|||> SPECTRAL UNIT-->digital paintings |||> inside Mark Rothko |||> transmission six

A painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience.

Mark Rothko

Is it possible to remix a work of art? As SPECTRAL UNIT, we are convinced that Marcel Duchamp would have answered affirmatively and with conviction. SPECTRAL UNIT is a multimedia project aimed at producing not only sounds but also images, videos, and writings. We believe in art as a generative and ritualistic process, where every action reveals the invisible through multiple processes in a state of perpetual becoming, including the reinterpretation and alteration of what already exists. We are developing a journey that explores the universe of seven abstract expressionists. After Jackson Pollock, we are now focusing on the figure of Mark Rothko.

We have composed a piece titled "From the Inside Out" (you can listen to it here), with the aim of exploring and contaminating Rothko’s poetics through our own sensibility. We approach his work not as something static or aseptic, but as an organic, pulsating structure. We want to immerse ourselves in his work, to fall into the artist’s paintings. This immersion is, in fact, one of the recommendations dear to Rothko himself: to drown in color, to become part of a unified whole, to overcome the impossible—the dualism between the viewer and the artwork. As with Pollock, we have created a video (to be published soon) where original works, our elaborations, and artificial intelligence intersect, overlap, and merge. In this video, we identified a series of frames that, beyond our intentions, gave shape to what we believe are significant images—a remix of Rothko that is no longer Rothko, yet undoubtedly alludes to his work. These are digital paintings.

A video is experienced in its flow, a river of images and sounds that enters our minds and surrounds us in its brief unfolding. Isolating frames from the video, like mining in a quarry, does not simply mean creating static images through a technical process. Rather, it involves transitioning from a flow of shapes and colors over time to their contemplation, amplifying time into fragments of eternity and capturing what might have been only the ghost of a moment, perhaps imperceptible. Transforming these frames into static images—without sound, without words—is a silent ritual, evoking an interior landscape. It is a return to consciousness, of which Mark Rothko’s painting is essentially a mirror or a gateway.

Adi Newton
Enrico Marani

November 20, 2024

Click here to open a slideshow with 22 digital paintings HQ inspired by Mark Rothko. Press “send key” and watch all the selections

Click here to listen the track “From the Inside Out” dedicated to Mark Rothko.