Ultimo spettacolo a Milano,
2023
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Tutto,
per caso, automatismo e sovrappensiero
2021
Tutto is an experimental autobiographical novel I made using the private notifications from my smartphone. It’s a unique and slightly absurd book, written and assembled by an algorithm that spied on me, collected, and pieced together every single notification I received during my forced lockdown in October 2020.
With this project, I wanted to challenge traditional ideas of authorship and storytelling by using raw, deeply personal data—automatically generated, yet incredibly intimate. The algorithm created a narrative that’s unpredictable and oddly revealing, a mirror of how technology infiltrates and reshapes our everyday lives.
What fascinates me most about Tutto is the range of content: weather forecasts, private messages, bank alerts, porn ads... every notification I received during that period became raw material for the book. The result is a reflection on automation in the creative process—impersonal, yes, but also unavoidably personal. It’s a strange autobiography written by machines, but lived by me.
The book—featuring two unintentional forewords by Alessandra Ioalé and Andrea Tinterri—was first presented in 2021 during my solo show Non volevo fare assolutamente nulla in Udine, but it was only released publicly in 2023. Why the delay? Honestly, laziness. And a certain digital exhaustion, if I’m being poetic about it.
Unaware forewords by Alessandra Ioalé and Andrea Tinterri
Photo credits: Alessia Bressan
Opiemme, Segni, Auriemma. Tre novità editoriali, a cura di Tommaso Evangelista, 2023
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cursor.space,
A portable website to be projected on empty surfaces
2020
cursor.space
is a portable website: just a blinking cursor.
Nothing to read, nothing to click.
A pause, a waiting room, designed to be projected onto empty surfaces.
It looks like the beginning of something — but nothing ever starts.
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I just dotted the i's and crossed the t's of Kenneth Goldsmith's Uncreative Writing,
An exercise in abstract plagiarism
2020
So many books published every year and so little time to read.
In times of world-wide culture overproduction I didn't write a book: I made one book-looking object with a deep-looking statement on the cover. And honestly it doesn't take long to read.
On the inside I actually did what i state on the cover: I just dotted the i's and crossed the t's of Kenneth Goldsmith's Uncreative Writing book, leaving the i's dots, the t's crosses and the original pictures of Kenneth Goldsmith's book Uncreative Writing. Nothing else.
It's both an exercise in abstract plagiarism and a lazy homage to uncreative writing, an enlightening concept I learned too late from Kenneth Goldsmith.
Guido Segni, September 2020
Photo credits: Alessia Bressan
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For whom the phone rings,
2020
https://ringing-for-you.today
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Fino alla fine,
Forse una tempolinea infinita
2019
https://guidosegni.com/finoallafine
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Existence of a plug,
A battery log performance
2019
http://existence-of-a-plug.online
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Demand Full Laziness,
A five year plan
2018
In times of obsession for work, fear of the robots and strong technological acceleration a new hype haunted collective imagination: the hype of dull automation and full laziness. Demand Full Laziness was a five-year plan and a durational performance about art, labour, self-sustenance and laziness.
For five years (2018–2023), I delegated and automated part of the making of my artistic production by the use of a bunch of deep-learning algorithms in order to increase production, to overcome labour in art and to increasingly get abandoned to laziness.
The dull algorithms and I were supported by a distributed cluster of patrons through the patreon.com online platform: art collectors, fans, friends, artists, and public of all sorts were able to economically sustain my personal attempt to be productively lazy just by crowdfunding my Patreon account. Depending on their economical effort, all the people contributing to my Patreon had the opportunity to receive a real fully fabricated and authenticated artwork made by the machine while I was resting (see the Patreon website for details).
During the first year (2018), the machine was trained on deep learning and on how to rest and make unique portraits of myself while laying in bed reading, sleeping or simply enjoying spare time.
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All the times that I missed your call and I probably refused to work,
2017
While most of the world is busy tracking views, likes, followers, reach, impressions, growth, engagement rates and KPIs, I decided to track something else: failure. Absence. Lack of response.
This is a real-time counter of every missed call.
No productivity, no optimization. Just a number going up.
A personal leaderboard of inaction. A timeline of tiny, invisible no’s.
Want to help increase my failing metrics?
Call me for a job — I probably won’t answer.
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La mer est bleu (in .eu),
2017
La mer est bleu is a work about europe, seas, glance's migrations, awareness and content-aware software removals.All condensed in form of an animated gif on a .eu website domain and of an ongoing collection of images on Tumblr
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Verba volant, scripta manent,
2017
Verba Volant Scripta Manent is a project about time and memory in times of flying information but it also represents a personal and unaware feeling of ephemerality of digital-based art making.The work basically consists in a twitter bot perpetually posting the famous latin proverb “Verba Volant Scripta Manent” and a marble slab, on which is inscripted the same text using the look and feel of a twitter post.The project has been publicly released in 2017, in form of an installation for the exhibition Segni Leggeri - Internet is not forever, which took place in Parma, and in form of an online intervention for Arshake magazine and a standalone browser-based work viewable at http://verba-volant-scripta-manent.online.
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Banality is overrated,
2016
In the context of her solo exhibition "A Subject Self-Defined" at TRANSFER Gallery in New York, Carla Gannis and curator Tina Sauerländer invited me - among other 60+ international artists - to present animated GIF “Selfie-Self Portraits” that provide a broad range of perspectives on contemporary selfie culture and self-display.That is my submission: a collection of self portrait of me in a public toilet with a lot of instagram filters applied on it then all merged in a single Animated GIF.
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More audience, less artists,
2016
Art statement commisioned written on a crowdworker's back.
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OMG! TODAY I PRAYED FOR THE INTERNET,
2016
I compiled a huge list of amatorial youtube videos in form of a contemporary prayer and a collective god invocation.Before it is too late for the internet and time swallows it up forever.
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A quiet desert failure,
Filling the data centers of tumblr and leaving the desert behind. One post a time.
2015
http://quietdesertfailure.tumblr.com
http://desert.fail/ure
A quiet desert failure is an ongoing algorithmic performance by Guido Segni started in 2013 and publicly presented 2015 in the context of The Wrong - New Digital Art Biennale.In its own way, it’s a monumental piece about internet contents, emptiness, time, storage, memory, oblivion and - ultimately - failure.I programmed an Internet bot to traverse the datascape of Google Maps in order to fill a Tumblr blog and its datacenters with a remapping representation of the whole Sahara Desert, one post a time, every 30 minutes.The whole performance will approximately take 50 years to be completed, but it is still not clear if the audience, the Google’s servers, the tumblr archive or the Internet itself will last enough to see the end.So, be patient, don’t hurry.The desert is coming.CREDITSFail/URLhttp://desert.fail/urehttp://desert.fail/urlThe tumblr archival performancehttp://quietdesertfailure.tumblr.comMusicFabio Angeli, Lorenzo Del GrandeThe Wrong Pavillionhttp://inexactitudeinscience.comSpecial thanks toFlorian Kuhlmann & Digital3mpire
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A is for Art, B is for Bullshit,
A history of conceptual art for badasses
2015
My personal take on conceptual art, conceptualism and contemporary bullshits.The book - which features biographies and works from Félix González-Torres, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, Joseph Kosuth, Marcel Duchamp, Piero Manzoni, Ray Johnson, Sol LeWitt, Yves Klein and many others - is a an essential history of conceptual art scraped out from Wikipedia by an algorithm which preserved all the pictures and some essential alphabetical letters: A for art and B for bullshit.The book have been printed in a limited serie.Each edition comprises two volumes (volume A and volume B).A special thanx for their help in making this book and/or just for their existences: Ilario Caliendo, Joe Badile, Fabio Angeli, Giacomo Verde, Marcantonio Lunardi & Ilaria Sabbatini, Luca Leggero, Mariano Fazzi, Federico Cosci.
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After Post Internet there will be only, and always, Past Internet,
2015
A truistic URL and a glittering web based statement about the post and the past Internet condition> http://after.postinternet.there.will.be.only.and.always.pastinternet.comBTW, yes... what you hear and see on the background is Alphaville's Forever young.
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Wiring Wired Fired,
2015
In the context of 6PM Your Local Time, after a year long subscription, I performed a hot-wiring action on my personal wired magazine collection using a tutorial found on the Internet*.The whole performance has been staged in my private studio and documented and streamed on Instagram using the hastag #6pmeu in the context of the "6pm your local time Europe" event.* the tutorial (Arte delle Mine) has been made by a couple of crazy artists friends of mine, Luca Leggero and Luca Giorgi (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HampaugvFI)
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Work less, work all,
We are the 99% on Fiverr.com
2015
Work less, work all. We are the 99% on Fiverr.com is the project created by Guido Segni for his solo show at Link Cabinet.The project combines body art with a performative approach and a strong political and conceptual statement. During the time of the exhibition the artist created a gig on Fiverr.com - a website where people offer their professional services at a very low rate – offering the possibility to buy one of his artworks.The artworks have been created by buying and reselling the gigs of Fiverr workforce, asking each worker to use his/her body to show, sing, dance or declaim a message chosen by the artist. The whole operation can be described as a commissioned body art performance, in which the performative procedure followed by the artist is combined with the actions performed by the workers on or with their own bodies.If on the one hand Segni exploits workers' body and creativity to produce his artworks, on the other hand he asks them to convey messages that borrow language and mottos from the labour rights movements, thus stressing on the difficult and peculiar labour conditions in the digital era.
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Pics or it didn't happen,
2014
“Pics or it didn't happen" - rule number 32 according to rules of the Internet - is a colloquial expression used by internet users in order to challenge their virtual interlocutor on a discussion forum or a social network, when his arguments require photographic proof of what he's saying.“Pics or it didn't happen" is a also an exhibition I made in 2014 for HOC/gallery about how a query search on Google Images became a list of images, how I transform them into real objects and how I finally turned them back again into pictures of the Internet.The project focuses on the transitions occurring between the online URL realm (acronym for Uniform Resource Locator) and the so called IRL (acronym for In Real Life) realm: from the Internet to the real world and viceversa, using all the intercommunication highways the digital world puts at your disposition, from a home-based printer to print-on-demand services to photo/video devices.The resulting materials are hosted online at the URL http://pics.oritdidnthappen.com and consist in a collection of all sort of images (photos, print on demand objects, sculpture ecomerce receipts, …) which have been collected, modified printed and then re-documented once again.
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Pics or it didn't happen,
Proofs of existence of a cloud worker
2014
Between June and July 2014, in order to proof their existence and their status of crowd worker, 40+ workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk have been paid 90 dollarcents for re-enacting a clip found on youtube titled “pics or it didn’t happen” in front of their webcam.The video is also part of the project Pics or it didn’t happen developed for HOC / Contemporary and has been presented on September 12th, 2014 at Pavillon social Kunstverein in Lucca.
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The middle finger response,
Crowdworkers of the world united in a gesture
2013
Collecton of JODI
In 2013 I had been intrigued by one of the new trend in art-making practices: it is the use of crowdsourcing applied to art.It basically consists in paying (very small) fees to a crowd of online workers dispersed around the world wide web that have to individually complete small tasks in order to produce huge and amazing pieces for the art world.So, I finally decided to make my crowdsourced art piece too and I posted a simple task on the Amazon Mechanical Turk.I’ve just asked all the crowd/cloud/online workers (regularly paid with a fee reward of about 0.5 U$D per submission) to take a picture in front of their own web cam with some simple and specific requests: to show/reveal their face, their context and, ultimately, their middle finger response.Basically the result is a curated selection of spontaneous self portraits of cloud workers and a travel around one of the most represantive crowdsourcing platform.In the end, “The middle finger response” is the cynical but sincere attempt to establish a dialogue between the artist, the public and the crowd dispersed through the new frontiers of leisure, labour and exploitation in the age of the big cloud.Hope you’ll enjoy it!
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Top Expiring Internet Artists,
2013
www.topexpiringinternetartists.com
“Outside of the Internet there’s no glory”Miltos ManetasTop Expiring Internet Artists is a daily updated chart list of the most influential internet artists based on the expiring date of their website.Or just the representation of the state of hypercompetition and anxiety of contemporary artists inside (and outside) of the Internet.
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Untitled URL Monument,
2013
The untitled URL monument is a series of hacky registered URLs endlessy travelling from one to another and containing only top level domain (TLD) names.http://cy.mn.uz.hu.th.jobs.bv.gy.nl.ca.bt.ar.gg.jo.py.id.fi.sa.zr.er.net.gl.zw.gi.cu.cm.bi.gm.gt.bs.am.st.bg.iq.mk.qa.au.tz.ki.aero.ck.tf.pg.nz.museum.rw.md.se.tg.nu.dj.sv.kp.su.gh.int.dm.sj.yu.mobi.za.com/vu.tj.ms.nc.ky.tn.cl.ad.la.es.vn.kn.km.vc.my.ws.ie.an.mt.hr.mu.ag.ml.tc.sz.pf.gb.ph.ht.kw.in.mg.mo.ch.cd.yt.cc.ro.al.soNo texts, pictures, graphics, sounds, or fancy video.The monument is a response to Constant Dullaart’s Death of the Url and an ephemeral place to remember and commemorate a whole generation of net artists using URLs and TLDs as a medium for their works. Guido Segni, June 2013
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White Cube on a White Web Page,
to be projected on a White Wall
2013
One cube, two hosts.A minimal HTML 3D White Cube spinning and rotating on one HTML white web page projected on a white wall.Just the (im)possibile dialogue between an ephemeral Internet art piece and the physical space of a gallery.
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15 minutes, anonymous,
2012
2012Digital pictures, slideshow, poster printsProject Link
15 minutes, anonymous.For “15 minutes” project I have created a collection of pictures using a face detection algorithm over a large amount of popular pictures of actors, actresses, politicians found on the web in order to transform very famous faces into pixelate, anonymous and abstract pictures. After a selection I put them all together in a fifteen minutes long slideshow and I made some poster print versions.
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Through the looking glass and what I found there,
2012
Ongoing series of drilling actions on webcams, in which I record the last frames of a webcam in the moment it is drilled and/or destroyed.
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A Lonely Google Space Oddity,
How i tried to move the whole universe in a Tumblr Blog archive.
2012
“A lonely Google Space Oddity” is a project by Guido Segni and it is his space oddity in the data-based are to piece together the whole is supposed to be if the audience, the Google’s servers, the tumblr archive or the universe itself will last enough to see the end.In the meanwhile, enjoy.
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BBORK.COM,
2011
My personal revisitation of VVORK.COM website: edited and translated in BBORK.COM(Work originally released under the pseudonym Guru Miri Goro)
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The GIFt Market,
Omnia sunt communia
2011
In 2011 Kim Asendorf & Ole Fach made an intriguing piece about GIF : the gifmarket.net.After i bought one of their GIFs I immediately released a gifted version of their piece: the Gift Market, in which all the same GIFs sold on the GIF Market were – and, still, are – GIFted to everyone.Omnia sunt communia, all things are in common: a tribute to the released under the pseudonym Guru Miri Goro)
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Fragile,
2010
Work released with Les Liens Invisbles.
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,
2009
The game is over
Work released with Les Liens Invisbles.
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Google is not the map,
2008
Since ancient times cartography has been used to describe the world as a geometric ensemble of measurable points, lines, areas and data-labels on a plane.While the world slowly fades away in an increasingly multiplication of self-representations, the map making process – missing its real reference – becomes nothing more than an empty-meaning abstract practice: so, what do all those maps stand now for?
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Neverending Happy End,
Happy endings never end
2008
"if you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story" O. WellsWork released with Les Liens Invisbles.
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Too Close to Duchamp’s Bicycle,
2008
Just a poetic declaration about how I got too close to Duchamp’s bicycle.
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QUICK ET NUNC,
LANGUAGES AND ESCAPE VELOCITY
2005
An old video from 2005. Put it here just for documentation purposes.