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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
Artwork:
Otolab
Contents:
Luca Bergero, Simone Bertuzzi, Silvia Bianchi, Marco Cadioli, Lucrezia Cippitelli, Alex Dandi, Teresa De Feo, Beatrice Ferrario, Fabio Franchino, Luigi Ghezzi, Alessandra Migani, Anna Monteverdi, Bertram Niessen, Miriam Petruzzelli,Monica Ponzini, Massimo Schiavoni, Domenico Quaranta, Elena Vairani
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---------------------------------- NET ART
//Monica Ponzini
NETWORKS
//Beatrice Ferrario |
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0100101110101101.ORG, EXPERIMENTAL FAKE MOVIE
Txt: Monica Ponzini
Area: Net Art
 There's a new movie coming out or maybe not. It's the European answer to American spy-stories and action movies. It has a captivating title: United We Stand; it is directed from a new talent and interpreted by Ewan Mc Gregor and Penelope Cruz. Are we sure about it? There is a great deal of advertising in specialized magazines and a lot of posters in cities like Barcelona , Berlin and New York . The film has also a web site. But where's the movie? The movie doesn't exist as well as the Nike's project to customize and rename Nike Plaz a well-known Vienna Plaza and as well as an artist called Darko Maver as well as the www.vaticano.org web site… two artists interested in the media dynamics made us believe it and we believed it. United We Stand is the inexistent movie we're talking about. It's the nth project revealing the unreliability of...
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ARTISTIC DEVIATIONS AND NET COMPARISONS
Txt: Beatrice Ferrario
Area: Networks
 Deviant ART (DA) is an art-oriented web site. It's a virtual art gallery where artists expose their digital works and chat with users. It's even a work place, where young promising artists looking for gigs can be noted. It's a social place, where you meet people, you can criticize and fight and you grew up. It's also a political place, where you can talk over public morality, the law on copyright and sometimes censorship. It's a community with all the merits and deficencies of a small social system. On line! The young photographer Echomrg has been a DA member for 5 years, he entered one year after the creation of the deviantart.com web site. He talks about this network, its dynamics and expectations through his virtual artist direct experience.
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GWEI, AGAINST THE NICE DICTATOR
Txt: Marco Mancuso
Area: Hacking
 Can a dictator be nice, make people trust him and have an unambiguous face? There are a lot of answers to this question and honestly I would be embarrassed if someone asked me to give a precise answer. In real world is difficult to find a person who's got these characteristics but in virtual world it's different. After a short reflection it's easy to pick out the well-known and super widely-circulated online search engine Google as the number one claimant to the role of Great Dictator of the Net. It's true the Californian online search engine is not the only It business corporate pursuing aggressive development strategies and having successful partnerships in all around the world stock exchanges. But it's also true that there are at least three factors distinguishing Google from its direct competitors: it has a clear and clean image, its services are powerful and beautiful and its business in focused on advertising...
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TROYANO: CRITICAL CHILE NEAR AT THE FUTURE
Txt: Lucrezia Cippitelli
Area: Hacktivismo
 Troyano is a collective of independent Chilean artists from Santiago, which organizes the cultural activities relative to art and technology. The collective participated at the VII Video and New Media Biennial (18-27 November 2005) critically attending the section dedicated to New Media and organizing an international symposium. Their project is called Elena in the honour of the virus which installs itself in a hard disk and erase its data. This project wants to give a critical picture of cultural, critical and artistic production which in the last ten years has been consciously relying on technologies. They want to propose in the contemporary Chilean society a debate on the “creative” use of media in opposition to a purely economic, utilitarian and commercial vision of technology diffusion. Chile has been in close commercial relationships with Japan, Taiwan (and now China) for decades, it's an important copper producer (the copper is...
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HISTORICAL MEMORY AND THE CITY
Txt: Lucrezia Cippitelli
Area: Hacktivismo
 Santiago, Santiasco, Sanhattan: The capital city of the most westernized Latin American's country is very far from that kind of Eurocentric idea of a Baroque and decadent Latin town full of picturesque people. It's a consumerist-oriented seven millions inhabitants' metropolis far from European and North American's idea of a South America made up of natives, poverty, social fights, and red dictatorships (the same as military dictatorships). Chile has apparently solved its hanging problems with Pinochet's dictatorship (1973-1990) and after many years of a transitional government and a decade of privatizations (with the consequent dogmatic approach to the marvellous things coming from the foreign countries: starting from private undertaking which bought all country's infrastructures which once were state-controlled) is now the leading country of a developing continent...
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PLAYING WITH CODE
Txt: Domenico Quaranta
Area: Software Art
 Game Art originates often in the combination of two big passions: love for programming and for videogames. Besides, it happens quite often that those two passions originate together, and many are the hackers and the programmers who have discovered the delight of the code playing at Super Mario Bros . Brent Gustafson cultivates both passions with an unusual regularity and uprightness. Gustafson, who was a Walker Art Center di Minneapolis, is particularly interested in emulation as an instrument able to assure the survival to the culture and the aesthetic of arcades and of 8 bits games, which are inexorably being cancelled by hardware obsolescence. ROM Color , one of his most recent works, refers to this interest. The technique has already been used by Benjamin Fry in Mario Soup , even if with some interesting changes. It originates from the utilisation of a peculiar feature of old tuners. In them, in fact...
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GLEETCHPLUG: NOISE GENERATION
Txt: Fabio Franchino
Area: Generative Art
 GleechtPlug is a piece of audio software oriented to the production of gleecht and noise sounds through mathematic processes. The interesting point is how the instrument works and produces sounds, a procedure that is common between artists espousing generative methodologies in the field of experimental creativity. Likewise, oM is a true player of generative music, able to generate autonomously random ambient music, for absolutely unique and unrepeatable listening experiences. I asked Giorgio Sancristoforo a.k.a. Tobor Experiment , author of those two pieces of software, some questions about his work and about generative art in general, obtaining some interesting considerations on how the music background may change in the next years thanks to the experimentation and contamination brought by code artists (generative and not) to electronic music, digital composition, fruition of music...
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---------------------------------
VIDEO ART
//Alessandra Migani
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THE MIGRATORY DANCE OF THE VITAL CYCLE Txt: Alessandra Migani
Area: Video Art
 I'm watching the videos of Carolina Melis, I close my eyes and, by magic, migratory birds come into my mind, flying from the wonderful shores of Sardinia to Brighton, a little town by the sea, an hour's train journey from London . The constant migrations are part of a path more and more artists decide to follow. Carolina Melis herself left her native Sardinia more than ten years ago to continue her dance and choreography studies in the Unite Kingdom . During this personal journey, the young director develops an interest in animation and illustration, filled with a Master in Communication Design at Central St Martins of London . She begins to find the first fulfilments straight after the end of her Master, in fact her video, In Which a Butterfly Lands on a Zebra's Head , selected in 2004 from the itinerant festival onedotzero , goes round the world. The video is a work wisely structured. In the opening, on the screen...
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---------------------------------
SPERIMENTALE
//Simone Bertuzzi
CLUBBING
//Alex Dandi
SOUND ART
//Luca Bergero
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PAAVOHARJU - YHA HAMARAA (FONAL 2005)
Txt: Simone Bertuzzi
Area: Sperimentale
 It will be a passing phenomenon, a momentary tendency, but there is remarkable a productive underbrush within the ambit of new-folk, that demands continuous attention and analysis. Fonal is a recent discovery, simply fantastic label, that encloses a sort of Nordic hippy community, a detection that slowly blooms in the international panorama. The captain of Fonal is Sänpäkkilä, aka Es, quite famous for his apparitions for German (K-RAA-K)3, not new in this context, and of which the optimal Sateenkaarisuudelma deserves a note, but who would need some more space for being analyzed. Fonal is actually active since 1995, born in Tampere, Finland, where it still resides, publishing several Finnish bands that cross ambient, experimentation and a hybrid vision of POP folk psychedelic. 2005 is the year of the publication of an exemplary disc to understand the poetic of Fonal, called Yhä hämärää, recorded by one band...
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ROCK-ELECTRONICA: LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES
Txt: Alex Dandi
Area: Clubbing
 Some years ago, during a rock night, I played a sequence of tracks made up of Franz Ferdinand, The Rapture ed Electric Six . After a song of Electric Six (“Danger! High Voltage”), an about twenty year-old guy, approached me and asked me to play rock. Not to play “more rock”, but to play rock. After a first reaction of astonishment, followed the almost sociologic purpose to understand why a twenty year-old boy did not consider rock what I was playing. The tone of the sound didn't allow any doubt: instruments played, true basses, new wave/punk guitars and singers. A sound equipment undoubtedly rock. I thought that maybe the funk of the tracks wasn't attractive to a certain type of rock public, but then ,thinking about Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rage Against The Machine, I had to change my mind. Then lighting, which, as any lighting, is under the eyes of everybody. What didn't reach the ear of that guy wasn't the punk...
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E/STATIC, SOUND ART GALLERY...AND MUCH MORE
Txt: Luca Bergero
Area: Sound Art
 If music has the possibility to release itself as it likes in the ambient where it's proposed, sound art on the other hand has a strong and rooted relationship with the space where it plays. This is an absolute fact, even if lots of people often forget about that. It's one of the strongest and interesting theme of the debate between attentive listeners, artists and insiders. In this contest, one of the greatest role is therefore covered by art galleries, where works born, evolve and find the visibility to the public. In Italy there are just a few galleries who've always been attentive to value exposed works in relationship both with the public and the fruition space of the work. I had the pleasure to ask some question to Carlo Fossati director of the gallery e/static of Turin that, during the years, has turned out to be one of the most interesting realities in Italy. The level of exhibitions and projects exposed is always high...
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----------------------------------
LIVE MEDIA
//Bertram Niessen
//Silvia Bianchi
//Elena Vairani
VJING
//Silvia Bianchi
//Elena Vairani
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NETMAGE CALLS OUT FOR ITALY: SPECIAL EDITION 06
Txt: Bertram Niessen,
Interviews (Andrea Dojmi , Zimmerfrei, Sinistri++, Simone Tosca): Silvia Bianchi,Elena Vairani
Area: Audiovideo
 Once again Netmage is drawing near and the communities involved in electronic arts have the usual expectations and doubts. There are the accustomed solid group of participants and among them there are some prodigies ( Arto Lindsay, Carlsten Nicolai, Kurt Hentschlager and @C-Lia) and some artists who are not well known to the Italian audience yet. Among participants there are also three “historical” realities involved in an experimentation which can't be defined electronic: Sinistri++ (former-Starfuckers), Zu and With Love . The reason why enthusiasts of glitch and drones probably don't know them is scenes and genres remain worryingly distant in spite of parallel researches; aficionados of free-post twisted guitars know they will have overdoses of noise and improbable metrics. The question is interesting: how do these music players – who are linked to a stage free-form live ness - will relate to...
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OPEN DOORS TO VJCLASH
Txt: Silvia Bianchi
Interview (Gianluca Del Gobbo): Elena Vairani
Area: Vjing
 The second edition of LPM-Live Performers Meeting, kept in Rome on 9th and 10th December 2005, has seen the participation of more than sixty artists from Italy, France, Belgium, Croatia, Thailand, Denmark, England and Uruguay. Organized and produced by Flyer Communication LAB, in association with FlxER, Shockart, Deliriouniversale, Homework, Peam, Electronic Art Café, the event has been kept into Linux Club. These two days have been a continuum of workshop, audio-video performance, dj and VJ sets, giving the festival the chance to become an interesting moment of meeting and confrontation for the experts and a good point of observation to understand how music, video and graphic can be combined in live performances. The audio-video performances have represented one of the moments of the two days, as point of revolution and fusion of vjing and musical production...
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BIO ART
//Teresa De Feo
I.A.
//Luigi Ghezzi
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DIGITAL ECOSYSTEMS TO CLICK CAPACITY
Txt: Teresa De Feo
Area: Bio Art
 You have certainly heard about the singular convergence between evolutional dynamics and informatics. Probably you're not stranger to the definition of Alife (see the article of Luigi Ghezzi in the last number of Digimag 10_Dicembre05-Gennaio06), of artificial life, and maybe even the one about the genetic algorithm. Let's talk about the possibilities of application of the evolutional rules, or rather behaviours who implicate adaptation and auto-conservation, in creating artificial system able to auto-rule their selves, grow up and evolve autonomously as a natural system. Scientists, biologists, engineers work hard on this project, as they found in this direction a big opportunity, both from a theoretical point of view, to go deeper and deeper in the acknowledgement of the evolutional processes, and from a more eminent practical point of view, to ameliorate the services of our technologies, hardware and software...
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BIOLOGICAL MEMORIES AND ARTIFICIAL MEMORIES
Txt: Luigi Ghezzi
Area: Artificial Intelligence
 After more than ten years since the official born of the Internet structure, the concept of memory togheter with computer is now common, so that is now acceptable a sort of analogy between human brain and computer, considered as a sort of electronic brain. In this analogy, Internet is a net, its function is to produce a collective intelligence, but also to keep a universal memory. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy define memory as “a label for a diverse set of cognitive capacities by which humans and perhaps other animals retain information and reconstruct past experiences, usually for present purposes.” There are some common aspects between human and technological memory, expeciialy considering the inner processes, like co difying the information that have to be memorize, their keeping and how to make them present in mind...
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INTERACTION SYSTEMS
//Marco Mancuso
INTERACTION DESIGN
//Massimo Schiavoni
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AMPLIFIED REALITY AND INTERACTIVE GESTURE
Txt: Marco Mancuso
Area: Interaction Design
 They have developed many software and interactive machine, generally connected with gestures and drawings, expanding reality, with the dialogue between technology and human, but also with fun, of the audience at their shows or art exhibitions. They are Tmema, the artistic duo of Golan Levin and Zach Lieberman, absolutely famous in the new media art world, moving easily between art shows of electonic and modern art and the fake underground scene of the audiovisual contamination festivals. From Messa di Voce to The manual input session, from Drawn or Scrapple and Dianltones, all their projects had a high artistic level, but exploring the most complex paths of the machine-human interactivity, devoted to an high aim of audiovisual emotion and research of the non sense. For this, and also many ather reasons, Golan Levin and his former student Zach Lieberman are considered as two of the most....
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FREE MINIMAL INTERACTIONS
Txt: Massimo Schiavoni
Area: Interaction Design
 The real strenght of the Teatro di Piazza o d'Occasione, founded in 1971 by Leonardo Toccafondi and then again in the 1979, is to create and use scenaries, images and materials always new and spectacular, developing lights, perceptive esthetic education, movement, colours, graphic signs and digital interactive technology. This theatre is part of that Performing art that focus on the audience, making it fact. It makes a traditional scene a multimedial habitat and, leaving us free to move, it allows us to interact with the minimal elements that surrounds us. The audience has an important role, it is the audience that define the existence of the show itself. We are ready to follow and respond to every input, we are aware that we are into the rappresentation, and we can lose ourselves in these scene, where instinct and narration can take our fantasies, and that is the strength; changing, being part of a creative...
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PERFORMING ART
//Annamaria Monteverdi
PERFORMING ART
//Massimo Schiavoni
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MULTIMEDIA BECKETT CELEBRATIONS
Txt: Annamaria Monteverdi
Area: Performing Art
There are a lot of editorial initiative and public events in occasion of the 100 th anniversary of Samuel Beckett (while there are a lot of discussing about the feminine rapresentation of “Waiting for Godot”, directed by Roberto Bacci, Pontedera Teatro). First of all, the fisrt and only Italian website dedicated to Samuel Beckett, conceived by Federico Platania, that has a precious database with essays, international bibliography, biography, a section for the events of the anniversary. Between the events, 1906Beckettcentoanni2006, beckettian Festival organized by Giancarlo Cauteruccio for the Kripton Company at the Teatro Studio in Scandicci ( Florence ). The festival ( that will last until April with the most important research Italian company: Virgilio Sieni, Egumteatro, Motus, Roberto Paci Dalò and Gabriele Frasca, Enzo Moscato, Remondi and Caporossi, Carlo Cecchi), open with the...
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ONE STEP AWAY FROM HISTORY
Txt: Massimo Schiavoni
Area: Performing Art
 Teatro Lauro Rossi of Macerata, Italy , December 31st 2005. fifteen people. Three consecutive twenty-five-minute shows. Accompanied into the theatrical optic room set up on a stage, we sat down in front of a projection screen, which because of its closeness, appeared, to say the least, enormous. Surrounded by a black background while behind us loomed the separation curtain beyond which a space of five square metres for the act. Complete darkness, an eighteenth-century silence and curiosity immobilised not only the body but also the mind. Then from the light room behind our backs, quite destabilising in their persuasion, movement and performing actions came to life that are meticulously illuminated and then projected onto the screen in front of us, obviously upside down and inverted. The story seemed to be one-step away: l'hic et nunc from unique existence and awe-inspiring in the place in which the work of art...
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----------------------------------
NEW MEDIA
//Miriam Petruzzelli
MUD
//Marco Cadioli
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SOUND IDENTITIES
Txt: Miriam Petruzzelli
Area: New Media
 That technology changes the perception of reality or reality itself, that it is becoming more than an instrument of “approach”, we have already discussed, faced and established it; the means through which all of this happens are not static and unchangeable, if anything they are quicker, more changeable, and more unpredictable. It was William Gibson who first spoken of Cyberspace or let's say a world-wide network made up of computer data in which the data is the “matrix”, a virtual space in which it is possible to organise and share information. And as often happens, the imagination comes to life through data of shared experience, which is translated into acquired practice of the communication of life. Blog, Advergame, Brand TV but also on-line press offices and Pod Casting are some of the more or less recent examples that are available to us. Of particular interest and of absolute diffusion on the net is the phenomenon...
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THE PORT, ARTISTS COMMUNITY IN SECOND LIFE
Txt: Marco Cadioli
Area: MUD
 The Port is a virtual island of 16 acres (about 6, 4 hectors) inside the on-line 3D world Second Life . Second Life is a space on the net where a parallel world in continuous expansion is being built, modelled by its own residents, that has meeting places, commercial spaces, artistic projects, and what is more incredible they are thinking and building the 100.000 avatars that they already live in. The project The Port was officially opened August 26 2005 by the artists Simon Golden e Jacob Senneby , with the collaboration of the architect Tor Lindstrand and of Frida Cornell . The Port offers itself as a space, community, arena for experiments. The members of The Port are artists, architects, programmers, “thinkers” that experiment and ask themselves about notions of v alue-creation in virtual spaces, about the nature of immaterial production and property, entwined with on-line and off-line reality, about the possibilities of virtual...
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