Does art anticipate science? Luca Rossi's artistic intuition becomes software

An idea conceived by artist Luca Rossi in 2013 has turned, more than a decade later, into a... technological product. In fact, U.S.-based developer Riley Walz recently launched IMG_0001, a platform(accessible from this address) that uses millions of videos uploaded to YouTube via the “Send to YouTube” application of iPhones from 2009-2012. This project, which Walz described as an ode to the nostalgia and poetic chaos of forgotten digital content, takes up a strikingly similar concept to Luca Rossi’s artistic work, If you don’t understand something search for it on YouTube.

Luca Rossi, a collective known for its provocations, critical work, and for being a kind of crazy splinter in contemporary Italian art, had developed a series in 2013 that exploited the vast archive of anonymous videos automatically generated by iPhones, identified by the acronym “IMG_XXXX,” to create an ever-changing work. Rossi’s research focused on the visual and narrative chaos generated by the amateur videos, transforming them into a kind of contemporary “Sistine Chapel,” as he repeatedly called it.

These videos, often lacking a clear theme or professional quality, represent fragments of life that would otherwise have remained submerged. Rossi’s work, which he called "altermodern," did not add new content to the already saturated digital landscape, but offered a way to explore and manage the incessant flow of information that characterizes our age.

From digital chaos to contemporary art

In Rossi’s vision, the center of our existence has become the screen: that of the phone, the computer, the television. “In this situation,” Luca Rossi said more than a decade ago, “we do not need to express ourselves, we do it too much. To save ourselves, we need to order and manage this enormous amount of information, of which we are both creators and victims. To remain imprisoned in the surface of our screen is to suffocate and be anesthetized: social networks are not a true community and keep us divided in our cages of individualism. It is as if we are in a room with 100 other people similar to us and talking at the same time: we cannot understand anything and we cannot communicate anything.” The series therefore “does not propose yet another piece of content, yet another work of art, but a way of ordering and managing the content that is already being produced abnormally in the world every day.”

The project If you don’t understand something search for it on YouTube proposed a kind of digital ecology, prompting viewers to immerse themselves in playlists of random videos by searching YouTube for terms such as “IMG_” followed by random numbers. This search generated a different collection each time, made up of poetic and surreal fragments of other people’s lives. Rossi described this approach as a form of “visual training,” an exercise in observing the world in unexpected and out-of-the-box ways.

Riley Walz’s technological version

The idea that Riley Walz turned into reality with the IMG_0001 site clearly echoes many of the central aspects of Rossi’s work. Walz leveraged a bot to identify more than 5 million “IMG_XXXX” videos on YouTube, uploaded during the period when Apple was allowing users to directly submit their videos to the platform.

Using the site’s retro, 1990s-inspired aesthetic and a targeted selection of videos (fewer than 150 views and under 150 seconds in length), Walz created an immersive experience that invites the audience to explore the forgotten digital world. The result is a mosaic of human, nostalgic and often surreal fragments that traces Rossi’s original insight.

When art anticipates science

The overlap between Luca Rossi’s work and Riley Walz’s project raises interesting questions about the relationship between art and technology. Rossi’s insight, which began as a critique and reflection on the overproduction of digital content, has found a second life, or a new life, in a technological project.

Luca Rossi described his series as a still but continuously growing work. This paradox perfectly reflects the essence of the project: a work that feeds on digital chaos, constantly mutating thanks to the unconscious contributions of millions of people. Walz, for his part, said he was inspired by an article by a computer engineer explaining the workings of the “Send to YouTube” function, but the similarities with Rossi’s work suggest that art can often anticipate technological processes, illuminating unexpected possibilities for the future.

Does art anticipate science? Luca Rossi's artistic intuition becomes software

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