Eva and Franco Mattes: "Reality is overrated" . Via e-flux mailing...

[Marlon Barrios Solano]

"Reality is overrated" – this slogan by Eva and Franco Mattes contains central aspects of the Italian artist couple's work: Their interest in reality in the age of digital forgery,
the blending of fact and fiction – and their
appetite for provocative statements.


The artists provide evidence of the latter yet again in their most
recent work No Fun: Franco Mattes simulated
his suicide in the popular webcam-based chat room Chatroulette.
Thousands of random people watched while he was hanging
from the ceiling, swinging slowly for hours. The video documentation of
the performance presents an unbelievable, at
times very disturbing, sequence of reactions: some laugh, some are
completely unmoved, some insult the supposed corpse,
some take pictures with their mobiles. Notably, only one out of several
thousand people called the police. Moving beyond
the aspects of shock and provocation, this touches on a basic question:
What does "reality" mean in the digital age?

Eva and Franco Mattes are the artist-provocateurs behind the infamous
website 0100101110101101.ORG.
Belonging among the pioneers of the net.art movement, they
have manipulated video games, Internet technologies, feature films and
street advertising.

AD/HD is Eva and Franco Mattes' first institutional solo
exhibition in Switzerland, featuring their most recent
net-based interventions and videogame performances. The works refer to
the history of performance art with its notions
of body, space, emotion, social interaction and communication – notions
that are then experimentally renegotiated by
interlinking physical and digital space, physical body and avatar.

A series of Synthetic Performances took place in the online
environment Second Life, performed by Eva and Franco
Mattes through their avatars, which were based on their real-life
physical features. People could attend and interact
with the live performances connecting to the online game from all over
the world. The series started in January 2007
with reenactments of historical performances by Marina Abramovic, Vito
Acconci, Chris Burden and others, and was
continued by Eva and Franco Mattes' own Synthetic Performances.

In Freedom (2010) we are faced with a live performance set within
the popular first-person shooter videogame
"Counter Strike". Here, the artist, Eva Mattes, is refusing to
accomplish the basic goal of the game, to kill the enemy.
She instead tries to convince the other players to save her life because
she is "trying to make an artwork". The result
is the performer being endlessly and brutally killed and abused by the
other players.

For our guest booth at LISTE – The Young Art Fair, Eva and Franco Mattes
developed the performance The Rude
Dude: "The Rude Dude welcomes audience, critics and fans into the
obscure under-the-stairs-corner of art, where the
most secret, unpleasant, potentially scary conversations take place. Ask
him what you never dared to ask about art,
because he knows and will tell it out loud.
The Rude Dude offers something slightly different than the regular art
fair stroll. A live performance, a Net Art
piece, a liberating experience, at least for him..."