Valentina Vetturi's 'Tails' transforms Spazio Murat into a cable landscape

Valentina Vetturi (born 1979 in Bari) presents 'Tails' at Spazio Murat in Bari, curated by Silvia Franceschini. The installation is a performative landscape made of papier-mâché cables that fill the space, altering perception and referencing submarine fiber-optic cables. The title 'Tails' is an acronym for 'The Amnesic Incognito Live', a software used to eliminate online and offline tracking. Vetturi used an Open AI software to design the sculpture's plan, describing it as 'agency without intelligence' per Luciano Floridi's definition of AI. The papier-mâché material, previously used in her 2020 video 'La carta ricorda', is analog and sustainable, made of paper, water, and flour, which dries into a form but loses memory when immersed in water. This contrasts with the permanent digital memory of submarine cables. The work highlights the material weight of the internet, referencing Guillaume Pitron's 'Inferno Artificiale', which notes 1.4 million kilometers of cables producing heat and contributing to climate change. An ambient sound piece by Roberto Matarrese incorporates bee buzzes and fragments from Vetturi's 2016 work 'In the corridor of cyber space', drawn from her research on the Cypherpunk Mailing List (1991-2000), which included Julian Assange and addressed privacy, digital currency, and encryption. Vetturi does not demonize technology but cites Stephen Hawking: 'Our future is a race between the growing power of technology and the wisdom with which we use it.'