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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: TeZ
Contenuti:
Luca Bergero, Silvia Bianchi, Simona Brusa, Marco Cadioli, Alex Dandi, Beatrice Ferrario, Fabio Franchino, Tiziana Gemin, Luigi Ghezzi, Alessandra Migani, Anna Monteverdi, Bertram Niessen, Miriam Petruzzelli,Monica Ponzini, Massimo Schiavoni, Domenico Quaranta, Elena Vairani, Valentina Tanni |
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---------------------------------- NETWORKS
//Marco Mancuso
NET ART
//Valentina Tanni |
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WJ-S PROJECT...WEB EMOTIONS
Txt: Marco Mancuso
Area: Networks
 For a long time I turned whirling for gorges of the Net searching for a project able to astonish me and speed up my mind. A project able to throw the basis for a happy integration between the virtual world behind our net cable and the chaotic universe of multimedia performances. Nowadays everyone can see how audio-video lives are sometimes walking a path opposite to the common one. A path that belongs to a society where aesthetic rules are more and more conditioned by the huge potential of technologies. Often auto-referential, sometimes incomprehensible or pure style exercise, a media live leave often disappointed even the experts. Try to figure out those who want to approach this world, by the digital matrix potentially infinite, for the first time. I'm sure that the landscape is not as fascinating as a Matrix fresco. You can almost be disappointed, most of all if you were searching...
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TO CURE WITH VIDEO ART
Txt: Valentina Tanni
Area: Net Art
 Aroma therapy, chromium therapy, music therapy, crystal therapy, art therapy. The varied world of the alternative medicine spreads more and more. Is it due to the mistrust of the traditional medicine and the stress of the nowadays life, or another new wage wave? We do not know the reason of the success of these curative strategies, apart from fans and detractors (that admits anyway the existence of a placebo effect), but it is impossible deny that the stimulation of some dormant senses obtains some effects, most of all using lights and sounds. Even if it is not the results we were looking for, we always obtain something, most of all when we need to cure our mind and not our body. A web project created by the Canadian Soil Digital Media Suite and signed by the composer and new media artist Michael Stecky is ironic about the problem. Perfectly Normal is created as an automatic dispenser of video and music...
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REALITY ADDICTS: TRANSMEDIALE 06
Txt: Tiziana Gemin
Area: Hacktivism
 This year Transmediale 06 of Berlin carried lots of changes. The evident novelty is the location, no more the spacious Haus der Kulturen der Welt , but in the discreet Akademie der Kuenste. The director of this festival, Andreas Broeckmann, sees in the transfer a sign that strengthen the relationship with arte in general. More than a logistic need. And the festival subtitle took the same direction, from “International Media Art Festival” to “ Festival for Art and Digital Culture . Transmediale 06 theme was Reality Addicts and the debate emerged, in the conferences as well, has been really interesting, even if it leaves lots of doubts, in my opinion. Made the point of the situation and saw the changes brought by the technologies most of all in the last ten years, we note the errors of valuation and the false illusions. The theme is about the perception of the reality mediated by technologies and the...
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INVITING HORROR: JOIN TO THE FEAR
Txt: Beatrice Ferrario
Area: Hacktivism
 During this age of modernity or thoughtful modernity, how the sociologist Ulrich Beck define it, who has never tried fear? We live in the constant menace of global danger of high potential power, we are fed and exploited by power structures, who try to guarantee to their citizens a sense of safety, in exchange of a restricted individual freedom. Inviting Horror, the interactive art project created by Karen Lancel e Hermen MaaT , overturn this mechanism, forming and studying frightening situations in public places, with the participation of common people that act scenes of social phobia. People who suffer of phobia project a mix of aggressiveness and desire on something or someone out of their selves, called phobic object. The subject experiment this someone or something as a menace for itself and point its aggressiveness on itself as defence...
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THE DUMPSTER, BITTER LOVE AT INTERNET TIME
Txt: Domenico Quaranta
Area: Software Art
 Let's start from the beginning: The Dumpster is an online project born on Valentine's day, visualizing with a cool design (Processing), a huge number of data, collected from blogs and related to people, usually teens, dumped in a romantic affair. Its author is Golan Levin, that created and realized the project together with Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg, two high level programmers (Nigam works for Intelliseek and Google, Feinberg for IBM). Together with a text by Lev Manovich, The Dumpster is supported by Intellieseek, and it is the the fisrt project of a join venture between Whitney Museum and Tate Online, that will brought two other works (The battle of Algiers by Marc Lafia and Fang Yu lin, and Screening circle by Andy Deck). The Dumpster can be analysed not only in its contents but also as a real phenomenon. There are different levels of access to a really huge number of data: almost 20.000 romance interrupted...
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ESONO: PROCEDURAL THINKING
Txt: Fabio Franchino
Area: Generative Art
 Boris Muller is a designer artist from Berlin . He studied computer related design both at the famous College of Art and Design in Breme and at the Royal College of Art in London . Nowadays Teacher of interaction design and interface design programme, Boris share his life between his professional job ( he was also in Italy between 2001 and 2002 at the Interactin Institute in Ivrea) and artistic activity. In his various activity and production ( you can find his huge production, both graphical and interactive ones on his website), he is absolutely conscious that design is related to procedural methodologies. Multimedial artist, the main aspect of his work is the dialogue with the nature of a computational machine, Boris had in his curriculum a procedural work for an advertising campain. That is almost a dream for young artists, considering the fact that communication agency are not so interested in generative art...
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---------------------------------
VIDEO ART
//Alessandra Migani
GRAPHIC ANIMATION
//Monica Ponzini
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LIVING ROOM VIDEO ART
Txt: Alessandra Migani
Area: Video Art
 The meaning of the term living-room is incredibly fascinating. The word living room has an abounding in images impact: it's the “room where you live”, the place where the family and friends spend time together, the room where entertaining stories are told, the fireplace room where the family gathers; the first place of the house where the TV entered and replaced daily chats; the place of the stereo and music for someone, the place of photographs and memories for someone else, the human body extension-space. So even if styles, design objects, and interior decorations change living-room remains the living and pulsing core of every house in every epoch and at every geographic latitude. This fascinating idea has excited so much the minds of the British collective The Light Surgeons that they have come out with – through an almost natural course - Domestic Archaeology, an installation conceived in collaboration...
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ANTI - APARTHEID ANIMATIONS
Txt: Monica Ponzini
Area: Graphic Animation
 It's the parable of life, the history of a nation, the reflection of a visual poetic. From 15 to 20 February the MoMA of New York has presented 9 Drawings for projection , the series of animations realized from 1989 to 2003 by the South African artist William Kentridge ( Johannesburg , 1955). With a technique which is essential and shocking at the same time the artist composes the portrait of his Country through a “little history” full of symbolic implications. In a magmatic and protean landscape the saga of three imaginary characters takes place: they are Soho Eckstein, who's a mining tycoon and a man of property, his wife and her idealist and passionate lover, Felix Teitlebaum. It's a non-narration progressing through associations and visual digressions. Bodies change into hills, pools, and animals and buildings collapse to make room for deserted lands passed through masses of poor people. While Soho crashes...
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CLUBBING
//Alex Dandi
SOUND ART
//Luca Bergero
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LIVE DJ SET VS STUDIO DJ SET
Txt: Alex Dandi
Area: Clubbing
 The forthcoming release of Miss Kittin 's Live At Sonar gives us the chance to consider the role of DJ sets (more or less live, more or less artificial) immortalised and marketed on CDs the discography market is overstocked with. Can a DJ set be considered a live in all respects by the same standards of a concert with a lot of musicians making music through instruments (either acoustic, electric or electronic)? After all, a DJ set is nothing but a sequence of someone else's records mixed more or less. Miss Kittin's live was recorded live during her performance during last year‘s Sonar and was successively edited in some parts for some problems of licences and authorisations on some tracks. The fact that a live is not reproduced in its integrity but divided into some parts allows some conceptual doubts on the operation. But if a DJ is judged a musician in all respects (by the English musicians' union too) we absolutely...
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LOREN CHASSE, PHOTOGRAPHING ACUSTIC SPACES
Txt: Luca Bergero
Area: Sound Art
 The American Loren Chasse is one of the most important international artists, connected to the environment/sound relation. His abilities to listen and to transform the object in “musical instrument” are some of the most identifying features of his work. If field recordings are more and more common in “experimental” music, Loren Chasse does not only have a different way of using sound, but he manages, with his microphone, to photograph in a representative way the acoustic spaces in which he works. Chasse can shift the “traditional” frontier of art, making the differences between music and sound art not very crystalline, if they exist. Beyond his activity as a musician and his several collaborations, he is a teacher at the San Francisco School District where he organises workshops on the listening ability and on creativity connected to it...
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AUDIOVIDEO
//Bertram Niessen
LIVE MEDIA
//Silvia Bianchi
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MIKROSOLKE, ANARCHIA AUDIOVISIVA
Txt: Bertram Niessen
Area: Audiovideo
 Mikrosolke, anarchic manipulators of narrations, were born from the meeting of Unz, Tatiana and MM . It is very difficult to explain (and understand) what they do. First of all, we must say there is not a “Mikrosolke” recipe”. It is in fact an improvisation project coming out of fun, sometimes sick, in building fragile (drenched too) bridges between audio and video worlds. Mikrosolke's performances are a new wave in the world of Italian audiovisual performances, lately worryingly oriented towards lounge-atmospheres fundamentally inoffensive. Their way to present on stage breaks the mould: to the cold posture peculiar to Tatiana's and Unz's laptop performers the unpredictable physicalness of MM (member of Mercoledì and Newtone 2060 too) who, between screams and sweat sometimes literally seems to fuck with the instrument (which can be a mixer and a couple of broken record players, a piano or some slide projectors)...
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QUBOGAS: NO AUDIOVISUAL PERFORMANCES
Txt: Silvia Bianchi
Area: Live Media
 Laura Henno, Jef Ablézot e Morgan Dimnet started their common research at secondary school in Lille where they graduate in plastic art and together start to approach the graphic world. Their artistic path starts in 2000 and leads them to be today an extremely established and internationally active team from the point of view of art and commercial production. They first presented live at Netmage 02 . In this Bolognese audiovisual kermes, they presented a live introducing a visual poetics able to unfreeze the standards of image in flash and of audio/video interaction, introducing regressive, playful, distorted and magic visual imagery. Qubogas develop a research at the origin of a surreal universe, developed between abstraction and figuration, with a work combining painting, digital collage, drawing on paper and graffiti. Their works recreate an abstract and imaginary world, made up of chaotic landscapes and explosive...
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ROBOTICS
//Elena Vairani
TECHNOLOGY
//Luigi Ghezzi
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ROBOTMUSIC: BEYOND THE LIFE
Txt: Elena Vairani
Area: Robotics
 One of the long awaited events of the AV2006 , the performance that perfectly summarises the theme of the festival this year, will be to see the robot musicians of the project Robot Music by the Japanese Suguru Goto, held at The Sage di Gateshead . The robot orchestra will play the percussions in a brief show on Saturday 4 th and Sunday 5 th of March. Suguru Goto is composer, inventor and multimedia artist and is considered the spokesman of a new generation of Japanese composers tied to technical experimentation in the artistic field and to the extension of the artistic potentiality that exists in the rapport Man (creator) - and robot (composer). A quick visit to its website immediately highlights the work of Suguru Goto, for the least in his main works which are SuperPolm (an example of a performance with a virtual musical instrument), the BodySuite (an instrument of sensors for the interaction between body movement, audio...
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REGIONAL INNOVATION SYSTEMS
Txt: Luigi Ghezzi
Area: Technology
 Nowadays a diffused sense of guilt is perceptible when pronouncing the word global, one of the most misused and poly-semantic terms used over the last twenty years, and equally a sense of compensation is felt when proposing, in substitution of it, the concept of glocal , that is the declension of global cultural, economical, political and technological dimensions with regional ones. As of the nineties in technological environments, a praxis was consolidated that soon became a policy innovation that goes under the name of regional innovation system . Perhaps it is that that can genuinely come into the category of glocal with procedures which are certainly ante-litteram in comparison to theory formulation. The approach is certainly not unambiguous, but the common features of this type of policy innovation are set in an institutional context that, through public intervention and the relationship with enterprises and citizens...
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INTERACTION SYSTEMS
//Simona Brusa
INTERACTION DESIGN
//Miriam Petruzzelli
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SEAMLESS 2.0: INVENTING INTEGRATION
Txt: Simona Brusa
Area: Interaction Systems
 Seamless 2.0 is an annual exhibition dedicated to the integration of fashion and technology promoted by the MIT of Boston. This year the event, in part sponsored by Motorola, has taken the shape of a fashion show in the context of the Science Museum of Boston . The intention: to present experimental work and new ways of imaging the rapport between body and clothes on a psychological, social and esthetical level. Among the projects that stood out on the catwalk were the works of Gemma Shusterman (MIT Media Lab), Diana Eng ( Rhode Island School of Design), Marta Lwin (ITP New York ) e Teresa Almeida (ITP New York ). The works presented go from wearable art to the prototypes of laboratory research that illustrate a incessant yearning for artistic and technological experimentation, however, they leave a doubt about what the common denominator that links them is, beyond the mere concept...
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ART . EXE
Txt: Miriam Petruzzelli
Area: Interaction Design
 Promoted by the town hall of Monza and the province of Milan, in collaboration with Teche 05. The archipelago of Ulisse, journey with interactive installations by Mario Canali will be inaugurated at Monza march 15 th . Born in Monza in 1952, Canali starts his artistic life in 1975 as a painter, he then dedicates himself to electronic and digital art, of which in Italy he has long been the proponent and the exponent in the foreground. After thirty years, his city has dedicated him an exhibition held at one of the cities historical centres, the Arengario, inside a wider operation that will culminate in autumn with the national videogame championships at its racetrack. Therefore it is a combined operation that declares among its main objectives not only that of approaching a wider audience, but also that of establishing a closer relationship between Milan and its province by re-launching the consideration between art and new technology...
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TECNOTEATRO
//Annamaria Monteverdi
PERFORMING ART
//Massimo Schiavoni
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VISION THEATRICAL MACHINES
Txt: Annamaria Monteverdi
Area: TecnoTeatro
The Andersen Project , the fifth extraordinary solo-show directed and interpreted by the eclectic theatrical and cinematographic Canadian artist Robert Lepage together with his multimedia structure Ex Machina , was commissioned by the Andersen Foundation of Copenhagen for the bicentenary celebrations of the birth of the Danish writer. The old-fashioned style scene inhabited by back-drop videos projected on a pneumatic mechanical landscape, with mobile platforms and gearings confirms the Lepage's interest in a theatre imposing tradition to give the impression of being contemporary. The plot: The Londoner lyricist Frederic Lapointe was chosen by the director of the Paris Opera to write the libretto of an opera for kids which drew inspiration from the Andersen fairy-tale The Dryad the tale of a nymph living in a hollow of a tree that renounce to immortality to visit Paris for a day. The third character is the young Morocco immigrant Rashid...
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FURA'S METAMORPHOSIS
Txt: Massimo Schiavoni
Area: Performing Art
 The Fenice's theatre at Senigallia is becoming a unique referent point for passionate and experts of the contemporary artistic culture. The theatre has entertained in exclusive the last performative master piece of Fura dels Baus: Methamorfosis . Intimist, bared, voyeuristic, less trashy and more engaged than usual, less pathetic and more melancholic, sentimentally efficacious and abstractically empathic. La Fura shows The Metamorphosis following the pièce taken from Kafka ; as it were in Faust, 3.0 . and in XXX , it's a free adaptation. Scenes and music are as usual of great impact in a pure furero style. The company was born from street arts in 1979 and it's composed by artists engaged in the constant research of new forms and scenic cues. They call themselves Theatrical Guerriglia and even today their radical performances sometimes provoke real popular insurrections...
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NEW MEDIA
//Miriam Petruzzelli
MUD
//Marco Cadioli
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TRANSMODAL INTUITION
Txt: Miriam Petruzzelli
Area: New Media
 An ever increasing number of artists shift through cultural interfaces, means and genres evoking both science and mythology, both technology and tradition. Postmodernism's heritage has changed into transmodal transit; today the human being is modulated by images, hyperlinks, processors, and nets; our sensorial world is redefined or better re-balanced by the collision with the arising realities new models of the world and our subjectivity are generating. The new art is connected to the means making it available, realizing it, and transmitting it; the new praxis is making pragmatic and philosophy at the same time; this praxis generates interactivity and socially and aesthetically changes the common sense while reflecting on the mutant nature of perception, connectivity, and conscience. The deriving works of art are made up of self-conscious associations of meanings, of unconscious sensibilities...
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SECOND LIFE ART
Txt: Marco Cadioli
Area: Mud
 The online 3D world Second Life entirely made up by its residents is becoming a very interesting art experimentations platform. There are different experiences ranging over conferences, debates, communities of artists aggregations, exhibitions, private art galleries, film festivals, poems reading, concerts, and even a drawing course. There are projects involving the real world but existing for SL only. There are important projects where well-known artists are involved in and real art-galleries like The Port project that realized an isle managed by artists with installations; there is a photographs exhibition by Jeff Wall , a magazine was edited and presented by the Whitney Artport in December (we talked about it in the last issue of our magazine), but there are also some minor initiatives. Quality is variable but it's sure there's a great fervour. In Second Life on 150.000 residents according to a list updated in December 2006...
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