Rob Duarte

Inanerumori, November 2015

Grizzly Grizzly is pleased to present ‘Inanerumori,’ an exhibition of electromechanical sculpture by Rob Duarte, inspired by Luigi Russolo’s Futurist manifesto L'arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises) from 1913.  In his manifesto, Russolo argues for a new kind of music -- one that reflects the noise of the industrial city, rather than the stale, artificial, and limited sounds of orchestral music. Russolo also designed a series of instrument for producing the noises required for his new Futurist music: the intonarumori. 

A week ago, Duarte shipped 75 pounds of electronics to Grizzly Grizzly. This stuff makes up the "heart" of the noise produced by the inanerumori installation -- the brutal, limitless spectrum of noise that Russolo's manifesto described, toned down and limited to 8-bit reproductions of mundane electronic notifications and unalarming alerts. The objects themselves will be generated on site when Duarte lands in Philly, two days before the show’s opening. The large, dark, and clumsy boxes of Russolo's  intonarumori will be translated into a combination of air and a thin skin of translucent plastic: the smooth, clean, light(lite), and non-confrontational aesthetic of a pacified culture.

Artist Bio

Rob Duarte’s work has been exhibited in diverse settings such as the Prospectives.09 International Digital Art Festival at the University of Nevada Reno, the New Children’s Museum in San Diego, EFA Project Space in New York City, and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts.  In 2015, he was selected by the Orlando Museum of Art to participate in the Florida Art Prize in Contemporary Art, and in 2012 he was nominated for the San Diego Art Prize and included in the corresponding Contemporaries V exhibition.  He is currently an Assistant Professor at The Florida State University, where he serves as the head of the Art Department’s Digital Media area and is director of the REBOOT laboratory at the Facility for Arts Research.