Studio Gianluca Iadema

Aphàiresis

Aphàiresis (from the Greek ἀφαίρεσις, “abstraction”) is an audiovisual composition developed between 2017 and 2019. The work engages with imperfection as a generative principle, investigating its role as both an aesthetic device and a conceptual framework within contemporary artistic practice.

Published by

Mille Plateaux Edition

Category

Audiovisual

Specifics

1ch video and 2ch sound | 43’00”

Years of creation

2017 -2019

It is through the tension between materiality, associated with imperfection, and immateriality, aligned with ideals of perfection, that a process of filtration and regeneration gives rise to an hybrid world. In this space, analog and digital elements relinquish parts of themselves, undergoing a transformation that leads to their reconfiguration within a higher-order structure.
Drawing on visual noise, interference, and distortions produced by obsolete projection technologies such as VHS tapes and analog film projectors, the composer reworks archival video and film material to construct an audiovisual composition. The visual and sonic elements, the latter largely derived from data bending processes, collaborate to reveal the otherwise opaque nature of digital and analog technologies, while simultaneously uncovering an inherent historical contrast.

The intuition to use the invisible technological substrate, such as electromagnetic signals, digital noise, or system glitches, as compositional material reflects a conscious intent to interrogate technology beyond its standard operational purposes. In this shift, what typically functions as background or infrastructure emerges as a central subject, opening new perspectives for artistic inquiry. The impulse to reassign meaning and aesthetic value to error arises from a broader reflection on imperfection as a potential origin of artistic creation. Art, in this view, emerges from the moment an object, for instance a goblet, breaks, thereby losing its function and entering a different conceptual space. This rupture disrupts habitual perception, initiating a reflective process through which the artist begins to see the object no longer as functional, but as material, stripped of utility and open to new meaning. Aphàiresis thus becomes a process in which distinct aesthetic codes, visual and sonic, mutually reframe one another, embracing error as a generative force. Through this interplay, the work mobilizes the transformative potential of failure to provoke both artistic and contemplative responses.

Featured Articles   

Frédéric Neyrat – The-Messianic-Messing-Up, notes on Gianluca Iadema’s Aphàiresis.

Album Release