Leandro Summo

Intro： The research field is limited to the area of computer art and electronic art, which leads Summo to rework and experience the communicative and expressive potential of new media and devices borrowed from other languages, such as sound and live music, working also on the intersection between art and science. In his works, images and imagery blend with the suggestions of music, sounds and words and come to life in animation, dragged by the fluidity of a sense of time, constantly expanded, contracted or multiplied. They thus suggest a different perception, more active and intense, on the level of body and senses. Woven from the mobile and incorporating dimension of the event, the electronic art solicits in the observer an emotional, mental, physical participation, up to the point where the observer get transported inside the work, in an immersive and interactive dimension, making him the protagonist of its operations and strategies solicited by the artist himself. Light is often the protagonist: Summo focuses on its essential characteristics in space, with an approach increasingly similar to a mathematical aesthetic. The result is that, in his works, we are not allowed to identify boundaries between space and time, between author and user, between music and architecture, but we are carried teleologically to reach a unique perceptive experience: to create an interactive overcoming of digital expressiveness in which subject, object and materiality of works or performances blend in the continuum of an aesthetic-sensorial multi-tasking. Since the beginning, he has carried out a coherent and targeted research into electronic art projects of international scope, always following two essential categories of reference for this device: metamorphosis and metaphor. The production of videos, video installations, immersive spaces and interactions with the public, highlights the artist’s full will to transmigrate from immobility to movement, from object to immateriality, from completed to modifiable, from silence to sound, from physical data to fluidity, from matter to event, from contemplation to participation, from the visible to the invisible. The consistency and the quality of his research have led him to earn important awards, thanks to collaborations with the sacred monsters of the electronic music scene and in hybrid experiences that will earn him, in 2014, the critic Coge and Vezer award for the Glowfestival. It is the year in which he founds "Dualbit", a study and multimedia production company; a brief parenthesis because from 2017 he will focus again and exclusively on the research in the field of visual and performative contemporary arts, sealing this return with a project born in collaboration with the “Soprintendenza Archeologia della Puglia” and the “Teatro Pubblico Pugliese” for the “MArTA Museum” of Taranto, named “Ode a Taranto”; and another one, “Sounds and lights from the sacre” in “Palazzo Lanfranchi” in Matera, commissioned by the “Soprintendenza per i Beni Architettonici e Paesaggistici della Basilicata”, in line with the experience “Terre e territori”, an installation made for the cathedral of Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi, commissioned by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities. Among the international experiences, are worthy of mention the "Fiumano Fine Art - Four" in London in 2016 and participation in "The Wrong-New Digital Art Biennale" in San Paulo (Brazil) in the Homeostasis Lab Pavilion (2016) curated by David Quiles Guilló. In 2018 he will be at the LPM Festival at the “Mattatoio” in Rome. The most recent participation is in 2019, in Matera for "Apollo Soundtrack", an immersive video installation called by the same name for Brian Eno, Roger Eno and Daniel Lanois with Icebreaker, produced thanks to the contribution of the Leonardo group and the company e-GEOS (Telespazio e Agenzia spaziale italiana) in partnership with the “Fondazione Matera 2019”; a mix of electronic art, science and live music that seem to mark the stylistic signature of Leandro Summo and his love for symbiosis with cultured and live music, revealed in 2015 with the symbiotic design of digital sets for Madama Butterfly for the "Traetta Opera Festival" and "AMI Fest IV", in collaboration with "Japan Apulia Festival" in Tokyo.