Free Wi-Fi
Free Wi-Fi Installation (or Intrusion). Photo: Melina Furlan

By Clara Sampaio
Collaborators: Carlo Schiavini and Elvys Chaves

Free Wi-Fi is a familiar phrase in many urban centers, accompanied by symbols that have become part of contemporary visual language. Invisible but essential, this network connects people, breaks down physical barriers and redefines the way knowledge and participation become possible. In the context of the work proposed by artists Carlo Schiavini and Elvys Chaves for the 8th International Seminar Arte!Brasileiros In Vitória, however, this connection is proposed as a gesture of “hacking”, an attitude that questions institutional structures and the very materiality of the art object.

How can audiences be even more active and engaged? Which bodies are included or excluded from cultural institutions? Starting from these questions, the artists create a sculpture that explores the critical shift between inside and outside, art and audience.
Positioned in the library of the Espírito Santo Art Museum (MAES) – a symbolic place of the institution's educational role – the work establishes a direct dialogue between the museum space, its collection and the city, activated by passers-by, who, through a camera on the museum's façade, incorporate a digital garment.

In turn, inside the library, images are constructed on various surfaces, “defective” televisions, whose particularities of signal emission and glitches compose their pictorial design. In one of them it is possible to see the human model that generated the wearable element: found in a database, this empty, mysterious and colorless body connects to its peers in an infinite digital space: without time, without sound, without place.

This fusion between the body and technology exposes the omnipresence of systems that overlap the dimensions of the public and the private, of the individual and the collective. This work is based on this notion of a network, which not only unites but also allows observation and codification, recombination and materialization.

The installation is structured around a hollow iron composition, supporting televisions, panels and other devices, creating an environment that refers to both transparency and the exposure of the means of communication and control. For the artists, “the exposed ironwork is not a secondary detail, but an essential element for the work to fulfill its critical and conceptual function. It highlights the construction processes and materials and reaffirms the need for more open, accessible and transparent artistic spaces.”

In this clash between body and technology, the fusion between human and machine becomes inevitable, and, as Haraway 1 proposes, “there is pleasure in this confusion of boundaries, but there must be responsibility in this construction”. The work not only materializes this intersection, but also warns of its risks, highlighting the fluid limits between human and artificial creation, presence and control, autonomy and surveillance.

This experience invites people to take a risk: to be captured, even if momentarily, while still outside — and urged to come in if they want. Free Wi-Fi aims to captivate with its apparent “commonplace” and invite reflection and a deeper perception of the urgencies that cross our path.

The boldness of providing an internet network in an institution that does not yet have this service understands this issue as urgent, and the gesture as a motto and a work. It inserts the work into the long tradition of the dematerialization of the artistic object, but reaffirms its current relevance by redefining the presence and democratization of institutional spaces. At the intersection of technology and aesthetics, the question is not only what it means to be connected, but also to whom this possibility is really open.

(1) Haraway, Donna J. Cyborg Manifesto. The Companion Species Manifesto. Translated by Ana Maria Chaves. Lisbon: Orfeu Negro, 2022. ✱


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