Chiara Passa
Chiara Passa (1973, Italy) is a visual artist who analyses virtual spaces through a variety of techniques and devices. Her works range from interactive video installations and net-based art to site-specific digital interventions, while mostly deploying augmented reality and virtual reality technologies. Passa's work process includes research targeted at the different ways space is configured and how it is generated from electronic language, from the interaction with humans to the way they blend and melt together at a given point. The artist also interrogates architecture, surfaces and site-specific locations by combining them with augmented and virtual reality. In doing so, Chiara Passa points out the tension between the virtual and physical tools and achieves a strange oscillation between the virtual and the physical world.
In 1999 the artist coined the term "super-place" to characterize dynamic places in her digital artworks such as in 'Live Architectures'; virtual architectures that are generative, interactive, performative installations that, for example, react to human presence by altering their geometric configuration and structure. These installations are always transforming and thus moving beyond their functionality as simple architecture.
Chiara Passa is the founder of the Widget Art Gallery (2009), a virtual gallery space that exists as a tiny app and can be downloaded and added to your home screen on mobile devices.
Passa's artworks have been internationally exhibited at festivals and institutions such as ZKM Karlsruhe, Furtherfield Gallery London, Off Biennale Cairo, ISEA Disruption at Vancouver Art Gallery, Vortex Dome Los Angeles, RENEW Media Art History conference Riga, FILE Electronic Language International Festival São Paulo, Electrofringe - festival of new media art Newcastle, Australia, BizArtCenter Shangai, and 11° Biennale of Young Artists of Europe and the Mediterranean, Athens.
