Elisa Giardina Papa

• elisa.giardina@gmail.com,
 
• bio/cv

• > Upcoming/Current:
• - Apr 2024 - "Italia 70 - I NUOVI MOSTRI", Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milano, Italy. Curated by Massimiliano Gioni.
• - May 2024 - "24/7. Work Between Meaning and Imbalance", Kunsthaus Graz, Austria. Curated by Katia Huemer.
• - Feb 2024 - "Sortir le travail de sa nuit (Taking the work out of its night)", Centre de Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré, Tours, France. Curated by Delphine Masson and Marine Rochard.
• - Mar 2024 - “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale. Elisa Giardina Papa, Collective, Edinburgh, Scotland. Curated by Sorcha Casey. (Solo)
- Jun 2024 - "Double Feature", Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany. Curated by Matthias Ulrich.
• - Fall 2024 - "Digital Capture: Southern California and the Origins of the Pixel-Based Image World", UCR ARTS, Riverside, California, in collaboration with Getty Foundation. Curated by Nikolay Maslov and April Baca.
• - Nov 2023 - "Darker, Lighter, Puffy, Flat", Kunsthalle Wien, Wien, Austria. Curated by Laura Amann.

works

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“U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale, 2022

“U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale reimagines the Sicilian myth of the "donne di fora" (“women from the outside and beside themselves”). Described as both magical and criminal, the "donne di fora" were said to possess both the feminine and masculine; the human and the animal; the benevolent and the vengeful. This video installation envisions the "donne di fora" as a gang of teenage “tuners” who ride through the utopian city of Gibellina Nuova (Sicily) on bikes customized with disruptive sound systems. The narrative voyage of the “tuners” is interspersed with poetic text and visual motifs from a 19th century collection of Sicilian fairy tales, Giardina Papa’s fragmented childhood memories of songs and stories told by her grandmother, and archival material from the Inquisition trials of the 16th and 17th centuries that criminalized women accused of being a "donne di fora." Accompanied by ceramic sculptures of related fantastical imagery, “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale repurposes the magical, ritualistic, and unruly as forces that generate an imagination beyond predetermined categories of humanness, chronological time, and mythological womanhood.

CREDITS

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Leaking Subjects and Bounding Boxes: On Training AI, 2022

Leaking Subjects and Bounding Boxes addresses the ways in which machines are disciplined and trained to see. It is a visual account that documents the methods currently used to teach AI to capture, classify, and order the world but instead considers everything in our lives, embodiments, and desires that defies these normative modes of categorization. That is, it pauses to reflect upon that which continually flickers in and out of any possible taxonomization and exists only at the very edge of definition.

This book is one outcome of Elisa Giardina Papa’s ongoing visual and theoretical research into machinic vision. It presents images which the artist began collecting in the winter of 2019 while working as a human trainer for various AI vision systems. Among the thousands of training images she processed for her tasks as a “data-cleaner,” she collected those which seemed to resist AI’s orderly impulse.

Segmenting, tracing, bounding-boxing, and labeling are key operations used to teach machines to separate data from data, signal from noise, and orderly things from disorderly ones. This collection of images is an invitation to reflect on what it means to practice a disorder of seeing and being which radically resists the normative impulse to divide and classify, to create hierarchies and produce difference. In other words, this book is an invitation to consider the ways in which all things that are opaque and promiscuous, heretical and unfaithful will perpetually upset orderly, idealized, transparent, and supposedly “universal” categories.

The book includes a conversation with Zach Blas and Mimi Ọnụọha on "Missing Data" and "Cleaning Data."

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Cleaning Emotional Data, 2020

"Cleaning Emotional Data" is a three channel video installation that addresses new forms of precarious labor emerging within artificial intelligence economies. Specifically, it focuses on the global infrastructure of microworkers who “clean” data to train emotion-recognition algorithms.

In the winter of 2019, Elisa Giardina Papa worked remotely for several North American “human-in-the-loop” companies who provide “clean” datasets to train AI algorithms to detect emotions. Among the tasks she performed were the taxonomisation of emotions, the annotation of facial expressions and the recording of her own image to animate three- dimensional characters. "Cleaning Emotional Data" documents these microtasks while simultaneously tracing a history of emotions that questions the methods and psychological theories underpinning facial expression mapping. The implications of this demand for emotional legibility – used increasingly either to identify consumers’ moods or to detect potentially dangerous citizens who pose a threat to the state – is further explored in a series of large-scale textile pieces developed in collaboration with Michael Graham of Savant Studios (Brooklyn, NY). The embroidery juxtaposes the abstract lines of facial micro-expressions detected by the algorithms with untranslatable emotional vernacular from the Sicilian dialect, the artist's mother tongue. This joint “fabrication” of computational and human language demonstrates how emotional sensibilities exceed reductive categorisation.

Commissioned by Aksioma, Institute for Conteporary Art of Ljubljana and La Kunsthalle Mulhouse.

"Cleaning Emotional Data" is the third installment of a trilogy exploring how labor and care are reframed by digital economies and artificial intelligence; it follows Technologies of Care (2016) and Labor of Sleep (2017).

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Labor of Sleep, 2017
Whitney Museum Sunrise/Sunset Commission

Labor of Sleep, Have you been able to change your habits?? consists of a series of short video clips, one for sunrise and one for sunset, that plays out over nine days, and humorously references self-improvement apps. The work examines the idea that sleep has become the newest frontier for gathering behavioral and biological data in order to optimize sleeping patterns, thereby turning the time that our bodies use to rest and replenish into a form of labor devoted to data extraction. In this way, digital devices function as both a poison and its remedy, providing relief for the time they take away. The daily exercises and assessments suggested by Labor of Sleep, Have you been able to change your habits?? rely on a range of motifs that reveal the absurdities of technologically supported self-optimization. The video clips illustrate how we use technologies to regulate human sleeping habits within the rhythms of a wider system—one that includes humans and non-humans, extending from organic matter to digital devices themselves.

Labor of Sleep, Have you been able to change your habits?? is part of Sunrise/Sunset, a series of Internet art projects commissioned by the Whitney specifically for whitney.org to mark sunset and sunrise in New York City every day.

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Technologies of Care, 2016

Technologies of Care​ documents new ways in which service and affective labor are being outsourced via internet platforms, exploring topics such as empathy, precarity, and immaterial labor.

The video visualizes the invisible workforce of online caregivers. The workers interviewed in "Technologies of Care" ​include an ASMR artist, an online dating coach, a fetish video performer and fairytale author, a social media fan-for-hire, a nail wrap designer, and a customer service operator. Based in Brazil, Greece, the Philippines, Venezuela, and the United States, they work as anonymous freelancers, connected via third-party companies to customers around the globe. Through a variety of websites and apps, they provide clients with customized goods and experiences, erotic stimulation, companionship, and emotional support.

The stories collected in ​Technologies of Care include those of non-human caregivers as well. One of its seven episodes, ​Worker 7 - Bot? Virtual Boyfriend/Girlfriend​, documents the artist's three-month-long “affair” with an interactive chatbot.

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Technologies of Care
For Rhizome Download Commission

Download Technologies of Care as a ZIP:

"Empathy, digital labor, and new ways to serve and care on the network are the subjects explored in Elisa Giardina Papa’s Technologies of Care, commissioned by Rhizome for the Download. The Download is a series of Rhizome commissions that considers posted files, the act of downloading, and the user’s desktop as the space of exhibition.
Elisa Giardina Papa's Technologies of Care presents portraits of online workers on the front page ofrhizome.org in a 26MB ZIP file that explores gender, empathy, digital labor, and new dynamics of care and service on the network. Each portrait in the ZIP is its own folder, activated by an HTML file marked play_it." [Paul Soulellis]

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When the Towel Drops Vol.1 Italy, 2015-2018

with Radha May

"When the Towel Drops" is an ongoing project that investigates the censored representation of women, femininity, and sexuality in international cinema and on the Internet. The first iteration, "When the Towel Drops Vol.1 I Italy,"" is based on the Italian cinema revision board archive, which preserves documents detailing the censorship commission’s decisions on national and foreign film along with the actual segments of censored footage. The performance and the 35mm film installation present and compile hundreds of censored scenes never before seen in public. Among them, a scene of childbirth from Ingmar Bergman’s Brink of Life, an ambiguous kiss between a mother and son from Pietro Germi’s Il Bell’Antonio, and a dialogue sequence in which gay sex is discussed in Pasolini’s Love Meetings. When the Towel Drops is a collaboration with Ugandan artist Bathsheba Okwenje and Indian artist Nupur Mathur.

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eCBT Mood - excerpt

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need ideas!?!PLZ!!, 2011

A collage of little-­seen online videos, the work draws attention to the masses of neglected videos and images that social media ecologies generate, and how contemporary networked society has fundamentally transformed social relations and creativity.
“Content is simply something to do; something modest offered up freely in exchange for a sense of accomplishment or relief. As one user puts it, ‘I don’t know what to do… so give me ideas. I’m trying to get more stuff done.’ Another whines, ‘I really need new vids, I have no time, ok?’ These pleas are funny and sad and strange. They register a palpable confusion of work and play, social anxiety expressed as a preoccupation with stats and productivity.” [Erica Levin]

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Brush Stroke, 2012—

Lucia** =):
How do I delete the grid behind a transparent background?
Re: to @Lucia** =):
It's like asking where the sun goes at night.
Re: to @Lucia** =):
You understand that it already represents nothing?
How do you represent nothing?
Wherever you see this transparency grid, you know you are looking at nothing.

Brush Stroke is a series of flat, minimalist sculptures printed with a white and grey grid on the front side. Seen and photographed from a specific point of view, it is perceived as a brush stroke that erases the space in which the work is installed, as it would do in an image editing software. Does this work exist as an object in space, or merely as a digital image? Does this distinction make any sense at all?

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Archive Fever Vol.1, 2011

Archive Fever (2011-) is an ongoing project that investigates data economy and data intimacy. Internet browsers automatically create a log of each website a user has visited in the previous two months. Since September 2011, I have downloaded and stored these data. Each time Archive Fever is exhibited, I retrieve the most recent volume and play it back. Link after link, the digital traces I have unintentionally left behind while browsing the Internet reveal a loose, unedited narrative of my work, play, and personal online interactions.

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Rooms

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Drawing from Life, 2012

Drawing from life, 2011. 120 digital drawings, printed on paper.

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Byob Miami, 2012

Byob Miami, 2012.

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Still Slime

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Carrellino D'Oro, 2009-2010

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bio

Elisa Giardina Papa research-based art practice seeks forms of knowledge and desire that have been lost or forgotten, disqualified, and rendered nonsensical by hegemonic demands for order and legibility. Sifting through discarded AI training datasets, censored cinema repositories, factitious colonial travel accounts, or fabricated heretical accusations, Giardina Papa traces how recurrent forms of extractive capitalism and imperialism have strained our capacities for living and laboring. Through critical yet poetic framing, she works across large-scale video installation, experimental films, and internet-based art projects to draw attention to those parts of our lives which, nonetheless, remain radically unruly, untranslatable, and incomputable.

Her work has been exhibited and screened at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (The Milk of Dreams), the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA’s Modern Mondays), the Whitney Museum (Sunrise/Sunset Commission), Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2018, 6th Buenos Aires Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento, XVI Quadriennale di Roma, Rhizome (Download Commission), Flaherty NYC, UnionDocs, ICA Milano, BFI London Film Festival, Center for Contemporary Art Tashkent, Uzbekistan, M+ Hong Kong, among others.

Giardina Papa is also a founding member of the artist collective Radha May. Together with Indian artist Nupur Mathur and Ugandan artist Bathsheba Okwenje, they develop performances and art installations that reveal reveal hidden histories and peripheral sites, exploring their relation to gender, sexuality, and colonialism.

Giardina Papa lives and works in New York and Sant’Ignazio, Sicily.

cv

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contact

elisa.giardina@gmail.com