FAKEWHALE in conversation with Riccardo Benassi
In this conversation with Riccardo Benassi, Fakewhale explores the deep weave between language, technology, and existence that characterizes his work. From the poetic ruminations of Daily Dense Dance Desiderio to the unsettling emotional landscapes of Morestalgia, Benassi reflects on how art, architecture, and internet culture shape, and are shaped by, our fragile attempts at self-definition. His voice moves through existential urgency, subtle irony, and the search for a sustainable form of collective presence. This interview invites you into the radical undercurrents of Benassi’s practice: a world where cracks, glitches, and ephemeral traces become the true matter of survival and creation
Fakewhale: In Daily Dense Dance Desiderio, you speak of using GPT-3 not just as a tool but as a partner in a shared writing process that challenges your sense of uniqueness. How did confronting the machine’s “imitation” of your inner voice transform your perception of authorship and identity?
Riccardo Benassi: I received beta access to GPT-3 during the pandemic times and therefore the historical-social spiral and the subjective one overlapped. I activated a path of internal excavation in diary form supported by the predictive writing system in which I had processed all my public texts written up to that point. In reading the initial results I was thus certain that I could be technically replaced to the point that even I was no longer able to notice what I wrote on my own and what I didn’t. This created a schism in my psychic ecology, at least initially, to the point that without the assistant who was working with me at the time I would never have been able to bring the path to a landing point. Needless to say this is clearly due to the fact that on an identity level I identify with what I write. Then I realized that what comes to me as a prompt-based system is actually a past-based system, that is, it brings something new into the world provided that it is obtained by copying and reconfiguring what is established and incontrovertible: the past in the form of data-entry. In other words, the system was not producing texts potentially written by me but potentially written by old versions of me who were not granted – unlike me – any transformative and progressive hypothesis. And ultimately – like a financial product – my value and my action on planet earth must be read as evolving, potentially, with respect to my tomorrow, not in relation to what is consolidated but in relation to what not even I know about future versions of me (that is, how Daily Desiderio functions).
Throughout your conversation with Andrea Bellini, you link artistic labor to a broader “artisticization of society,” where creative gestures are democratized but often hollowed out. How do you navigate between critical distance and necessary participation in this aesthetic economy?
I think what you call critical distance is actually the possibility of testing free thought in the total absence of free will. The only way I allow myself to participate in the aesthetic economy, however, has to do with choosing to do only what I assume someone else or something else cannot do or has not chosen to do. Perhaps the balance between these two polarities – which determine an abstract binary system useful only for the sake of the discussion – has to do with the identification of the different roles that the artist assumes within the societies that s/he is fortunate and courageous enough to pass through.
Your reflections on “co-presence” evoke Aldo Capitini’s philosophy, merging the living and the dead within the same existential space. How do you imagine your digital works, like DDD or Morestalgia, participating in this expanded, trans-temporal human community?
I feel that everything that is directed to humanity includes all the bodies that pass through the artwork but also all the bodies that have ever been in the world and all the bodies that are yet to come into the world. The materialization of every artwork is just a trigger for intelligible consequences.
Tracing the emotional and conceptual evolution of your practice, which figures, artists, thinkers or movements have most influenced your work, either as inspirations or as necessary counterpoints?
All the musicians who made me fluctuate (Ambient music I guess) and all the musicians who made me dance (Techno music I guess) and all the artists who have decided to implement the text in the world of visual arts in order to open up access to it from a spectatorial point of view.
In describing the “stream of unconsciousness” behind your writing, you highlight the effects of hyper-fragmentation, ADHD, and the internet’s endless call for multitasking. How do you see this cognitive condition shaping the future forms of literature and artistic expression?
My feeling is that all this leads to a new form of public honesty that can sound like an extreme intensification of narcissism.
Morestalgia portrays the internet as an “emotional datascape” that simultaneously nurtures and erodes subjectivity. Could you delve deeper into how you construct installations that resist the smoothing effect of digital nostalgia while working with its raw emotional materials?
I use my body as an antenna and my existence as a scapegoat—the alibi of creating the artwork allows me to go through emotions while reminding myself that what I feel, what I sense, is never just mine. And the artwork is always the extroversion of what I still don’t know, which begins as personal paranoia and then becomes collective reality, not a goal but a drift in which I allow others to participate… even if it were only to keep us company.
Your work often leverages the symbolic and infrastructural power of architecture, treating it as a living archive of social and political tension. How does your sculptural and installation practice attempt to “inhabit the cracks” left by institutional or material failures?
I have a lot of faith in the void, I feel its call, let’s say, its request to be semantized even if temporarily and its scent of unprecedented possibilities. In retrospect, I think I inherited this drive, this volition, this passion, from the free party movement: there is no ceremony more suitable than a rave to describe the attempt you refer to. With respect to failures, if in addition to the institutional and material ones we add the technical ones and the way in which they modify our very idea of humanity, then the work of art necessarily comes into play.
Dancefloorensick captures Berlin’s pandemic rave protests as a site where both resistance and conformity buzz within the same “noisiness.” What relationship do you see between collective euphoria, political protest, and the persistent exhaustion of bodies under techno-capitalism?
There is nothing better than debris to dance on, especially if it belongs to History and one wriggles free from its burden in sync with companions on the journey… Now that power has become immaterial, physical tiredness cures mental tiredness.
Your frequent collaborations with educational institutions suggest a strong belief in the pedagogical potential of art. How do you balance your role as an artist seeking personal liberation with your role as a teacher fostering collective critical thinking?
I believe in public education as the main tool for emancipation from the destiny that each of us has found ourselves inhabiting by being born in a specific body, in a specific time, in a specific family, in a specific culture, in a specific geographical area. When I studied art history in University I did it to find out if anyone had forgotten to do something important and if so, to do it myself. While teaching I’m lucky enough to always meet new generations, thus to discuss with new users their relationship with the phenomenology of contemporary interfaces and the way in which they modify the knowledge of the world and of existence. Teaching has also allowed me to walk the tiny line between making complex thoughts stupid and making them simple and understandable, till the point that today, I believe that the most sophisticated form of being an activist is being a popularizer, especially on social networks.
fakewhale
Founded in 2021, Fakewhale advocates the digital art market's evolution. Viewing NFT technology as a container for art, and leveraging the expansive scope of digital culture, Fakewhale strives to shape a new ecosystem in which art and technology become the starting point, rather than the final destination.
You may also like
Weaving Technology into the Future of Fashion and Identity
As we witness a transformative shift in the fashion landscape, a shift driven by groundbreaking tech
Paolo Canevari: Memory, Power, and Transformation
Paolo Canevari, born in Rome in 1963, has established himself as a distinctive figure in the contemp
Robbie Barrat: Unmasking ‘The Lost Robbies’
In the fast-paced world of AI-generated art, Robbie Barrat ‘s “AI Generated Nude Portrai
