VIVO DESIDERIO celebrates the vibrance & magic of romantic passion
11 November 2023
>> Artists Isa Kost and oculardelusion will launch the first nine pieces of a generative collection – VIVO DESIDERIO (“Living Desire”) – 14 November 2023, on MakersPlace
VIVO DESIDERIO – which means “living desire” in Italian – expresses the vibrance, magic, sensuality, and ever-changing emotions we experience when falling in love.
Isa Kost (Italy) & oculardelusion (US/UK) met as members of the DADA collective, and in May and June 2023 spent weeks together mounting an exhibition at MEET Digital Culture Center in Milan. During that time, the two artists collaborated intensively on an art installation for the exhibition – and discovered that their skills, interests, and styles complemented each other beautifully.
“We’re both inspired by organic forms, and both have an emotive, whimsical quality to our work. Isa’s style tends to be precise and thoughtfully composed, while my approach is more free-form and intuitive,” says oculardelusion. “Together, we are able to create work that’s true to each of us as individuals while being completely unique from what we’d create on our own.”
After weeks working in Milan, they retreated to oculardelusion’s home in coastal Norfolk, England, to recover. They walked the beaches, gathering shells and digging for cockles, and found themselves having long discussions about the nature of love and desire. Meanwhile, they carried on making art daily. Thus was born VIVO DESIDERIO – a celebration of romantic passion that combines Isa’s precise and whimsical anatomical drawings with oculardelusion’s psychedelic expressionism and poetry.
Originally conceived as a generative piece, the base of the artwork comprises nine layers, each with nine states, resulting in 387,420,489 possible combinations.
The layers include:
ELEMENT: organic elements framing the figure
POEM: a line of poetry adorning the figure’s waist as a belt
SEED: a jewel augmenting the figure’s navel
TATTOO: decorative elements appearing on the figure
DESIDERIO: the main object in the region of the womb
DESIDERIO AUMENTATO: desire augmented
SKIN & BONES: the figure
SURFACE: the background texture
DEPTH: the background colour
“The number nine holds important symbolic meanings across cultures,” say the artists. “It represents the fulfillment of cycles, and is the number of fruition, enlightenment, and wisdom. In Tarot, nine is the number of completion, signaling the coming of renewal. Multiplying by nine always results in numbers that add up to nine. Of course, it’s also the gestation time for a human baby, too.”
For the initial launch, the artists have hand-assembled from these layers nine favourite combinations, to which they have added specially drawn elements, illuminated and brought to further life with animations.
The initial nine animated VIVO DESIDERIO artworks will be available as 1/1 editions from 14 November, on MakersPlace.
After this launch, the artists plan to continue releasing unique generative artworks from the VIVO DESIDERIO collection. Collectors of the initial 1/1s will be given preferential access to these near-future mints.
“We love that the artwork has the capacity to generate more than 300 million unique iterations. If we were to output one piece a day, it would cover more than 821,917 years… in other words, into eternity,” says oculardelusion. “Each experience of love is unique, yet love itself is infinite and eternal. We look forward to Vivo Desiderio unfolding into the future, long beyond our own lifetimes – sort of a message in a bottle sent out from our lives today.”
// ANATOMILIA
VIVO DESIDERIO is just the beginning of an ambitious project. In early 2024, the artists will begin producing further collections under the long-term project umbrella of ANATOMILIA.
The idea for this project also emerged from the artists’ time in Milan: “During our time together there, Isa took me to the Fondazione Prada museum to visit Cere Anatomiche, an exhibition featuring 18th-century lifelike wax models used to teach anatomy at hospitals and universities. It was both distressing and beautiful to view the bodies of otherwise perfect young women flayed for the world to see. Why shouldn’t the insides of our bodies be considered as beautiful and worthy of regard as the outside? We want to bring that sense of intense vulnerability – of emotion as a deeply embodied, physical experience – to our art.”
“Meanwhile, we invite collectors to begin engaging with VIVO DESIDERIO. We hope you’ll agree that 300 million states perfectly captures the energies of falling in love – their ever-changing, heightened, vibrant, complex, and sometimes sorrowful, chaotic energies and sensations.”
>>> VIEW THE DROP >>> + READ THE MAKERSPLACE INTERVIEW >>>
BIOS
oculardelusion (Karen Frances Eng) experiments with digital and analog tools and chance processes to retrieve ephemera from dreams and internal states. She's currently immersed in emerging technologies as mediums of expression and collaboration. Her work includes layerings of VR, AR and AI; mixed-reality, townscale public art; large-scale animated projection; and collaborative artmaking facilitated by blockchain. In 1990, she earned a bachelor’s degree from University of California, Los Angeles, in poetry – her first love.
karenfranceseng.com
Tw/Inst @oculardelusion
Artist and graphic designer Isa Kost was born in Italy, studied art and holds a degree in architecture. Kost dedicates herself to research projects in contemporary art. In her works, she experiments with both analog techniques such as printing, collage and photography, as well as digital tools. Her approach is to go on journeys as an explorer of the contemporary world, similar to those who set out to discover new lands or new species of plants and animals. She is a lover and experimenter of data visualization.
Isakost.net
Tw @isakost
Inst @isaboh74
linktr.ee/isakost