Nine iconic Roman sites mapped through audio recordings which visualize their sonic weight
9 Unique Videos
20 of each video will be
sold at .0494 ETH
27 Unique 3D Maps
20 of each 3D Map will be
sold at .0242 ETH
9 Unique Stills
20 of each still will be
sold at .0387 ETH
Augmented Rome
Accursed Share and Mat3ria, Galeria Matèria’s Web3 laboratory, are proud to present Augmented Rome, a project by Priscilla Pallante, an emerging artist who is pushing photography past conventional bounds and into uncharted territory in the NFT space.
Project Details
Mixing psychogeography with cymatic imaging techniques, Pallante has mapped nine iconic Roman sites through audio recordings to present them as they’ve not been seen—but only, perhaps, felt—before.
Priscilla Pallante: Augmented Rome is a collection of NFT artworks offering an intricate, complex portrait of the Eternal City captured through sonic resonances. A native of Rome herself, Pallante deploys novel photographic techniques to reimagine its landscape anew by materialising sound waves recorded at famed urban landmarks like the Fori Imperiali, the ancient road that runs between Piazza Venezia and the Colosseum. For this project, Pallante collected feedback of voices and noises while walking through the city, from the Castel Sant’Angelo to the basilica of San Pietro, visualising their frequencies to generate a ‘parallel vision and version of Rome’. Technologies such as 3D mapping and cymatic geometries enable Pallante to, in her words, ‘give shape to the sonic weight that I perceived in my city but that I could not see’.
3D Audio Maps
Pallante’s 3d maps represent a three-dimensional materialisation of the audio feedback showcased in the bidimensional cymatic images that make up the 9 short videos. The maps are the only images and objects in the collection that holistically translate the audio frequencies into distinct visuals. This is a unique point of value, with the maps serving as a counterpart and complement to the cymatics in the language of purely audial representation.
The printable .stl files accompanying the 3d maps enable collectors to print piece by piece what Pallante believes ‘Rome could look like if we could see sound.’ Accursed Share will also be introducing Decentraland technology to expand on Pallante’s vision that ‘even if Rome has its own sound characterisation, every big city could sound and look this way.’ The 3d maps will then function as instruments for collectors ‘to actually see the representation of sound inside their own physical environment.’
3D Models
These static images of 3d models are related to the touristic sites where Pallante recorded audio activity. These images and objects reimagine this activity in the form of plastic souvenirs that suggest existence in the physical world, if mediated more so through photographic transposition. As Pallante writes:
Photography has always had the great power to certify the existence of its subject: if it is inside the photographic object, then it exists and I cannot doubt its existence, because it is not possible to photograph what is not physically present in front of the photographic medium.
The 3d models underscore the ambiguity of Pallante’s movement between the seen and unseen layers of her city, as she exploits photography’s ‘relationship with reality and its limits towards the representation of what is not physical or visible’, but audial. The printable models exist or could exist as ‘physical objects’, and not only as digital entities, but photographed, are born into digital life.
Cymatic Videos
Each cymatic video interpolates images related to each site and the audio recorded in that specific place, extracted from the single track underlying the composite 1/1 NFT video. The cymatic images assigned to each site are composed of, as Priscilla writes:‘
figures that I found repeating many times, in order to have the most accurate depiction of the audio sample I collected through the city and of how that place in Rome would look like if we could see sound waves, using the scientific method that is based on the repetition of an experiment and on the selection of the most recurring attitudes of the objects under examination.’
The cymatic images, as seen through these GIFs, function like coordinates for the site, collating frequencies perceived and measured by Pallante as she walks through its three-dimensional space. They become a bi-dimensionally accessible means of orienting oneself as if inside a 3d-modeling program, as a way to capture the complex range of data at each site.
Artist Biography
Priscilla Pallante (Italian, b. 1992) is a photographer and visual artist living and working in Rome. She received her Bachelor’s degree with honours in photography at the European Institute of Design in Rome (2016). Pallante researches the relationship between photography and new technologies by seeking out new strategies for representing that which evades representation: virtually, photographically, and otherwise. Pallante uses the paradoxes of photography to produce illusions of reality. Working with photography in a quasi-documentary tradition, she records what is not, or not yet, visible in the physical world.
With a focus on process, Pallante follows an idea through its evolution into an object, as its dimensionality is transformed through interactions with new scientific tools so that a photographic trick eventually becomes a truth. Investigating relations between photography and other disciplines, Pallante aims to bring her craft beyond the material and conceptual parameters of the photograph itself, an imperative actualised in Augmented Rome and well-suited to the dynamic possibilities of crypto and blockchain-based artwork.
