In Peter d'Agostino's multimedia (video/web) installation Y00 (YearZEROZERO), the Millennium bug is the catalyst for time travel. As predicted, the worldwide clicking-over to digital double zeroes at midnight on January 1, 2000 (imaged as an explosion of fireworks over New York's Times Square) sends us careening back in time to New York at the beginning of the last century. It doesn't stop there, however, but initiates an imagined chain reaction, to other cities at moments that encapsulate tremendous change. These include Philadelphia during its brief time as the nation's capital; Rome in 1300, declared the first Jubilee or Holy Year by the Pope; and Brasilia, a planned city opened in 1960, perhaps the most deliberately forward-looking city ever built.
These four cities-in-time all offer similarly ambivalent emblems of celebration mixed with upheaval. Turn-of-the-century New York, its streets crowded with immigrants, wagons and automobiles, telephone and trolley lines, rocked with as much transition--technological, political and economic--as our time. Philadelphia circa 1800, with its Enlightenment flowering of neo-Classical buildings and political structures (recalled here through building facades and cobblestones), had recently suffered the Revolutionary War and the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1793.
Images from Giotto, and a slowly spinning view of the Pantheon in Rome, call up that city. The Jubilee of 1300 was a brilliant piece of propaganda; Rome was then experiencing factional fighting and an influx of pilgrims fleeing war and disease. For the Jubilee, Giotto completed a huge outdoor mosaic on St. Peter's Cathedral, since lost. In a simultaneous installation of Y00 in Rome, d'Agostino will project a digitized "mosaic" rendering of another Giotto masterwork, from the Arena Chapel. Y00 will eventually be seen in each of the four cities through which the piece travels.)
D'Agostino's vision of Brasilia is nocturnal: the brightly-lit, iconic buildings glow white or yellow in the surrounding darkness. Flooded with light, the stark forms are even further dematerialized. The narrow-based bowl of the National Congress Building, in particular, seems to defy gravity and physical constraint, pointing toward an airier, techno-enhanced future. In terms of everyday life, Brasilia's harsh mechano-grid has proven challenging , and has given rise to shantytowns and unruly suburbs. One of these, the Valley of the Dawn, provides wild Emerald-City images in counterpoint to Brasilia's utopian modernism. The residents of this grassroots spiritual community dress up in gaudy Flash Gordon attire, and believe their millennial Peaceable Kingdom has already arrived. Here the time-loop has travelled its full circuit, giving us a glimpse of a primal, post-historical moment, one stop past millennium madness.
- Miriam Seidel, excerpt from the catalog for Why 2K? by Peter d'Agostino
and Jude Tallichet, Painted Bride
Arts Center, Philadelphia, Dec 2000-Jan 2001.