Featured Photographers: Sileō - "System Error"
In the vast landscape of photographic work being made, few stand out to me as much as Silvia Pedrina and Leonardo Brentan, a dynamic Italian duo known collectively as Sileō. I first viewed their manipulated polaroid work over three years ago, when they submitted a piece to an online exhibition here at Analog Forever. I reached out to them back then and we have spoken back and forth over the year’s and I am thrilled to finally share some of the images that wake me up at 2:00am screaming, “share these with the world!”
The series I am talking about is of course System Error, a small collection of photographs that use a striking blend of traditional and digital techniques to explore our rapidly evolving relationship with technology. Its a series that delivers on multiple levels simultaneously: its 1980s cyber punk aesthetic is flawlessly executed while simultaneously evoking deeper philosophical musings. One by one, the images present alternative realities where the boundaries of our physical and digital world are artfully overlapped to create new shared “expanded” realities. But who is this collective of artists known as Sileō and what are they trying to tell us?
“Sileō is about capturing silence in a world of constant noise," says Pedrina. Born and raised in the countryside of Northern Italy, both Pedrina and Brentan found their creativity early on. For Brentan, his passion for photography grew from childhood snapshots of family gatherings into a pursuit of “eternalizing the fleeting through his lens.” Pedrina, on the other hand, discovered her voice in painting, “giving life to her dreams and fantasies.” These separate artistic paths converged in 2014, when they began to explore the possibilities of instant film together. The duo discovered early on that shared aesthetic thrived in unexpected ways when working with instant film. Brentan explains, "Instant film is not a perfectly accurate representation of reality. Its color alterations and occasional development mishaps work in our favor when creating dreamlike images." This is obvious in the work they produce, taming the inherent “happy mistake” medium we all love to create inspired 3-d manipulated Polaroids.
System Error as a series came into existence in 2019 with one simple question: “How about we take some photos with neon lights?” Not having the resources for a neon-lit studio, Sileō, driven by their love for experimentation, used the monitors of their PCs as lighting sources for digital portraits. They then printed the photos on Polaroid Originals films via the Polaroid Lab, giving physical form to their digital glitch effect. The results are breathtaking, yet they embrace a spontaneous approach to their work, welcoming unexpected interpretations and valuing “art for art's sake” as they work in the moment to create unique collaborative works.
A recurring theme in their work is the exploration of entropy and evolution, from ordered compositions spiraling into chaotic imagery, to the progressive merging of humans with digital spaces. This exploration, however, is not without paradox. The instant film photographs made of each subject begin to meld and merge with the digital world as they take on a hybrid life of their own through their abstraction. The so-called glitches in the images, in turn, take on a new physical quality, morphing into metaphsycial mirrors.
According to Sileō, the series “represents an expanded reality,” as opposed to an altered one. They explain, “Technology can alter one's vision of reality, they're own perception of it, but it hardly can modify the objective reality itself, it adds its own flavor to it. You could think about it through the lens of Philip K. Dicks novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch: the drugs that appear in the story don't alter reality itself. They don't open portals to other dimensions in a physical way, but instead trick the subconscious and the perception of those who use them.”
And although their series provokes questions about humanity’s relationship to technology, the duo see no competition between analog and digital techniques, considering them two sides of the same coin. "One supports the other and vice versa," Brentan clarifies. They believe that blending these two realms allows them to create their unique vision, an amalgamation of the digital and physical worlds. By challenging the common misconception that photo manipulation is tied specifically to digital photography, they highlight that this technique is far from new and can be used to create stunning artistic visions.
In conclusion, Sileō's System Error is a captivating exploration into an "expanded" reality where the digital and physical converge. It offers a lens into the interplay of human perception, technology, and art, as they reshape our understanding of reality itself. It’s both unique, captivating, and just great art. Connect with Sileō on Youtube and Instagram!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Behlen is an instant film addict and the founder and publisher of Analog Forever Magazine. Behlen is an obsessive community organizer in the film photography world, including previously launching the independent publishing projects PRYME Magazine and PRYME Editions, two enterprises dedicated to the art of instant film. Through these endeavors, he has featured and published 250+ artists from around the globe via his print and online publications.
He has self-published two Polaroid photobooks -“Searching for Stillness, Vol. 1” and “I Was a Pioneer,” literally a boxed set of his instant film work. His latest book, Searching for Stillness Vol II was published in 2020 by Static Age.
Behlen’s Polaroid photography can be found in various publications including Diffusion Magazine, Fraction Magazine, Seities Magazine, and Polaroid Now (Chronicle Books, 2021). He loves the magic sensuality of instant film: its saturated, surreal colors; the unpredictability of the medium; its addictive qualities as you watch it develop. He spends his time shooting instant film and backpacking in the California wilderness, usually a combination of the two.
Connect with Michael Behlen on his Website and on Instagram!
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