Albert Figurt
Biography
Albert Figurt is a Video-Artisan, Multi-Instrumentalist and New Media Scholar from Italy / longtime affiliate with Amsterdam’s think tank INC (and the related VideoVortex community), he’s happily obsessed with the socio-anthropological & perceptual side æffects of online video / in the past years he’s been organizing Guerrilla Film-making workshops, lecturing on Desktop Narratives and teaching American exchange students about Non-Linear Storytelling and Expanded VideoEditing / first Italian recipient of a brand new Fulbright Grant specifically dedicated to Independent Researchers in the Art Field, in 2022 he spent 6 months as a Visiting Scholar at MIT investigating the audiovisual meta-format of Desktop Movies.
Photo credit: Albert Figurt
DESKTOPIA
the (bittersweeet) arts & crafts of screencast storytelling
2021 - 2025
VideoLoop Installation
How are we supposed to categorize a movie realized with no [usual] cameras, no [conventional] editing and very scarce [when not absent] additional sounds and/or good old spatiotemporal remapping tricks? Is it still possible to entertain an overstimulated, global audience with a long-take-based / artsy-if-not-conceptual / low-quality / glitch-flickering artifact?
By splintering, looping and sequencing both physical & cognitive functionalities of the average user, "desktop narratives" (aka screencast videos) can surely offer a challenging reconfiguration of the language of moving images, but also offer a metaphorical and speculative representation of daily routine, solitude/solipsism, algorithmic anxiety + fear, friendship & desire in our hardwired contemporary society.
The video-installation features clips from my recent practice-based research, articulated along 2 complementary approaches > namely “desk-talkz” interviews & “desktopian happeningZ” snippets. The overall goal is trying to expand the idea of HCI-derived storytelling while also challenging crucial notions like contemporary spectatorship and device-oriented fruition.
