Anti-Social Sculptures

Anti-Social Sculptures
art that uses personal information
Street Ghosts
Persecuting US
Face to Facebook
Fingerprints Catalogue
Masses of individuals involved in artworks
without their consent
These anti-social experiments, which take the form of performances
and sculptures, are defined within the expanded notions of space,
body and audience that prevail today.
These experiments use informational entities that flow through a new
public space formed by media that bridges
online and offline environments.
Historical participatory art opened up to the audience:
Surrealism: “Exquisite corpse”
Theory: “Opera Aperta” by Umberto Eco
Media art: Douglas Davis or Roy Ascott
Anti-Social Sculpture:
“Social sculpture” is a term promoted by Joseph Beuys.
It named a kind of artwork that takes place in the social realm, an art
that requires social engagement, the participation of its audience,
for its completion.
Living Sculptures:
First Living Sculptures by Alberto Greco 1963 Buenos Aires,
mainly photographic work though.
Pi Lind, Living Sculptures ( yj ce rze by), 1967 Stockholm
“Sociological Exhibition”, “Social Realism”
Oscar Bony, The Worker Family (Familia Obrera), 1968, Argantina
His moral unease: “It is obvious that the work was based on ethics,
for exposing them to ridicule made me uncomfortable”
Oscar Masotta, To Induce the Spirit of the Image, 1966. Argentina.
(Poor people used for performance like Santiago Sierra)
An aggressive attitude toward participation.
“An act of social sadism made explicit”
“This social act of manipulation which in real society happen everyday”
He refused to the option “Either Happening or left politics”
PS: Masotta was part of Group of Mass Media Art in 1966 which did the first work of media art.
Paolo Cirio’s approach
Artistic and social experiments with a new,
rich material and a unique social space.
Pushing the boundaries of art forms that investigate
new possibilities and perceptions of reality.
Shifting cultural ideas about privacy
mark an exciting historical moment.
The difference between
Moral and Ethical
Anti-Social Sculptures
An Anti-Social Sculpture is the deliberate and explicit exploitation of individuals as
material for an artistic social experiment. The people who comprise these
performances produce new anti-social networks through coercive participation in an
artwork designed for a provocative and sensational spectacle. The stage of the
performance is delineated inside the mediated space of the Anti-Social Sculpture with
individuals becoming participants in a show for spectators who watch from afar via
the theater of popular media.
This sociological exhibition involves large quantities of informational bodies in an
artistic performance without their authorization. It is the latter transgressive artistic
practice that new media provides to the artist.
Artworks made by people, who use or are subject to personal media, pushes the
notion of spectatorship in art and performance to new frontiers.
The artist can play with this power of sorting and arranging huge amounts of personal
data and, in doing so, artistically reconfigure social forms. The social realities
generated by media platforms that collect people’s personal information can function
as a set of utilitarian structures for artistic creation. Today, artists can mold sensitive,
ready-made informational material and recontextualize it in new speculative scenarios
that comment on contemporary society.
The artificial hells created through these Anti-Social Sculptures are the reenactments
of today’s social reality: mass surveillance, obsessive stalking, isolated public debate
within a social bubble, profiling individuals as micro-targets, the social-manipulation
of public opinion, public disclosure of affinities, and misappropriation and exploitation
of personal and private information by companies and authorities.
These anti-social experiments, which take the form of performances and sculptures,
are defined within the expanded notions of space, body and audience that prevail
today. These experiments use informational entities that flow through a new public
space formed by media that bridges online and offline environments.
These sculptures offer viewers a potentially transformative experience through
cathartic performances generated by social interactions within an artful arrangement
of people. They remind us of the possibilities to construct new social realities by
reconfiguring information flow through algorithms. Designing new Social Algorithms is
a form of sculptural activity: in this case it shapes structures of people who interact
and participate, whether passively or actively, in lively performances or statically
unveiling their sociological state.
Ultimately, these sculptural performances of informational power aim to unsettle
alienating contemporary social conventions. They seek to raise awareness about
problematic situations by engaging randomly-selected crowds in a work of art, thus
reaching people who usually are excluded by art discourses and breaking the tedium
and passivity of media and art consumption.

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