The exhibition at Traffic Gallery in Bergamo wanted to document and reinterpret one of the most iconic projects produced by the milanese collective otolab, “op7”. Conceived in 2006 for the Mixed Media festival which took place in the Hangar Bicocca in Milano, it was presented with a video installation of the work, a triptych and seven photographic prints taken from the original video material. A catalogue was published for the exhibition including texts by Marco Mancuso and Claudia Attimonelli.
op7 was a site-specific commission by Marco Mancuso/Digicult within the curatorial work for the Mixed Media 2006 festival, with the aim of inviting the Milan-based collective to dialogue with the “I sette palazzi celesti (The seven heavenly palaces)” of Belgian artist Anselm Kiefer, seven post-industrial towers that are permanently located in the Hangar Bicocca in Milan. Thanks to a five-screen projection, Otolab set up an optical path through seven audiovisual tunnels of minimal black and white.
The multimedia work op7 by otolab is an artistic hybrid, born as a multisensorial live-media show, also able to express its potentialities through the modalities and codes that are typical of the audiovisual installation or of the exhibit. op7 is an ontologically important work, a link between the Italian project tradition and the present research around expressive codes in audiovisual synesthesy.
