Is It Me Watching the Loop, or the Loop Watching Me? A conversation with Mario Ruggiero, whose work will soon be shown at the Kinomural festival

Mario, as a new media artist showing your work at Kinomural, what was it about this festival that made you want to bring your art here and what does it feel like to show your digital universe out into a public city space?

I think Kinomural is one of the most important festivals out there for people working with images and what we call visual art. It's not the first time I've shown my work, but the idea of seeing something on a huge wall that I might have made alone, in the dark, at five in the morning, is pretty amazing. All the things I've absorbed over time, images, ideas, things I've seen or experienced, and then turned into loops suddenly leave the studio and take over a public space. For me, that's incredible, and I'm really curious to see what happens to the work once it's outside the context where it was created. What interests me most is the way people experience it. I'm used to having a relationship with an audience through a screen, views, likes and numbers. Here, there will be actual people standing in front of the work. I want to see if they stop, how they react, if something happens. A real reaction, even a small one, means something completely different to me than a like. I'm also really happy to have been invited. When I saw the other artists involved, many of whom I really admire, I felt genuinely proud to be part of it.

Kinomural happens in a noisy, open city environment. Is your work designed with a specific soundtrack or do you rely on the visual rhythm?

Music is really important in my work, but maybe even more important are sounds and noises. In the works I call Time Geometry, for example, I layer the same sound over itself several times, intentionally creating a pattern that suggests some kind of shift in space and time. These works try to show time as a sequence of events happening in space. It's a physical thing, and sound is physical too. I'd actually be very happy if the noise of the city mixed with the noise I've created, if some kind of dialogue happened between the two, maybe even a slightly destabilizing one. In that case, I wouldn't want the sound of my work to isolate it from its surroundings. I'd rather it wrapped around the environment and somehow changed the way you perceive what's happening around you.

When people stand in front of your work on the streets of Wroclaw, what emotional or physical reaction do you hope to trigger in them?

My work is very connected to the idea of time, so more than anything I'd like to make people think about time. I'd like someone to wonder: "I'm standing here watching a video that keeps repeating. Am I wasting time? Am I stopping it? Or am I somehow entering it?" I'm also interested in something called semantic satiation in psychology, when you repeat a word so many times that eventually it loses its meaning and almost becomes just a sound. I think something similar can happen with images. Repetition can push them towards a kind of abstraction, making us temporarily lose their original meaning and revealing the dynamics hidden inside an event. And then, of course, I'd like people to actually enjoy the videos. That too. Maybe especially that. :)

I think that almost everyone in the crowd will pull out their smartphone to film your project. How do you feel about capturing a loop of your loop on their screens? Does it ruin the physical experience, or does it give the artwork new life?

So, let's think about it: the work is filmed, created, published and experienced on a smartphone. Then it gets shown on the side of a building, filmed again, and published again, only to be experienced once more on a smartphone. I'd say that's basically a loop. On one hand, I really like the idea that the work can have a new life through being recorded. Documentation is important, and I'm happy that it exists, because it allows the work to keep circulating after the event is over. On the other hand, I have to admit that if I saw most people watching my video without a phone screen in front of their faces, I'd consider that a huge success. So I'd probably film that myself, just to document the fact that it happened. And then we're back to… well, let's think about it.

Technology and new media are changing faster than ever. Looking ahead a few years, where do you see video art going and how do you see your own practice evolving alongside new technologies?

We've reached a strange situation. Technologically, we keep moving forward, while culturally we often seem to want to go backwards. We rediscover film, Polaroids, analog cameras, maybe because we're trying to recover a relationship with images that we've somehow lost. At the same time, we're afraid of stopping, because it feels like the train keeps accelerating. Today we have incredibly powerful and accessible tools. We can make images, videos, music, 3D worlds and, with AI, things that just a few years ago would have required studios, budgets and dozens of people. That freedom is amazing, but it can also create a kind of paralysis. When everything is possible, it becomes harder to understand what we actually want. And, paradoxically, we can all end up looking more similar, using the same tools, the same models and the same generative systems. I hope video art can move away from that kind of standardization by pushing technology and forcing it to do things it wasn't really designed to do. I like the idea that it can create new languages, even ones that are difficult to understand at first. What I try to do is not let myself get too comfortable with the tools I have, but instead break them, push them until they glitch, and see what happens. It's a bit like when I was a kid and had a remote control car. I found it much more fun to crash it, take it apart, put it back together and try to make it work in some completely ridiculous way than to actually drive it normally. In the future, for example, I'd like to see how far I can reduce video to the absolute minimum while still keeping it understandable. A bit like taking the vowels out of a sentence: Whn y r mv th vwls frm sntnc, y cn stll ndrstnd wht s wrttn. I'd like to tell a story that works like that but with the images, reducing it to the bare minimum just to push the limits of intelligibility.