The Observant, 720 x576, 3h, 2013

The Observant is a project focused on the use of images in the contemporary society and on the way image influences the interpretation of reality.

We decided to work on duality and on subversion, in order to let odiens reflect upon the way peopole look at and interpretate images; we all project on images different meanings which very often are not correct and precise but coming from a personal outlook, a peculiar experience connected with our own biography and our culture.

We believe that that the system can use, to monitor people, an excess of information (misinformation), a massive diffusion of data, which are mostly images.

This excess of information is in some way conforting, because we think that we know and we are able to understand whatever it happens, but actually it paralyzes and stops every deeper analysis, freezing our mind in a state of suspicion dominated by our preconstitued frames of thought.

The project is conceived as an installation: two monitors used for closed circuit TV control will be hung on the wall, screening two videos (1 each) of two religious buildings (a church and a mosquee) which must be familiar to the pubblic, filmed at the same time, the same day, in the same city and with a similar fixed framing. The mental short circuit will be given by the position of two monitors: high-angle which is usually the position of the colesed circuit cameras and by the suspicious comparison between the two religious buildings.