Lanfranco Aceti

Dov’È la Mona? aka Modus Pixellandi: Where is the Art? is an early work made in Photoshop in 2000, at a time in the UK when what is now called transmedia, or what Aceti prefers to call ‘semiotic translation,’ was still in its early stages. The digital image appears as a long, thin stripe on the screen, a composite of separate images, each an artwork in its own right. It belongs to the long history of transformations and reinterpretations of the Mona Lisa by modern, contemporary and new media artists, a history that includes Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) and Andy Warhol’s multiplied Mona Lisas, and it explores the visibility, or invisibility, of the art object. Aceti rejects what he calls ‘interpassivity masked as interactivity’: the work does nothing, it simply exists, and ‘demands observation and intellectual decoding from the viewer.’