquire new skills in technology, developing familiarity and critical consciousness, with the electronic, visual and virtual universe. The concept of cyborg according to Haraway is a taxonomic figuration of current reality. It proposes a redefinition of feminist subjectivity, ushering in a new way of thinking about sexed identity. The cyborg overcomes the dualism of male and female given its virtual corporality. The cyborg deconstructs classical subjectivity and the united conceit of the female subject. Contemporary American feminism, moreover considers the cyber subject as the perfect figuration for the multiple minority and transgressive sexual identities, removed from the prevailing dualisms, who do not identify with state heterosexuality and also reject homosexuality as a socio-cultural ghetto. The queer subject is born. In conclusion, the cyborg image can play a mediating role on the psychic and sexual level, becoming a symbol of the anti-mother, even in the biotechnology debate. Cyber-feminist women are neither pacifists nor mothers. They’re angry. The problem is not the man, but the system of power organized into perpetual surveillance networks. Living in cyber-space as cyber-subjects, free from the exploitation of our nature as women, for the progress that comes with it: forging new ideas and a new language.

I also cannot exclude the “Berlin factor” in my current practice. Here I’ve rediscovered my femininity. In Italy, the aberrant Catholicism that considers women as mechanical wombs and the patriarchy handed down even by pacifist and leftist movements as the prevailing condition of life, an economic and political system based on perennial surveillance and opposed to emancipation, is certainly not a healthy territory in which to grow as free women. In addition, Berlin has led me to rediscover the Tekno subculture and has conveyed new performative needs for interaction and sound. The nostalgic and irreverent veil of recent titles allows me to direct it all. My sex and gender quotes have recently come from Samuel Beckett's play scripts, old poems by Emilie Dickinson, and the titles of Gustave Doré engravings.

Could we say you work within a cloud of archaic images that stand at the basics of perception of what’s real and what’s virtual?

There can be no perception of something without its memory. Let's go back to the fact that I have too many images in my head. How do you find the right one? One that can be considered art. I let myself sink into the meanderings of my Cloud; struck by my instinct I choose the subject most charged with creative potential. Every other image within me reconnects to that form, finally co-feeling with the outside world where collective memory emerges legitimizing that image. Perhaps I have stumbled upon an archaic feeling, so to speak an archetypal image. I nurture that memory through a virtual film as if a cybernetic surface was constantly flowing in my mind. I’m aware that my memory is not unique and I have never truly relied on it. It is manipulable by myself and therefore to be questioned.

Trying to draw a line between the real and the virtual today is a superfluous exercise, an almost impossible action that is immediately exhausted in its fulfilment. As an artist, I wonder what human beings will want to possess shortly. How will ordinary life be changed by the intervention of virtual reality and artificial intelligence? What will be the aesthetics of the future if the present is dominated by the continuous vision of sculpted bodies in 3D modelling, which strangely still retains a margin of imperfection? The filter of the virtual constantly covers everything. What if technology is not directed at the next humanity? I think it is strongly conveyed by an action aimed at changing the total perception of the real, constantly. Placing virtual filters on archetypal memories seems to me a mirror of our society, as much as producing seductive works and objects that reveal their 3D nature but with margins of human imperfections does. The memory I share is a distant memory of almost folklore, dressed in virtual and technological clothes. The audience is my community. However, I do not want to suggest the layers of multiple human experiences in future spaces. I only want my memories to build a community, gathering the shards of a Cloud. I believe that every spirit is moved by its instability.

How do you see your art evolving with the growth of technology?

I would like to turn into a bot just to create work endlessly. Digital arts are indispensable to our survival. But will they still belong to artists? Now that it is becoming increasingly clear that creativity is by no means the prerogative of human beings, AI is not only destined to replace repetitive and low-value-added jobs but instead a natural predisposition for creativity by leveraging the forces of immediate reproducibility and infinite generation/regeneration of form and content. Here I see numerous possibilities. First, an AI assistant in my next studio and a robot for manual labour. I am in favour of universal income. Secondly, exploring the potential of holograms and virtual reality. The production of 3D modelling films, expanding the image on giant screens. It would be great to show them on the screens of Shibuya TV in Japan. I am making my first sound sculpture by collaborating with a composer and an electronic engineer. I want to continue to produce seductive artefacts of no-gender reincarnations in sculptures that are increasingly cyborg in nature but I could eliminate the boundaries of reality, getting rid of physical bodies, and being digital avatars. If I propose art that does not privilege one viewer over another, with ever-new, more complex and varied works, perhaps they will last longer in the collective memory.