Website: https://degradationism.myportfolio.com
Degradationism is born from the mind of Federico Di Malta a visual and multimedia artist born in Thiene (VI) on 10/03/1999. In 2023, he obtained a Bachelor's degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, specializing in New Technologies for Art. His creative research focuses on the study and analysis of the instant in its aesthetic, mnemonic, conceptual, and perceptual forms, which finds its dissolution in what the artist calls Degradationism. This refers to the relentless and inseparable process through which our senses, particularly our eyes, are constantly subjected to an informational database of images, contacts, smells, tastes, and sounds, distracting us from the true moment of knowledge, consciousness, and creation: The Instant. Drawing a visual comparison with the world of cinema, we can define the memory of a human existence by likening it to the entire duration of a film. Firstly, we know that the fundamental unit of cinema is the frame. In terms of memory, it can be compared to a recollection, but for a recollection to exist, it requires an even more microscopic fundamental unit a keystone capable of reconstructing the entire memory within itself at the moment of recall: The Instant. This is possible because the instant represents a breaking point between an ordinary past and an unusual future, effectively marking the course of our lives and constantly altering it. However, our mind tends to destroy the spatiotemporal context of the event that our memory retains, leaving only the instant alive, enabling the recreation of the entire memory through a complex process of induction. Similarly, our senses cognitively record the reality of an instant in a minimal part, so reduced that it can be translated into a physical form as a point extremely vivid and sharp, resulting in a "punctum" (to paraphrase Roland Barthes) that is "piercing." As we move away from the instant, our senses undergo a process of degradation of things, where everything appears blurry, deformed, or undefined, reaching the extreme climax of accidental chaos known as De-gradation, the loss of reality's degree.