MOLLEINDUSTRIA, WHEN THE GOIN' GETS TOUGH ...

Txt: Claudia D'Alonso / Translation: Micaela Genchi
Area: Hacktivism

A process of creative deconstruction has been assaulting one of the most representative “mass entertainment” commercial product: videogame. Groups as Molleindustria, Newsgaming , Antiwargame, Metapet deconstruct schemes and contents of videogame language changing videogames from entertainment instruments into soft stings to kindle lethargic brains. These kind of games –which are often realized in Macromedia Flash and called politicalgames or subvergames – are online detonators for our critical sense. Molleindustria represents one of the most interesting laboratories of vivacious experiments of creative contra-information. They create software art, media activism and net art products far from the market of digital entertainment; they reinvent one of the pop culture language sabotaging mass thematic and rules. Their hyper-coloured and gummy 2D graphics is used to...

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MEETING THE MEDIA GURU: GEERT LOVINK

Txt: Francesca Valsecchi / Translation: Giulia Artioli
Area: Hack Art

The official and awaited moments before meeting our mind myths are never the proper occasions for a fruitful exchange, as the conditions for a necessary concentration and participation do not occur easily. Neither does escape to this rule the meeting- on the16 th of March- at the Multimedia Library of Santa Teresa- with Geert Lovink, for the first time in Italy, guest in that setting as wonderful as it is cold, become an exemplary setting for research, communication and quality debate, beyond hosting daily a dense group of citizens and migrants using the multimedia library and Internet. Lovink was welcomed by a crowded room, even though provided with a bad acoustics making the voice echoes, rather then having a rhythm of narration able to intermingle itself with daily life and partly to reveal, describe and enrich it of reflections brand new for deepness. And the deepness of Lovink's thought is exactly his capacity to update and interpret...

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REMEDIATING PONTECORVO

Txt: Domenico Quaranta / Translation: Micaela Genchi
Area: Software Art

According to Jay D. Bolter and Richard Grusin, new media absorb and emulate old media. They call this phenomenon remediation and it can be seen both as the direct expression and invisibility of medium and hyper-mediation or display of medium and its characteristics. One of the most interesting characteristics of this process is it's multidirectional action. As a matter of fact new media give us the possibility to discover some characteristics of old media we forgot because of their linear evolution and so they give their contribution to their growth. So “soft cinema” experiments and “database logic” (Lev Manovich) gave us the possibility to recollect that “all films are computational, all films are a kind of net art” because they are based on an enormous archive of elements and the final product - the film - only represents one of countless possible combinations. Daniel Coffeen states it in his introductory essay to The Battle of Algiers , by Marc Lafia and Fang-Yu Lin , the central panel of the triptych commissioned by the Whitney Museum of New York with the Tate Modern of London in the occasion of Node.London...

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Kinotek is a duo of video performer from Rome, composed of Mattia Casalegno and Giovanni D'Aloia . They try to build up audio-visual ambient using the languages of the new media arts. They move with confidence between the area of club vjing and the area of abstract performances, with the objective to experiment the different modalities of interaction between technologies and performances. Through the stratification of hi-tech dreams and analogical memories, Kinotek propose extremely interesting contemporary glances at possible dreamed worlds and not. Most of all Mattia Casalegno assumed during the last two years a role more and more prestigious, not only in the national ambit, but also in the international one. He got in contact with lots of different artists, not just electronic ones, inside contests and festivals of absolute relief (as the last edition of Mutek), as he accompanied with his visual the performances...

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REC FESTIVAL, LIVE AFTER SIESTA

Txt: Silvia Bianchi / Translation: Ornella Pesenti
Area: Live Media

The Rec Festival of 25 th February 2006 in Madrid has seen the participation of different artists from all around Europe and local artists as well. The festival was a marathon of 12 hours where 24 deejays and as many vee-jay alternate head to head on two different stages giving a good overview about the last European production. The RecMadrid, organized and produced by Nak e Tektun TV and completely financed by the city of Madrid, is the first festival the city has dedicated to the audio and video. The festival inserts in a larger European ambit where the crescent importance of the electronic art generates more and more shows that increase the value both of the image and the sound. I had the opportunity to meet the English group Addictive TV , the HFR-Lab from Rome, and the graphic crew Giraffen Toast . I discussed on the actual state of the international audio-visual production, both in the live media ambit...

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THE FEAR OF THE LIMIT

Txt: Motor / Translation: Giulia Artioli
Area: Artificial Intelligence

Not long ago I was invited to the conference (The Sense of the Limit, arranged by Pino Zappalà) which closed ToShare, a festival of digital arts. The subject of the conference was the sense of the limit. I had to relate the point of view of the artist. As I didn't want to tell about my limits and as we were guests of a festival of digital arts, I considered which the limits of digital were, in relation with technology and art. In this case, fears often, or, better, quite always, display. In a Newtonian universe, all is defined through the fundamental laws of dynamics; in simple words, the world Is like a huge clock. Human beings are nothing but cogwheels of this mechanism, which isn't nice if we think we have a personal will and identity, and yet there you are the paradigm. For who is involved, as we are, in the digital world, the turning point consists in McCullock, Pitts and Norbert Wiener ‘s ideas, rather than on Von Neumann...

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SCIENCE OF INFORMATION, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

Txt: Luigi Ghezzi / Translation: Giulia Artioli
Area: Technology

Science of communication is more and more moving away from an overall social subject. This science interdisciplinary par excellence is specialised in subfields and has created fences frequently off-limits, maybe because it focuses too much on amazing again and on safeguarding its margin of action. Together with repetitive manuals on new media you can find investigation on contingent phenomena such as smart mobs with rather the feature of a description and of an anthology than an investigative value. Together with science of communication there is psychology and sociology of mass media, the journalism (with its weekly, daily and scientific review), in a few words all the studies that can be gathered in the humanistic disciplines of information. They use, often implicitly, “ a logic of closure point by point” through a rhetoric of alarmism (for instance Baudrillard) or pro-technicians enthusiasm (for instance Pierre Lévy)...

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