Interview: Oblivious Artefacts’ Ignazio Mortellaro

One of the most distinctive characteristics of the Stroboscopic Artefacts imprint is its artwork. There’s a cohesion to its releases, developed and maintained by Ignazio Mortellaro, the brother to label head Lucy. Ignazio is the founder and art director of Oblivious Artefacts, a collective of artists that also includes the visual artist Marco Morici and the photographer Jose Florentino. Their black-and-white creations go from static visual art to live video sets, but it’s all pulled together by Ignazio’s aesthetic sense. To get a better idea of where Oblivious is coming from, we sent over some questions to Ignazio via email earlier this month.

Why “Oblivious”?

Oblivious Artefacts is intended in the sense of oblivious devices, the combination of these two words creates a kind of paradoxical short circuit in its meaning. A device is something produced, programmed by definition, to imagine it as unconscious creates misunderstanding, ambiguity, a world affected by error, the continuous analog variations that generates new potentiality. Our imagination works within these limitations, investigating the perception of images, invoking moods that range from the surreal to the objective. We perceive the apparatus as something physical, mechanical, while the oblivious, memory, is as impalpable as a dream.

I think that this is summed up well in contemporary music, to be intangible and physical, poetry and body. Contemporary electronic music is firmly rooted in my generation, and over time this bond will only deepen. We listen to music to a greater extent than in the past, we have innumerable tools to make it and the world of music production has expanded enormously. I think of sound as a physical element that creates a dialogue between the universe and my body. I love the low frequencies and obsessive rhythms of techno because they hide something atavistic, being in contact with the ground and simultaneously projecting into the depths of space. Inside a club, it’s as if your body becomes a sounding board, a process of emptying and of vibration, where sound and thoughts are generated and made into matter, converging, wrapping everything that surrounds us.

Can you talk about the first concept behind the label’s covers? I imagine it must be hard to start from scratch.

The problem exists in the sense that there is no beginning sketch to work from, but luckily, the root of the graphics lies within the music, in the strength and clarity of the ideas on which the musical project is based. This belief has led us to only work with labels that believe in what they’re doing, in what they want to communicate. In the end, what we do is nothing more than bringing another level of understanding to the music, it is as if we help describe the space in which that particular music lives. I try and put myself in the musician’s skin, as if I have been invited to journey with them, to lose myself in their sounds, to align myself with their frequencies in search of a compositional rhythm for my graphics.

When we made the SA series in vinyl for Stroboscopic Artefacts, the problem was double: to understand what the image for the series should be as well as the image that the label wanted to project of themselves. The first releases were a declaration of intent, with songs like “Why Don’t You Change” by Lucy with the voice of Krishnamurti, “Gmork” from Lucy as well as “Fixing the Error” by Xhin. One needs to think of music as a tool for social communication to investigate our relationship with nature, and to identify its roots in distant lands and cultures.

You rarely see color in your work. Why is that?

That’s a question that I get asked often. The world of communication today is often a world of information overload, and our approach is linked to processes of subtraction rather than addition. We try to reduce the information, to condense it. With black and white you can define space, volume, the depth of things. We avoid color because it generally flattens perception to the surface level, which solicits superficial emotion, when, instead, what we care about is the rapport we have with deeper emotions.

If I could imagine a sense to experience our work, it would be touch, it is not by chance that Deleuze suggested in his text “Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, Galilée” a touch functionality for the eye. What color does touch have? Our graphics have a sort of built-in color that changes with the emotive aspects of sound.

You state in the Oblivious bio that technology is kept to a minimum. Why?

Technology has always been a key element for us in our research, both in video and sound applications, and ultimately the museum installations are becoming more and more complex in their technological construction. Nevertheless we want to maintain a lo-fi profile in which technology is understood as a tool and not as an end. Use music as a method, as a process to overcome the antithesis of nature/culture.

We believe that a real contrast between mind and nature does not exist, but it rather exists as a common logic, where the world is always filtered by a bright and digital gaze, whereby everything is structured and geometrically designed, finished and measured as well as a continuous, analogical and unsound gaze, which is rich and infinite in its depth and breadth. When we think about the man today, we may not consider him as an entity separate from nature but rather as a whole, technology, as a cultural event, is integrated into ourselves as well as nature, in medio stat virtus, the virtue lies in their balance.

Can you talk about the series that is used in the album cover on Lucy’s new album Churches Schools and Guns? How was it constructed?

The series of the “Bestiario” from which the picture covering Lucy’s album is taken dates back to 2010 and it is still open. As many of my works, it does not have a given life range, I do not like setting up deadlines. I like to imagine it as a cave, a removal place where I do not know when the extraction ends. It is mainly a work on the imagination, on the idea that the world’s thought may be manipulated, its image, including the most concrete, may be changed as desired. It is like seeing shapes in the clouds, discovering imaginary animals or mythical figures shaped by the wind.

I am mostly fascinated by the revealing of the human power, the thought’s force, which is above all physical force. In albums such as Lucy’s, with such a powerful and radical title, the risk of minimizing its richness was evident, therefore I have chosen a rarefied picture. They are isographic lines, conventional traces that are used to describe the shape of the territory and the elevation of mountains in geographical maps. I have deleted parts of them, I have redrawn a sort of virgin territory, identified distinguishable shapes, a bonzo in this case. A picture that in our culture we connect to meditation, the effort aimed at the elevation of the spirit. How could we forget the images of the monk Thích Quảng Đức who committed suicide by fire in 1963?

Video, sculpture, graphic design: All of these are such different mediums. How does it all fit together in your mind?

I believe that contamination is at the base of the contemporary way of thinking. I feel the need to cover different media in order to extend the possibilities of expression. When I perform graphic design works I often think as a sculptor, when I work on videos I break their composition into different parts as a graphic designer or photographer. In our mind there is a lot of space. It depends on ourselves, the opening of horizons. Lately I am interested in acting and dance. My intention is to establish a cooperation with an acting company with the aim of working on a couple of projects where contemporary music, landscape and movement may coexist in a single experience.

What is the most interesting thing about Lucy’s music for you?

Probably his great capacity of building places, describing sound stories. When he composes music it seems that he is always telling you something, doing it in a way that is always new and original. Each one of his new works is a guide for discussions that range among a lot of different topics. He is a breeding ground of ideas, I would say an enlightened client... if he was not always working in the dark.

This feature is part of a week of articles guest curated by Stroboscopic Artefacts boss Lucy. To check out more of the features that Lucy picked out, check out his guest curator hub page.