Alessandro Zannier

“ENT2 VENICE/YAOUNDÉ”

After his participation in the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021 (Italian pavilion ‘Resilient Communities’) with the event ‘ENT1 – Venice/Auckland’ in connection with New Zealand, Alessandro Zannier played the dual role of visual artist and musician-performer, creating the second ENT pair, this time with Africa. He compares environmental data from Venice and Cameroon and generates digital 3D animations created by decoding cross-referenced big data that dialogue via the web through two bright twin obelisk-installations, one of which was sent to the capital Yaoundé.

Based on the contents of the concept album ‘Entanglement’ (released under the musical alias Ottodix), the project investigates the visual representation of the global human collective over a vast space-time scale understood as a swarm of events. Zannier’s work encourages us to think about the immediate correlation today between individual local phenomena in the global network, with instantaneous causes and effects on the entire system (pandemics, the economy, fake news, pollution, global warming, war, etc.). It presents an original portrait of man no longer understood as an individual, but as a colony of phenomena, as a collective, obtained by decoding of big data.

As a hybrid between digital and concrete, science and art, reality and utopia, the ENT project was chosen for participation in the NFT pavilion with both physical and intangible works. The artist presents the bright ‘ENT2 Venice/Yaoundé’ obelisk, which generates animations obtained from the sophisticated overlap of different environmental data from Cameroon such as deforestation, the drying of Lake Chad, microplastics in the sea, and noise pollution in its ports. The NFTs on display, all signed by the artist, are videos obtained from some of these animations.

NFT ‘ENT SERIE’

Alessandro Zannier’s ‘ENT’ operation also acts NFTs because the medium conceptually expands the ‘network’ philosophy that inspired the entire project. The artist has therefore created a series of videos lasting between 15 and 20 seconds with titles that carry precise geographical coordinates on the world map, ports subject to noise pollution from ship traffic and the seas. The audio track in each video recreates the noise pollution in the respective area and the visuals consist of an animated 3D image generated by this sound.

The first video in the series is ‘ENTsoundscape#Auckland#NewZealand’ and the last one is ‘ENTsoundscape#Douala#Cameroon’. The overall design obtained by joining these points of the world outlines a form that will be the focus of a work planned for 2023. In order to compensate for the CO2 production required to make the NFT tokens, the artist is planting fruit trees in Cameroon that will absorb more than twice the amount of CO2 as emitted by the tokens and contribute to the gigantic ‘Great Green Wall’ designed to contain the advance of desert areas towards the south.