Artist Interview: Tice Cin and Pietro Bardini
During the installation of their exhibition in Borough Road Gallery: The Heart of the Whirlpool, we had the opportunity to talk to Tice and Pietro about their work and practice.
Could you talk a little bit about your practise, and what media or themes your work or writing touches on?
P: So I’m a composer and multimedia artist, I mainly work with sounds I’m interested in exploring ways that we can use computer machines to aid the composition process so algorithms and generative sequences. I’m mostly interested in ways that sounds can be used to explore the architectural space, for instance, placing multiple sound sources in an environment to exploit the natural sounds and reverberation in space.
T: So specifically with my poetry, what I’m working on over the next year is using the research that I collated during my MA a couple of years ago to inform some interdisciplinary projects. That’s why what Pietro and I do is really interesting for me, because I wrote a lot about the female body and fluids and how posthumanism effects the way that we interact with robotics and the elasticity of the body. I suppose this next year in particular in my practice I’ve been looking at how to manifest that with visual representations such as The Heart of the Whirlpool.
With my prose I’ve just written a novel where it’s completely different to this, it's social realism set in north London. So it’s nice to be able to use this very abstract research for something. I remember that’s what my MA thesis supervisor said to me: don’t worry about a PhD just turn it into art.
“I mainly work with sounds I’m interested in exploring ways that we can use computer machines to aid the composition process so algorithms and genetic sequences.”
What drew you to collaborate together, and what commonalities are there in your practise?
T: We’re both Barbican Young Creatives, and we were invited to this project being run at Barbican Centre called Barbican Young Guides and that was to create 'happenings' within the gallery space in response to the work of Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov. I just remember looking over at Pietro and he was talking about his work and I was thinking… why are we not linking up our practices? We could make something really interesting. What was your memory of that Pietro?
P: Yeah I remember you approaching me and saying ‘Oh, we should make something together’. I think we bounced ideas around about fusing sound and poetry together and this was where our work around Vorticism and Rayonism began, responding to paintings such as Rayonist Sea. It was good. We put a lot of ideas into a very short piece, but I think it was successful as a starting point. In terms of commonalities, we both like to explore machines and how we relate to them, and how our relationship with them can develop in the future to become more sustainable.
What are your responses to Vorticism and it’s manifesto?
P: Well Futurism is a significant topic in the art education of Italian students. Futurism's such a big art movement that is still very celebrated in Italy despite its links with Fascism. That troubling history has kind of been washed away because it is still very much platformed, and has transformed and mutated itself across the Italian art landscape. We still see artists nowadays with Tullio Crali vibes.
In response to Vorticism, we wanted to look at ways that we can take this on a more contemporary approach because since the time that Futurism and Vorticism took place, machine 'life' is now in a very different context. Both on a social level and on an environmental level, the machine cannot be celebrated anymore as this totally utopian, industrial force.
T: I suppose something to say about the manifesto is that we wanted to challenge this idea that a robotic entity can’t be made without a capitalist incentive and that machines cannot be interacted with. We’re trying to focus on how to collaborate with the machine, to give it some kind of autonomy.
Open between the 4th and 7th of March 2020
Do you have your own attitudes towards technology?
P: Yeah I mean I always try to embrace using technology to create works, especially creating generative works, giving a lot of responsibility to the machine, taking it away from myself. Because I find sometimes it’s good to…
T: Outsource.
P: Yeah, leave your ego to the machine to create for you.
F: Do you think it’s possible to discover an ideal algorithm to create the perfect music?
P: No, every piece is different. For instance, I’m working on a piece that uses some medical data, using an algorithm to go through the medical data faster and reduce my workload by the algorithm selecting and choosing and giving this to the machine. But ultimately I decide where it goes. It’s not like machine learning pieces which are quite trendy now where they feed a lot of pieces to a computer which eventually creates a piece of music which has never been created before but sounds like those that have been fed. I’d rather use a machine to aid the composition.
Do you have plans to work together again, or any upcoming projects in the pipeline?
T: We’re part of Design Yourself Collective at the Barbican together and we do have an exhibition there soon, we don’t have a date for that yet. But we were just talking this morning, I was asking how are doing? How are you finding it working with me? Are you happy? You seem happy.
P: Yeah!
T: It’s mainly technology and digital rights that we’re very invested in exploring with our work at the moment. I like that Pietro is very egalitarian and he’s alright with all the sex robot chat.
F: Is it mainly over social media that you communicate?
T: We communicate through many different mediums really.
P: Yeah Facebook, WhatsApp, emails…
T: If it goes too long without meeting up in person I think that you feel further away from the piece itself as well. When we’re in the same room together I feel like even though we’re doing the same amount of work that it’s all happening a bit better and more smoothly.
“If it goes too long without meeting up in person I think that you feel further away from the piece itself.”
Interviewed by Fraser McFarlane