Alessio de Girolamo: Real Time: Venice

21 September - 15 December 2024

Capsule Venice is delighted to present Real Time, the gallery’s first collaboration with Italian artist Alessio de Girolamo (b. 1980, Sanremo, Italy; currently lives and works in Lecce, Italy).  Hosted in the annex gallery space and the garden shed (Project Rooms 2 and 3) during La Biennale di Venezia - 68th International Festival of Contemporary Music, Real Time unveils the artist’s most recent audio and video experiments with the eponymous software Real Time. Developed over the past few years in close collaboration with LIM - Laboratorio di Informatica Musicale (Music Informatics Laboratory) at Università degli Studi di Milano, the software Real Time represents a significant breakthrough in the way that a musical composition is conceived. It uses the elements of the natural soundscape closest to the notes of a chosen musical score, without any pre-sampling or pitch alteration, to create a brand-new score in which the natural and the artificial meet and inevitably clash. This software replaces the “silenced notes” in the original track with the closest acoustic frequencies. Real Time highlights the breach between the spontaneous, non-numeric, circular, and aleatoric patterns followed by musical composition as a product of an unaware soundscape and the time-based, numerical logic of traditional musical composition that resulted from a composer’s awareness and intention. The software thus represents an (occasionally impossible) attempt to reconcile these two antithetical systems of thought.