2023年，我启动了一个以河流与水为主题的项目。该项目通过鳄鱼这一形象得以呈现，鳄鱼被视为文化的根本化身。我曾构想过罗马的台伯河、南京的秦淮河、巴黎的塞纳河、胡志明市的西贡河，以及中东的干河床及其西方对应物：那条最终演变为巴塞罗那兰布拉大道的溪流，还有雅典的伊利索斯河。该作品旨在对西方、中东和东方城市进行比较分析，将河流既视为文化的具象化载体，也是艺术实践得以展现的场所。

我关注的不仅是鳄鱼和龙这些象征性形象，更在于承载其象征意义的元素：水，即“阴”。水之于龙，正如像素之于数字图像；二者皆是承载所见之物的媒介。许慎在《说文解字》中对“龙”的解释是“能幽，能明”。文献中常将像素描述为可见、物质且呈正方形的，但实际上它只是一个点样本：不可见、无形、无状。干涸河床，如同城市中被改道或掩盖的河流，是转瞬即逝、变幻莫测且大多不可见的；尽管如此，它们却塑造了地貌。

本次讲座旨在邀请大家以更广阔的视角思考我们的个人艺术实践与策展实践：探索我们所使用的媒介的物质性或非物质性——将其视为置身于时间长河中的对象，而非静态之物，置于拥有数千年历史且不断变迁的文化语境之中；并思考我们所创作和策展的艺术对象的可见性与不可见性、物质性与非物质性。

In 2023 I started a project whose subject was rivers and water. The project manifested itself through the figure of the crocodile, as the elemental embodiment of culture. I had imagined the Tiber in Rome and the Qinhuai in Nanjing, the Seine in Paris and the Saigon River in Ho Chi Minh City, the wadis of the Middle East and their Western counterparts: the stream that became La Rambla in Barcelona and the Ilisos in Athens. The work was conceived as a comparative analysis between Western, Middle Eastern, and Eastern cities, with the river as both cultural embodiment and the site in which artistic engagement finds expression.

My interest was not solely in the symbolic figures, the crocodile and the dragon, but also in the element that carried their symbolism: water, yin. Water stands to the dragon as the pixel stands to the digital image; each is the medium that carries what is seen. The dragon of Xu Shen’s Shuowen jiezi ‘can be hidden, can be manifest’ (能幽，能明). The literature speaks of the pixel as if it were visible, material and square, when in reality it is a point sample: invisible, immaterial, without shape. The wadis, like the rivers that cities have diverted or covered, are transient, mutable and mostly invisible; nevertheless, they have shaped the landscape.

This lecture is an invitation to think in enlarged terms about our personal art practices and our curatorial practices: to explore the materiality or immateriality of the medium we work with, not as a static object but as an object placed in the flow of time, set within cultural contexts that are millennia old and with an ever-changing presence; and to consider the visibility and invisibility, materiality and immateriality, of the objects of art we create and curate.

主讲人信息：

兰弗兰科·阿切蒂（Lanfranco Aceti）教授是一位艺术家、策展人和学者，现任“赫利奥波利斯21——韧性社区”（Heliopolis 21 – Resilient Communities）展览与公共空间总监，以及“当代剪影博物馆”（Museum of Contemporary Cuts）馆长。他师从皮诺·帕伊奥尼（Pino Paioni）和翁贝托·埃科（Umberto Eco）学习符号学，并获得中央圣马丁艺术与设计学院（Central Saint Martins）博士学位；曾于伦敦大学学院（UCL）工程系及斯莱德美术学院（Slade School of Fine Art）从事虚拟现实环境领域的艺术研究驻留。他曾在伦敦大学金史密斯学院（Goldsmiths, University of London）、哈佛大学、科隆媒体艺术学院（KHM）以及麻省理工学院（MIT）担任客座研究员、访问学者及客座教授。他的研究探讨了图像如何在不同媒介、文化及人工智能之间被编码、解码和重新编码；他担任《Artology: Studies in the Arts》特刊的客座编辑。

Prof. Lanfranco Aceti is an artist, curator and scholar, Director of Exhibitions and Public Spaces at Heliopolis 21 – Resilient Communities and Director of the Museum of Contemporary Cuts. Trained in semiotics with Pino Paioni and Umberto Eco and holding a Ph.D. from Central Saint Martins, he held an artistic research residency in Virtual Reality Environments at University College London, in the Department of Engineering and at the Slade School of Fine Art. He has held affiliations, fellowships and visiting professorships at Goldsmiths, University of London; Harvard University; the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM); and MIT. His research examines how images are coded, decoded and recoded across media, cultures and artificial intelligence; he is guest editor of a special issue of Artology: Studies in the Arts. As an artist he took part in Plateau of Humankind, the 2001 Venice Biennale curated by Harald Szeemann. He presented Preferring Sinking to Surrender in the Italian Pavilion of the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, and his work appears in The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of New Media Art, Volume 2 (2025).