Antonio Scarponi

Antonio Scarponi is an architect whose interdisciplinary projects use elements from architecture, multimedia arts and design to “jam” the conventional social order of contemporary society. His work, which transforms public space and everyday objects into catalysts for public dialogue, both reflects and interrogates today’s global community by illuminating our shared humanity as well as the socio-political lines that divide us.

Scarponi credits the protests at the 2001 G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy for triggering a turning point in his work which increasingly addresses the possibilities of representing a world order beyond that of the nation state. Scarponi strives toward a more inclusive depiction of globalization from the point of view of the world’s population — a hive of voices, behaviors and cultural trends from everyday life.

His 2007 interactive project, “Dreaming Wall,” installed in an historic Milanese square, was a digitally generated billboard which displayed randomly chosen real-time text messages sent to the projector by people across the world. The projector beamed ultraviolet lasers onto the billboard’s phosphorescent, UV-sensitive green panels which allowed each message to remain visible on the panels for 15 minutes before making way for another “dream.” The dissolving layers of messages produced the “subconsciousness of a city asleep.” “Dreaming Wall” is currently planned for installation in cities in Switzerland, Spain and elsewhere.

Among Scarponi’s current projects is an atlas called “Human World,” which subverts the conventions of territorial boundaries by visually depicting the world’s populations using conceptual and symbolic categories, such as the number of people who are Internet users, or the number of people who live in democracies or in regions where the death penalty is legal. In Scarponi’s atlas, each nation is represented by its national flag whose dimensions are proportional to these categories at a scale of one pixel per 1,000 people. A work in progress, “Human World” is Scarponi’s attempt to visually harness and demonstrate the power of the “critical mass” of the world’s people and our response, or lack of response, to the ethical and political challenges of our times and to use this information as a springboard to more sustainable behaviors.

“Design is a subversive practice,” Scarponi has said. “It has the power to imagine reality arranged in a different way and with a different order of values.”