Metro Rail: Professor Roberto Bocci
Metro Rail is a multidisciplinary project that includes a series of horizontal and vertical panoramas and an experimental films that seeks to portray urban environments shot within and around the Washington DC Metro Rail transportation system. As an artist, I am particularly interested in the representation of interior and exterior urban spaces animated by 60 Hz electrical hum, mechanical sound and video surveillance cameras. I am interested in portraying the relationship between human life and urban environments and the sense of alienation and disorientation that may derive from traveling through and inhabiting these spaces. I believe that urban environments have a direct influence on human life and that architectural structures can be considered metaphors for the human body and vice-versa. In the Metro Rail panoramas, the superimposed black frame that sits on top of the images references the horizontal format of the trains with rounded cornered window openings. Within the context of this subject matter I am also interested in the representation of time and space within an artwork. In order to do so in Metro Rail, the images are compiled as panoramas and the experimental films are created shooting both video and time-lapse photography. All prints are archival digital inkjet prints mounted on DiBond. Metro Rail was made possible by an Arlington County Spot Light Grant and a Georgetown University Faculty Summer Research grant.
Roberto Bocci is a photographer and an installation artist born in Siena, Italy. His practice includes single and composite photographic images, installations, and experimental time-based media works. His artistic concerns encompass multiple points of view and questions of personal identity. Bocci has shown his work in the United States, Europe, Japan and Australia and has been awarded fellowships and grants including a Fulbright Fellowship, a Woodstock Photography Grant, an Arlington County Spotlight Grant and numerous Georgetown University research grants to support his work. He lives in Arlington, Virginia, and works in Washington, DC, where he is an Associate professor of Digital Art and Photography at Georgetown University.
