Luca Antonucci

Luca Antonucci started out studying film and broadcast media as an undergraduate and after graduating worked at a Bay Area cable access station. Long hours in an empty newsroom gave him time to experiment with the station’s CCTV cameras and video monitors. It was here that Luca first became interested in analog and semi-obsolete systems which now play a large role in his practice.

Though Luca still uses aspects of film narratives and video in his work, his process now is mostly based in printmaking. His studio space is a site of collaboration with the artists he’s working with through Colpa Press, the publishing practice he co-founded in 2010. “One affects the other,” Luca says, “You can’t share physical space without sharing ideas.”

Colpa Press uses a risograph as their main method of printing, but Luca also employs other devices that bridge the gap between analog and digital. Part of his studio space is reminiscent of every 90s basement den, complete with a secondhand couch and stacks of B-movie VHS tapes. Luca has rigged up a color video printer to the TV so he can create physical screenshots from the videos. He may take several of these out-of-context moments from different films and manipulate the images or combine them with other objects in a work. “I’m interested in the multiple lives of objects…and how they can live together in a new narrative.”

Luca’s work for Limited Edition was created through this process, with pieces taken from the films Welt am Draht (1973) and The Thirteenth Floor (1999). Both films were adapted from Simulacron-3, a sci-fi novel by Daniel F Galouye about a virtual-reality environment used for market testing. It seems that “every single sci-fi film is set in an ad agency,” Luca says. It’s fitting, then, to explore the narrative of an artificial marketing environment in an ad agency that isn’t quite what it seems to be.