LINKED

Filippo Tocchi received a grant to develop LINKED. In a world where daily life is both guided and disrupted by ubiquitous advertising campaigns on billboards and huge screens, and where people now spend an average of 4 hours a day on their smartphones, the symbiosis of humans and computers mediated by screens has become ubiquitous and undeniable. Digital technology increasingly acts as a major site of subjectification, influencing the way individuals observe, analyze and interpret themselves. Building on this concept of human subjectification through digital technology, LINKED seeks to translate these abstract ideas into a tangible, immersive hypertrophic film experience that reflects on the status of spectatorship in the age of social media. The project consists of the creation of a sculptural audiovisual multi-channel support and display for the production of an immersive cinematic installation. A second phase will produce a short film developed specifically for the support.

Filippo is a visual artist who operates under the name MRZB. MRZB is an artistic acronym Filippo began using in 2014 to create situations where to experiment within collaborative frameworks of collective articulation. MRZB stands for MERZBAU, the initial name of the environmental, architectural and livable sculptural assemblages by Kurt Schwitters. The interest in the series of artworks derived from a belief in the power of residues, in processes of accumulation, hoarding and mixturing and speculations around the potential collective liveability of an art-piece. In a decade MERZBAU has investigated the marginal, the discarded, the suburban — as removed, psychedelic and hallucinatory cosmos — to traverse the specters and residues of a centripetal and massified reality. From 2021, MRZB articulated its practice in a series of mise-en-scènes. Appropriating and taking adrift the formats of the spectacle, MRZB has produced polyphonic assemblages, exaggerated microcosms that incorporate and re-signify the detrita of contemporary culture.