Phonemenology

Riccardo Benassi analyses technology’s impact on our relationship with space, reflecting on how technological devices have radically changed structures for living and organising reality, from architecture to politics, from cultural production to consumption. The video essay Phonemenology’s five chapters are a journey across different stages: from how the perception and consumption of music has changed since cell phone ringtones entered our lives, to the narration of European gangsta-rap – a musical genre characterised by a voice that tells a personal story and video filmed in the suburbs – passing through gentrification, the circulation of goods in a globalised society up to techno-privatisation. Objects, 3D animations and textual parts make the artist’s thoughts explicit on the screen at several levels, in a continuously changing setting – from the home, to the European suburbs, from the waters of an unknown sea, to the countryside – composing a phenomenology of contemporary interfaces.