OVERVIEW

Damon Zucconi

Liste Year

Year of Birth

Country of Birth

Presented by

2020

1985

Italy

VEDA

Damon Zucconi (Bethpage, NY - 1985) lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. Zucconi works with custom software and scripts to create works which are typically accessible online. He utilizes vision, literacy and pattern recognition to make plain the perceptual experience.

  • Damon Zucconi, Forgiveness, 2020. Installation view at VEDA, Florence. Courtesy the artist and VEDA, Florence
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The three works: Forgiveness, Forgiveness, and They Saw Not The Small Withered Head Of The Saint (all 2020) are direct to substrate prints of images produced using software; the combination of two programmatic approaches.

The first approach – used for Forgiveness prints – synthesizes handwriting. “Cursive handwriting is a complex graphic realization of natural human communication. Its production and recognition involve a large number of highly cognitive functions including vision, motor control, and natural language understanding.” The direct production of writing by hand” is instead replaced with a kind of anonymous average — the trace of no-one-in-particular — the synthesized strokes modeled on thousands of examples from thousands of different hands. The telautograph — an analog ...

In They Saw Not The Small Withered Head Of The Saint, another program takes the synthesized output and concatenates it into a new composition using a heuristic approach to the two-dimensional bin packing problem — an otherwise intractable NP-hard problem. It’s a mode of composition where the goal is efficiency. “They Saw Not The Small Withered Head Of The Saint” is backdropped in red to highlight and ‘debug’ the process.



Both works – Forgiveness, Forgiveness and They Saw Not The Small Withered Head Of The Saint – are lists: Liber Scriptus. A continuous generation of traces — the same, but different — so as to trigger semantic satiation — the phenomena in which repetition causes a word or phrase to lose its meaning.

beglyaaelc_ak_x__y has been created using a process and software developed to interlace images without changes in opacity. The software decomposed the images into groups of tiny gridded squares then takes from each bucket in turn, weaving them together into a new whole.

Further references here and a selection of press here.