Alessandro Imperato

 


Alessandro is a theorist/practitioner in the field of visual arts and new digital media. He teaches in the Department of Motion Media Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta, USA. He approaches motion design from a fine art perspective and places great emphasis on concept development, visual research and experimentation. Alessandro completed his doctorate in the ‘History, Theory and Practice of Visual Arts’ under the supervision of Professor Francis Frascina and Dr. Jonathan Harris at the University of Keele in 2001. His Ph.D. was part of an innovative and new area of doctoral research in which the theory and practice of visual arts and media were given an equal status and focus. After starting his career as a painter, which involved a scholarship to study at the British Academy in Rome in 1992, Alessandro developed a cross-media practice that involved conceptual sculpture; installation and video based work as well as the utilization of digital media following its emergence in the early 1990’s. Alessandro studied visual theory and art history, which he pursued at post-graduate level in the Department of Fine Art at the University of Leeds, which is internationally renowned in the fields of research in the Social History of Art and Visual Culture. He is an active researcher in both the theoretical and practical areas of digital and new media, particularly in the area of digital video. This includes performing regularly in real-time public installation performances using digital video projection. He writes articles and is currently conducting research on the social history of digital media art. Alessandro is a founder member of the Medeology Collective - www.medeologycollective.com www.medeology.com http://www.medeologycollective.comhttp://www.medeology.comhttp://www.medeology.comshapeimage_2_link_0shapeimage_2_link_1

Alessandro Imperato is an English born digital artist and theorist in the social history of art and media theory.  His imagery draws heavily on Brechtian strategies of ‘making strange’ settled meanings and narratives by jarring juxtaposition of potent signs.  His work is particularly concerned with international military conflict in the post-Cold War and the increasing political contexts of cultural repression and regulation.


Alessandro’s practice as a cultural producer can be described as being digital media montage.  The artwork is intended to make sense of the mediations between reality and its representations.  He aims to contribute towards a strategy of critically re-coding the post-war dualism between abstraction and figuration. He regards art to be an important aspect of political and ideological struggle, in which realism and art’s critical relationship towards society involves an adequate re-description of present lived conditions.  One of his aims is to contribute towards a Critical Realist aesthetic and to develop an adequate signifying practice that can take account of the various changing areas of political and cultural struggles.  Revealing the social conflicts inherent in art and the media can expose the construction of myths of artistic autonomy and reveal artifacts as sites of political struggle.  Alessandro is not interested in the invention of a private language, but in using the signs, forms and images  of society to subvert and transform their meanings in order to reveal the myths and ideological distortions of cultural representations.








Media Art as a form of ideology critique offers a resource whereby the politics of representation and the representation of politics can re-code cultural and political elements.  Rhetoric, speeches, cliches and images already in social currency set up fields of meaning which define and represent reality, challenging these frames of reference at the level of signification is a task for cultural producers. Alessandro’s aim is to go beyond the topicality of the issues in question in order to reveal the wider social and political significance art can have.

‘Hand Drawn Venus on Computer’, 1985