The Blank Contemporary Art, together with the artists Eva and Franco Mattes, is among the winners of Italian Council, the important project of General Direction of contemporary art and architecture and urban peripheries of MiBACT, born with the specific task of promoting production, knowledge and dissemination of Italian contemporary creation in the field of visual arts.

The Ministry has awarded the prize to the project My Little Big Data, realized by Eva and Franco Mattes, a reflection on how personal information is collected and processed by the network and on which utilization can result from that. Through a “do-it-yourself” investigation, artists analyze their personal data to create a self-portrait based on data extracted from 70.000 personal emails, sent and received during the last 10 years.

The first copy of the video essay will be joining the GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo collection, partner in the project. The work will be presented to international cultural events, including the participation at the Athens Biennial, a solo exhibition at Fotomuseum Winterthur in Zurich and two academic conferences, at Goldsmiths University in London and at New School University in New York.

Eva and Franco Mattes (born in Brescia in 1976, living and working in New York, USA) are an artistic duo, at first known as 0100101110101101.org, that has collaborated since 1995. They’re considered the main representatives of Net Art. Their projects rise from their strong capability of understanding and making use of new media. For more than 20 years they have constantly realized works that answer and examine our hyper-connected living condition, exposing, often with sense of humor, the deepest ethical and political implications.