Federico Solmi is presenting The Great Farce, as part of group show The Tides of The Century at Ocean Flower Island Museum in Danzhou City, Hainan Province, China. This is the inaugural show at the Ocean Flower Island Museum, which is located on a giant man-made, flower-shaped island. Against the backdrop of humanity’s shared future and response to global challenges, Tides of the Century will explore art languages without national boundaries with the potential to enhance mutual understanding of the world, address issues of common concern in the 21st century, and usher in a better global future.
For this international presentation, Solmi has created a work in a 16,000 square foot room, which over 40 projectors being used in order to create an immersive environment. The piece will be large enough for around 1,000 people to walk amongst. Having premiered The Great Farce originally in the 2017 B3 Biennial of the Moving Image in Frankfurt, Germany, new sections have been developed for this new viewing.
In The Great Farce, 3-D models of characters and environments are built and texture mapped with scans of hand-painted imagery. A virtual world is created within a game engine, where each scene is staged as a movie set. The characters act as puppets, animated through motion capture and computer scripts rather than strings. Scenes are recorded by an in-game camera from a first-person view, giving the perspective of a director, or voyeur.