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| Concept / Editing:
Marco Mancuso
Photo editing / Cover
Arianna D'Angelica
Translations:
Giulia Artioli, Ian Bolton, Micaela Genchi, Ornella Pesenti, Camilla Serri, Mariacristina Virgilio
Artwork:
Alessandro Capozzo
Contents:
Tatiana Bazzichelli, Simona Brusa, Lucrezia Cippitelli, Alex Dandi, Teresa De Feo, Beatrice Ferrario, Tiziana Gemin, Luigi Ghezzi, Alessandra Migani, Maria Molinari, Anna Monteverdi, Bertram Niessen, Miriam Petruzzelli, Monica Ponzini, Mariangela Scalzi, Domenico Sciajno, Maria Rita Silvestri, Matteo Traversari, Lorenzo Tripodi, Valentina Tanni |
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LEADING ARTICLE
And so, the end of 2005 has arrived nearly unexpectedly. It has been a very busy and stimulating year, a year which has witnessed the birth of Digicult project and of this magazine, which has reached its momentous tenth issue. I am glad to notice that the end of the year coincides with such an important milestone for this project. This end of year has given us a few acknowledgements, both very different but also important: Digicult has been nominated among the finalist projects of the award of multi-media publishing Palinsesto Italia and has been mentioned among the links of the blog Bruce Sterling - Beyond the beyond. I believe that this concurrence of events (lets get things straight, it's nothing earth-shaking, but it is an acknowledgement of professional appreciation which is important for us all), deserves a consideration, which I decided to translate into at least three changes: the leading article, the Christmas change in the magazine, a declaration of intent.
First of all the leading article: after receiving many suggestions by my assistants, I decided to speak my mind in a moment in which I think is right. As I have repeated more the once, my tack to the Italian electronic culture is very respectful and therefore I reckoned that it was not right to speak my mind while Digicult was a project in progress in the past months. Today this condition has not changed, our growth is still underway, but, as I have already said, I think that it is only proper to consider Digicult a well-established experience in Italy , without forgetting the experiences which have been present for years and which I hold on great esteem. With this special issue of the magazine, Digicult wants to answer to some critics it has received in these months, aware that its multidisciplinary tack and the way it handles publishing and culture are totally professional. This Christmas issue of Digicult is therefore experimental and it wants to show that, taking the cue from the most contaminated techniques typical of digital art and inverting the order of the factors, the aesthetic aspect may change, but the result doesn't.
Therefore there are new columns (Cover, Interview, Foreign News, Reportage, Meta and Trends ), which follow the ten areas which already exist and are the analysis areas of the magazine; these are dynamic areas which reflect the classic columns of a paper magazine, with the technical limitations of the HTML code and of surfing on browser, as well as being seen on a monitor. Virtual places which witness how the same articles which can be indexed in one way, can find new life and visibility thanks to a layout which is not so different. Nevertheless, the heritage of the paper magazine is hard to bypass.
The tack which I tried to put into evidence for those who still haven't understood it, is that Digicult comes from the electronic art which gives life to it and it actually lives thanks to the META dynamics which design the profiles of the digital culture of today. META means interdisciplinary art, META means interpretation of a sense which goes beyond structures and barriers, META means the possibility to speak to a real crossover artist like Tez (Marco Mancuso) together with an event like Peam 2005 (Luigi Pagliarini), of the philosophy of DJ (Alex Dandi) like the animation and video clips of Resfest (Alessandra Migani) , like the audiovisual experiments of Skoltz Kolgen (Bertram Niessen) like the contagious media of Rachel Greene di Rhizome (Mariarita Silvestri) , of the online project 56K Tv Bastard Channel (Beatrice Ferrario) but also of the forms of media activism in Cuba (Lucrezia Cippitelli) , of the political denunciation of Big Art Group (Annamaria Silvestri) like the ones of the international summit of information technology in Tunisi (Lorenzo Tripodi) , of the new tactical grounds of netporn (Tatiana Bazzichelli) and of the anti-copyright licenses of the project Copyzero (Maria Molinari) , of the sound research of Thomas Brinkmann (Marco Mancuso) like the experimentation of the machines in Nature of You, Robot (Miriam Petruzzelli) and Bioart, tra etica ed estetica (Tiziana Gemin).
META means this but much more; I think that this sequence of articles which gives life to this magazine, represents this idea, if one has the patient to go beyond its indexation. One needs to go beyond divisions and neologisms, one needs to know the culture of our time down deep inside. Therefore, I want to thank all those who have written for this magazine till now, to those who support us from the beginning and to all those who have lent a helping hand and much more. I don't know what the year 2006 has in store for us but, maybe if I knew it, it wouldn't be so amusing..
Marco Mancuso // Deputy Director top |
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AUDIOVIDEO
//Bertram Niessen
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SKOLTZ_KOLGEN, AUDIOVISUAL DUO
Txt: Bertram Niessen
 Skoltz_kolgen is a Canadian duo composed of Dominique T. Skoltz and Herman W. Kolgen. Draft of one of the cases in which new media artists share not only artistic life, but also the affective one. In Italy they are known mostly because of their perfect and effective live and their audio-video projects, even if their activity is extended to audio production, experimental movies and graphic. Their aesthetic consciousness, cold without being glacial, and their lucidity in the construction of plans make them one of the most important reality in the global panorama of audio-visual performances. Their super-cool universe are articulated between cellular life, immaterial high-design and flows poetic. Who read the interview to Rechenzantrum in the past number ( Digimag09/nov05 "Nuovo centro di elaborazione dati" ), the sharing of their method “on stage” is not unanimous (and creates some perplexities also in who writes). At the same time, the impact and beauty of what they're doing is unbelievable. As well as we can't discuss the fact that their qualitative standard are higher than any other experimental electronic performance now available. I have spoken with them about that and about some other themes, discovering that every new project is different from the previous, from the liveness point and for many other aspects.
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NEW MEDIA MARKET
//Maria Rita Silvestri |
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RACHEL GREENE AND CONTAGIOUS MEDIA
Txt: Maria Rita Silvestri
Area: New Media Market
 Rachel Greene has been for a decade executive of Rhizome, a well-known new media art platform affiliated to the New Museum of Contemporary Art of New York. She left office to Lauren Cornell, but she still is the coordinator of expositions made by the same organization. In 2004 her first book “Internet Art” has been published. Contagious Media , her last expo as executive, was a monography about Peretti brothers. Both artists with a predominating attention about social dynamic, Jonah is the leader of Eyebeam Contagious Media group while Chelsea is the performer. Jonah has defined as contagious the practice through the massmedia, after verifying that his request to Nike to produce shoes named Sweatshop has had a global diffusion at the point that all magazines from all around the world published the news. The work on which the exhibition most focused on was BlackPeopleLoveUs.com, a website were Sally and Johnny, an imaginary Caucasian-white couple, insert and ask for textual and photographical contributions about friendship with black people. The exhibition didn't treat only the Internet, but all the network and net. For example Rejection Line consists in a telephon number that every women can use to show her refusal to someone who tried to pick her up. The women can leave that number to unwanted people. A recorded message will answer saying that “The person who gave you this number does not want to talk to you or see you again. We would like to take this opportunity to officially reject you”. More than a million people since 2002 used that number. If you need it: 212- 479-7990
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NET ART
/Beatrice Ferrario
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THE OTHER TV IS MADE UP WITH A MODEM
Txt: Beatrice Ferrario
Area: Net Art
 Think of intermittent images black and white writings and old televisions interferences. Think of biting shocking funny provoking and mocking videos. Imagine a contrary to trend web site that imposes an access time to visit its pages and a broadcasting station making fun of television and its characters. A broadcasting station that wants to limit its use instead of promoting the audience administering to the televiewer-user non-stop programs that meet the demand (when the demand already exists) or create an induced one when required. This is 56KTV Bastard Channel , this and much more. First of all it is an online art project (it self defines as “an international online art project”,) created by Reinhard Storz art and theory of communications lecturer at the Basilea Art and Design University and author of the art platform xcult.org; he also collaborated with Monica Studer and Christoph van der Berg. Financed by the Swiss foundation for culture Pro Helvetia, 56KTV – presented in Italy last 11 November thanks to Next2Frame organization – it exists because of the works of all around the world artists who are supported by professional people that make up and bring their contributes out.
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HACKTIVISMO
//Maria Molinari |
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COPYZERO X: MULTIPLE CHOICE LICENCE
Txt: Maria Molinari
Area: Hacktivismo
 Copyzero is an exclusive complete system promoted by the Movimento Costozero . As we have already talked about last month in the first part of this article, with digital signature and temporal mark – i.e. with Copyzero and Copyzero Online – the cost of royalties and licences is reduced to nothing. With the first and unique modular licences Copyzero X – which are effective in the foreign Countries too even if they were appositively conceived for the Italian legal system – artists give up some specific exclusive rights on their digital works of art. This article is aimed at understanding how these new licences work and what the difference between them and Creative Commons is. The all-rights reserved copyright has now become an antisocial offensive and a protectionist instrument in a commercial view. As Riccardo Bagnato says “copyright warrants that nobody does to Walt Disney what Walt Disney did to Collodi.” The term Copyright means the author only has the right to reproduce, copy, distribute and modify his work of art. If the author wants to allow someone else's usage of his work of art he has to declare it through a licence. Copyleft is on the contrary of copyright “a general method to realize a free software program” (Richard M. Stallman) and “a philosophy that turns up into a variety of free commercial licences” (Wu Ming 1). So copyleft extents these rights to everyone because it is aimed at promoting the spread of knowledge. Everyone can reproduce, copy, distribute and modify a work of art if he guarantees the same rights to the other people by using a licence having the same terms and the same conditions of the original work of art licence.
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SOFTWARE ART
//Valentina Tanni
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FLICKR ART: DATABASE AND VOYEURISM
Txt: Valentina Tanni
Area: Software Art
 In a justly famous essay written in the now remote 1998 the theorist of new media Lev Manovich acknowledged database as an essential element of the new-born digital culture and he built up a theory inspired by the well known Erwin Panofsky 's study ( perspective as symbolic form ) where you could recognize the “sensible signs” of a spiritual content in the perspective methods adopted by the human being. So according to Manovich, database – the new contemporary symbolic form – contains “the new way we configure experiences of ourselves and of the world. After God's death (Nietzsche), the end of Great Illuminist Tales (Lyotard) and the arrival of the Web (Tim Berners Lee), the world appears as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts and other archived data.” The endless data collections have always fascinated software artists who have been trying to imagine and divulge alternative interfaces since the web appearance. They are trying to build up systems that can filter database raw material and return it in an each time different – in the aesthetic aspect and message – formalization. That's the reason why Google-based artist projects have been drawing crowds for a five-year period. These projects use the stream of texts, images and videos drawn off from the bottomless well of the most famous and used research motor of the world transforming them in news generators, landscape images, quizzes, micro cinema and happenings too.
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VIDEO ART
//Mariangela Scalzi
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VIDEO ART PERCEPTIVE CODES
Txt: Mariangela Scalzi
Area: Video Art
 These days' visitors of Siena meet with a maybe unexpected scenario when treading in medieval tradition footsteps they get to via di Città. A strident voice arrogantly tunes up a double-speeded song from the entrance-hall of the historical Palazzo delle Papesse – built in the second half of the Fifteenth Century and today well known as a Contemporary Art Centre; the visitors' look instantly pass from the stone of the palace to the sculpture made up of monitors that originates the voice. The ripped wrinkled video whose colours are pop culture-inspired shows a ruffled and sometime hysteric female singer that tunes up her almost incomprehensible song from the huge palace entrance-hall in one of the most crowded downtown roads. This makes the visitor unconsciously slip in the first lively perceptive short circuit of his trip. Through constant audiovisual raids in its last years exhibitions – mainly with Invisible , a 2004 installation, Popesses' centre has dedicated a huge space to works of art whose interactive capability, digital culture aesthetic mark and impressive environment character attracted the audience's attention on the most current video art trends audiovisual language technologies.
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ELECTRONICA
//Marco Mancuso
CLUBBING
//Alex Dandi
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THOMAS BRINKMANN, ELECTRONIC ANTISTAR
Txt: Marco Mancuso
Area: Electronica
 The two things most of the people knows about Thomas Brinkmann: the first is that the artist is one of the brightest musicians in the so called minimal techno scene of the last 20 years, the second one, is that he has always been dar from the worlwide tour, from the huge cache and from the more or less commercial production. Thomas Brinkmann is the ultimate antistar, expecially in the world of electronic music, always so autocelebrative. He is the typical genius working in the shadows, less known than othersma much more interesting and important for different generations of techno musician. Also his artistic history is a sort of puzzle, in which every part seems to find its place only in the last years. Against dogmas and discipline ( he loves telling how he was sent away from the art school because of his modern andradical ideas), he was one of the first people that in the 1980s started to work with rythmic lines in electronic music...
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DJ: SHAMAN OR JUKEBOX?
Txt: Alex Dandi
Area: Clubbing
 What are the differences between a good dj set and a bad dj set? When a dj is considered a good dj? Who are the best djs? These question seem to be really personal, but they hide some esthetic rule. If as Frank Broughton and Bill Brewster wrote in Last night a dj saved my life, the dj came from the shaman, the mystic figure of the ancient times where dance and religion were really close, then the role od the dj is now really different, full of responsibility towards the audience. Dancing and religion are now far from the other because of the sexual implication of moving, but dance has always been important in collective ritual. If you saw the images of the crowd dancing during a djset of Larry Levan at the Paradise Garage inside Maestro documentary, isn't so difficult to understand that a good dj set is an adrenalic experience, a sort of celebration of our instincts...
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LIVE MEDIA
//Domenico Sciajno
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METAMKINE LOOK AT US: LIVE! IXEM 05
Txt: Domenico Sciajno
Area: Live Media
The second edition of Live!iXem 2005 took place in Mestre-Venice at the Candiani's Centre from 9 to 11 December 2005. The contest-festival is aimed at analyzing the Italian realities involved in sound and interdisciplinary experimentations. This year's judges were well known foreign artists who have also performed together with the authors of the selected projects. Judges have in common a deep experience and knowledge on the relationships between sound and images, among them there were Xavier Querrel the cineaste and sound experimenter of Cellule de Intervention Metamkine (review guests). This was the right context for Metamkine because they have been exploring the relationships between sound and images on live performance for more than a decade. The Cellule is a structure with a changeable geometry, which is formed by musicians and cineaste. From 1987 they have been presenting their work at various festivals, art galleries and independent spaces in French, Europe, Canada , USA and Japan ; they collaborate with groups coming from different part of the world. During their live performances through reflecting mirrors, multi projections and an ingenious displacement Metamkine produce a new film by reversing spirals of drawings and improvised photos live accompanied by an audio trace made up of tape fragments and old synthesizer sounds.
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I.A.
//Luigi Ghezzi
ROBOTICS
//Miriam Petruzzelli
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EVOLUTIONARY SIMULATION ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Txt: Luigi Ghezzi
Area: I.A.
Artificial Life (or Alife from its abbreviation) born from a promising interaction between evolutionist research and informatics: in the computer simulation environment a togetherness of instructionist technology and selection processes are applied, taken from the Darwinism paradigm. Intuitively, the theme of artificial life is the computer simulation of the behaviour of real organisms and ecosystems. Through this artificial reproduction of life, numerous scientists look for the answers to questions about the nature of life and evolutionary processes that characterise a living organism also trying to understand the dynamics of the underlying evolutionary processes that have brought the primordial mono-cellular life form to the existing complex life forms. These dynamics reflect an informationist approach in opposition to artificial intelligence: the command instructions are not top-down but bottom-up, which means that...
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YOU, ROBOT
Txt: Miriam Petruzzelli
Area: Robotics
 What is natural and what is artificial? What characteristic does this distinction take on today, if there be one possible? What can Man do facing a nature that is escaping the reductionism model and in which Man appears more and more of an exception? Set to find an ample definition of these two terms seems to be laborious and risky task and perhaps sterile if abstracted from the awareness of a universe in progress that does not lose its mystery in the typical attempt of our scientific and humanistic discipline to dominate or to understand. This seems to be the conclusion reached by Riccardo Notte, in the light of a fascinating study conducted on one of the biggest ultramodern myths with the provocative title: You, Robot, antropologia della vita artificiale (You, Robot, anthropology of artificial life), in which the origins of a contradictory archetype are faced with shrewdness and scientific rigour, at times unnerving, passing from...
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INTERACTION DESIGN
//Matteo Traversari
WEARABLES
//Simona Brusa
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THE DIALOGUE OF ICS AND IPSILON
Txt: Matteo Traversari
Area: Interaction Design
 “An interactive system, I believe, can be considered a new type of film; but a film that can be controlled, and that concerns something we wish to influence. And the important duty of a project maker is to imagine this interactive film. Let's not wonder about the nuts and bolts: what is the dream? " (Nelson, 1980) High interactive content representations, shapely objects, suggestive environments have the purpose of influencing the human mind, as if in the context of a motion picture. Reality is painted, actors move between one scene and another, they act and they behave. But who's really interested in it? The virtuality of a film is what seems to be inside it, but what most matters is: What does it really want to be? This is the most important question a project maker has to ask when thinking about his/her own interactive work. Perceive the way in which a complex sophisticated human comes to dialogue with situations, with the purpose...
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MATERIAL GIRLS
Txt: Simona Brusa
Area: Wearables
 Without a doubt, there is nothing more exciting for a designer than to touch, experiment and create new material. For a creative mind, in fact, new material could be the final step of a long experiment or the stimulating beginning of a new project. This is the case of Maggie Orth, recognised innovator in the field of electronic textiles and founder of the company International Fashion Machines. Her work in the field of wearable computers, started years ago with MIT, has evolved in a slow but progressive way towards textile experimentation. The need to win the difficult challenge of generating peculiar effects on clothes or on soft surfaces has brought Maggie to the creation of a new electronic textile (Electric Plaid), printed electronics with thermal-agent ink, able the change colour in predefined areas. Her interactive textile works of art, Dynamic Double Weave and Leaping Lines , based on this new material, have been around the world....
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TECNO TEATRO
//Annamaria Monteverdi
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BIG ART GROUP AND THE INFESTED SCREEN
Txt: Annamaria Monteverdi
Area: Tecno Teatro
 The NewYorker Caden Mason, leader of Big Art Group, famous for his spectacular technological manipulations on stage, has landed at Senigallia, at the Theatre La Fenice with his House of no more, invited by Velia Papa (director of the Inteatro Festival) which attracted a mass of people. The previous show of Big Art Group , Flicker, was a funny and destructive parody of TV reality shows, live tragedies and chronicles in real time widespread on TV. It was organized like a real time movie, a movie that, while realizing, was already broadcast and on stage. To the 3 cameras corresponded 3 positions and 8 actors controlling “personally” and in turn their own “digital eye” playing meanwhile a character of the story and lending their arms, their head and their chest for the shot of another one. In little words, 3 screens contiguous engendered a single image. The surprising element of the show was that also with the fix cameras, the machine created by Manson used with ability to create through cardboard profiles the sensation of shooting movements, the succession of shot and reverse shot, tracking shots and close ups. The theatre revealed this way the tricks of cinema and television.
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NEW MEDIA
//Lorenzo Tripodi
NEW MEDIA
//Teresa De Feo
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FOR A DEMOCRATIC AND SHARED NET
Txt: Lorenzo Tripodi
Area: New Media
 During the last weeks, the World Summit on Information Society took place in Tunis , two years after the summit of Geneva , and had to deal with global strategies in order to face the issue of digital divide. The most discussed subject was instead Internet Governance, much more interesting, of course, both as far as economic earnings and social control are concerned. Who has the power to control internet? Who controls the way the new electronic frontier is developing? The result of one of the most discussed international summits of recent years (strong is the anachronism between the democratic welcome message of the President Ben Ali and the choice to settle this summit in one of the countries with the biggest control over internet information worldwide, thanks to censorship actions and to repression of freedom of speech in the activist and protest blogs of young Tunisians, at home and abroad) is that in a virtual...
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DO YOU REMEMBER OUR BELOVED COMMODORE 64?
Txt: Teresa Deo Feo
Area: New Media
 Bit & Bite story, an exhibition path, promoted by Sogei (Società generale di Informatica, General Society of IT) devoted to the story of IT, has just ended at the Accademia dei Lincei of Rome . A view we must meditate on, starting from the first tools of computation up to the history of computerization tout court and to the 30 years of PC, through a true archaeology of hardware up to creative experimentation of the new, though already old, technologies. The exhibition devotes, in fact, a considerable part of its proposals to the controversial union between art and computer, creating continuity between tools and language rewriting, between technical innovation linearity and the bricolage game made by artists researching a new use and comprehension of technical devices. An articulated exhibition where techne writes its history, showing retrospectively paths, possibilities, as well as old and new uses...
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HACKING
//Lucrezia Cippitelli
PERFORMING ART
//Monica Ponzini
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ETHICAL HACKTIVISMO AND CUBAN RHYTHM
Txt: Lucrezia Cippitelli
Area: Hacking
From: Santiago del Cile
 How does the “new media” concept work where even technology is difficult to find? Is it possible to talk about hacktivism in geographical, political and social spaces where the lack in technology prevent from developing practices and activities that involve exclusively the Internet? The question – and its possible answers - has been suggested by the collective of artists and activists Chilean Troyano, who asked me to take part in a conference at the 7 th Biennial Video and New Media Exhibition carried out in Santiago del Cile last November about artistic practices that involve new media in Cuba . A point of view of hacktivism as collective practice, critical and not oriented to the production of artistic “goods”, gave me the chance to present into the series of talks – focused on the theme of Hacker as virus that pierce and crack a system – the work of a group of artists and activists from Havana with whom I worked...
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JESPER JUST, TRUE LOVE IS YET TO COME
Txt: Monica Ponzini
Area: Performing Art
From: New York
 Performa was born as a cultural association in Spring 2004 with the goal to organize a Biennal Exhibition dedicated to performance and visual arts. New York surely has a strong tradition about performance, that took roots in 70's movements, when SoHo in particular was the cradle of new way of artistic expression. Its first edition, Performa 05 , has seen the light from 3rd November to 21st November and has invaded the Big Apple with more than 90 artists, who exhibited in many different places found between Manhattan and Brooklyn. From Marina Abramovic, who proposed historical performances and an absolute premiere in the amphitheatre of the Guggenheim Museum , to Francis Alÿs , who organized a fascinating striptease for a selected audience, just to mention a few Sisley Xhafa and Yoko Ono , going on with new talents such as Tami Ben-Tor or the Collective My Barbarian. An event that looked at the tradition of the start...
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GRAPHIC ANIMATION
//Alessandra Migani
NEW MEDIA
//Luigi Pagliarini
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RESFEST, KEEP THE MIND CURIOUS
Txt: Alessandra Migani
Area: Graphic Animation
 I still have the images in my mind, I am happy to have participated in the first edition of Resfest in Rome at Palladium Theatre ( 18 th -20 th November 2005 ). Let's try to sum up what the new “artistic vanguards” are elaborating in the world of video. We also remind you that this is an itinerant festival of digital image (at its 9 th edition), attentive to its most experimental and innovative forms, famous throughout the world thanks to an extraordinary program and to a worldwide tour that reached almost each continent. In Italy it reached Turin before Rome . We could say that the keyword is keep it curious , the leit-motif of the entire festival, the curiosity in fact is the must of the festival. A clear message which appears between the hypnotic lines of the catalogue, stimulating a double vision: on one side, towards the artist, who wants to create and to be all eyes on the world inside and outside himself; on the other side...
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PEAM 2005 REPORT
Txt: Luigi Pagliarini
After more than one month of activity the third edition of the Pescara Electronic Artists Meeting is over. The meeting, this year, has shown artistic robustness, intellectual determination, social strength, political consciousness and philosophical inspiration. Peam2005 counted 15 curators, 12 sections, 7 locations (plus a "virtual " one) and more than 100 guests running a large number of exhibitions, workshops, concerts and performances. The most impressive thing has been the coherence with which all the artists and curators developed and maintained their ideas around the leit-motiv, The new human being positioning, with all the projects spinning around this request for a definition of human-beings hybridized by hi-tech. The research for a new human identity explores and redefines the human body, cognition, communication, spatial position and semiotic by reading the human-machine interaction under a different light...
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GENERATIVE ART
//Marco Mancuso
BIO ART
//Tiziana Gemin
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TEZ, META GENERATIVE ARTIST
Txt: Marco Mancuso
Area: Generative Art
 TeZ is Maurizio Martinucci 's stage name. He was originally a musician and he became then a 360° media artist thanks to his creative inclination. TeZ is not famous in Italy yet, but he's considered one of the most complete and versatile electronic artist abroad. It's not easy to give a plain definition of his work. It's almost impossible to visualize it for the ones, insiders or not, that don't understand the crossover potentialities of new electronic arts and the fact it's not always necessary to define the level of meta-language electronic arts naturally create. We should be proud one of the most aware meta-artist of this period is Italian and we shouldn't let these artists forcedly emigrate in the direction of Amsterdam and Holland digital channels. TeZ is above all a musician. He has been working with electronic music for years and he has collaborated with famous artists such as Kim Cascone, Taylor Deupree and Scanner...
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BIOART, BETWEEN ETHICS AND AESTHETICS
Txt: Tiziana Gemin
Area: Bio Art
 By means of technology these days' sciences produce aesthetics images so it is not surprising the artistic field produces works which look like genetic engineering surgical procedures or laboratory experiments. Faced with some operations our aesthetic but also ethics sense is often put in a critical position. We are forced to redefine the border between animate and inanimate world and our definitions of subject and object. Bio art – art manipulating life mechanisms – doesn't have a precise thematic manifesto and it involves a lot of very different projects whose contents and methodologies are relative to biotechnology. The promoter of various bio art exhibitions and author of the Biotech Art book Jens Hauser gave a lecture at Ars Electronica 2005 entitled Bio Art – Taxonomy of an etymological monster on the difficulty of finding bio art works parameters or limits...
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NET PORN
//Tatiana Bazzichelli
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NETPORN: NEW "TACTICAL" TERRITORIES
Txt: Tatiana Bazzichelli
Area: Net Porn
 In olden times we inquired into digital bodies and bit physique, today we prefer real performance to virtual one where the body becomes flesh at last (using a now memorable Cronenberg-like expression. I think many of you remember his movie “Videodrome”.) The late 80's – beginning of the 90's “indie” imaginary that accompanied the most part of those years punk has now become “porn” bringing the “do it yourself” idea in contact with your skin and underneath your clothes (which are no more virtual clothes). Today pornography is becoming more and more “indie porn” and its main characters are no longer stars but very normal people that self manage their sexuality creating a new independent pornography. Maybe genuineness is the new secret of success. What's more by means of P2P channels, blogs and share circuits of videos, pics and independent movies exchange it is a very rapid success. The porn becomes playful and ironical; it deconstructs and creates new codes. Indie porn seems to impart new sap to net culture, which was exhausted of years of debates on digital body and cyberspace. On the other hand our mailboxes speak without beating about the bush too: more than 50% of the messages we receive everyday testify that sex is an important part of our life and netporn is a phenomenon we can't close the eyes to. A two days event focused on netporn criticism called The Art and Politics of Netporn was organized in Amsterdam.
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