MEDIAMORPHOSIS — Vol. 1

MEDIAMORPHOSIS is a project of artistic investigation that connects science and power through interactive multimedia installations. It moves across different historical periods, brings their key events and figures to the fore, and builds a narrative that reveals the cyclical nature of time and the deep connections between scientific knowledge and power.

Vol. 1 explores the ties between science, discovery, innovation and power in nineteenth-century British imperial expansion. The installation welcomes the public into an environment that evokes a laboratory of research and scientific inquiry: documents, sources and connections form a system in which every element seems to find its place and science seems to confirm the order of things.

A large interactive concept map invites visitors to follow the threads that bind events, ideas and interests. A desk allows bibliographic and archival materials to be examined under the microscope. A digital panel offers a synthesis of the key events and figures.

Moving along the map, the apparent coherence of the system gradually reveals its own contradictions. The narrative of progress becomes entangled with slavery, imperialism and the manipulation of research and communication. A glitch cracks this harmony: an interference breaks the path, calls into question what seemed self-evident and lets the mechanisms of power emerge.

The invitation is to observe, connect and doubt: the sources, the narratives and the systems through which knowledge acquires authority.

Knowing, Classifying, Convincing, Conquering

The first chapter addresses the role of scientific knowledge in the age of imperialism. Science helped legitimize and strengthen imperial projects; the empires, in turn, supplied resources, territories, specimens and data that fed and accelerated scientific development. A few emblematic cases, together with the innovations that made them possible, show how scientific and technological knowledge could become an instrument of expansion and legitimation.

The age of empires is among the deepest and most aggressive accelerations of modern globalization, and without it the present is hard to read. It is a period dense with political, economic and cultural transformations, and with scientific, medical and technological advances comparable, in the reach of their innovations, to many of those of our own time. In these years dynamics mature and take hold that would have decisive consequences in the century that followed.

The starting point is a chance encounter that sums up the theme of the installation. An article published in Science in 1900, devoted to a lecture by Ronald Ross, the protagonist of this first chapter, contains the sentence: "In the coming century the success of imperialism will depend largely upon the microscope." Here lies the idea at the root of the installation: science is an instrument of conquest and, at the same time, a product of the conditions created by imperial expansion.

The success of imperial ventures required, first of all, a representation and a classification of the world and of the peoples who lived in it: a selective and subjective construction, designed to define hierarchies and to justify one's own supremacy. To describe and order reality meant deciding what had economic value, what deserved to be exploited and what could be ignored. This view of the world was then passed on to the public through images, books, museums, exhibitions, games and newspapers, and it made colonial expansion familiar and, in many cases, socially acceptable. The strength of the State and its project of expansion came to be bound up with the promise of scientific and technological progress.

The phase of conquest gathers and capitalizes on the results of the earlier ones: acquiring territories able to generate wealth, controlling strategic routes, gaining access to new raw materials and fostering medical and technological innovation.

Staying alive is the first condition for conquering the world. Fighting disease and raising life expectancy make it possible to occupy and hold territories. Knowledge of sea routes, together with geography, astronomy and meteorology, makes it possible to cross and connect distant lands.

Just as decisive is the discovery of new materials, raw materials, molecules and resources able to open markets to be controlled or monopolized. A new fabric, a plant with particular properties, new animal hides, minerals: every discovery can become an economic and strategic resource and fuel technological competition between States.

The logic is still the same today. Only the discoveries change.

The installation

MEDIAMORPHOSIS Vol. 1 translates this entanglement into a vast concept map that reconstructs the connections between science, discoveries, innovations, power, conquests and imperialism. The viewer is immersed in an intricate, soft tangle of wool: a reassuring, harmonious and enveloping environment in which everything seems to be going well. Every thread is connected to the others and leads toward an ultimate end, revealed at the close of the path: slavery, imperialism, the manipulation of research and communication. A glitch, the only element of rupture, breaks the harmony and brings down the curtain of power.