Wayne Walter Dyer (1940 – 2015)
The Italian artist Maria Teresa Ortoleva collaborates with Kings College, London, in an artist-in-residence programme, where she gathers and analyses data, transforming her results into colourful drawings and 3-dimensional objects, in an attempt to uncover the hidden terrains of our intellect and convey their cyphers in an artistic vernacular.
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Ortoleva’s thoughtscapes are sculptural elements, cut out and made of acrylic glass, staged in vibrant formations of waves. One thing our brain still does better than anything else - including its rival, the computer - is recognise visual patterns. Our brain can connect objects and concepts that are unrelated. It will create a connection, and if that correlation is useful, it will add it as a building block. Based on Ortoleva’s conclusions, the individual constituents are placed according to the data she so vigilantly has scrutinised and at one and the same time inform their display. Her modelled renditions of facts are playful panoramas of the mind that have emerged from the obscure world of human synapses, where reason is born and shaped. These visualisations allow us to comprehend data at a glance and in an enhanced manner.
Let us concentrate on Ortoleva’s work 'Still Body Frenzy Mind’, 2017, it was created for Premio San Fedele and addresses the prize theme "Light" in terms of intensity, electricity and pulse, with reference to the recent analysis of modernity as the time of "intense living" formulated by the French writer and philosopher Tristan Garcia. An extremely intimate phenomenon, such as dreaming, is visualised by means of the electric waves it produces in a dreamer's brain. Escaping any scientific reduction, brainwaves are transfigured into Perspex lightnings, a sculptural and unexpected presence. They ideally electrify the exhibition space transversing it from floor to ceiling. The installation is expanded by cushions that invite the viewer to make himself comfortable and physically enter the mental universe evoked by the work. The documents on the wall add a scientific degree to the project, whilst broadening the range of its possible meanings. The work offers itself as a tool to activate intellective and sensory connections and associations in the viewer.' (Stefano Castelli, 2017, https://www.mariateresaortoleva.it/STILLBODY/index.htm)
It is curiosity that underpins Ortoleva's approach to the development of her drawings. Each illustration presents data she collated and analysed during her research and workshops - ephemeral moments of thoughts and impulses - narrated into intense enigmatic riddles, as we can observe in her series 'Handtrack of an Electric Thought.’ The black rhythmic scribbles swing like the ink pen of a seismograph, recording movements and activities. The optical exactitude floats in front of our eyes and coheres with and occupies the paper surfaces similar to mysterious calligraphic glyphs, which are enhanced by coloured spots, lines, and arrows.
Maria Teresa Ortoleva is an Italian artist based in London, whose research-based practice traverses science, data visualisation, and mental health moved by a commitment to underpin the relevance of imaginative thinking and its cognitive value to everyday life. The core of her study gives form to exhibitions, interdisciplinary collaborations, site-specific commissions, community projects, and education workshops. Currently, she’s represented in Milan by the Luca Tommasi gallery and is a Kings Artist-in-residence in the department of Informatics at King's College London. Ortoleva has exhibited widely, and her oeuvre is held in international collections.
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