THE INFLUENCERS

Txt: Domenico Quaranta / Eng: Ornella Pesenti
Area: Hacktivism

In the long list of festival that follows during the year, and that gets longer and longer, The Influencers conquered an enviable position as a cult event. Organized in Barcelona by the d-i-n-a network, creator in Italy of net.art events part of the history, The Influencers is carried out in one of the Sonar headquarters, the Centre de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona (CCCB) , but the two share very little. Three days, no shows no concerts, as d-i-n-a prefers the “live talk show” formula, that sees some champions of media actionism and radical entertainment involved in a close confrontation with an attentive audience. A confrontation that often goes on even outside the event and remain in the memory as an experience, more than as a passive moment. A glance back can give maybe the idea of what we're saying. Imagine a stage where Adbusters , reached the moment to tell the spirit of subvertising and...

segue...

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- top -----------

BIOMAPPING, EMOTIVE SHARED ATMOSPHERES

Txt: Sara Tirelli / Eng: Ornella Pesenti
Area: Hacking

Biomapping is put into the pocket before leaving the house, as a very mp3. This time you're though invited to leave your headphones and to abandon your lonely soundtrack to look and to live everything around you in a different way. Artist, academic, activist, Christian Nold is one of those characters that moves on the line between Art and Science. And he does this in a very critical way. His Biomapping research project has moved around the most important new media art festival since a couple of years ago, last of all the Barcelona Sonar, inside the exhibition ALWAYS ON, dedicated to the mobile technology and culture. But his work is different from the other artistic projects that seem to parade the use of the new technologies, loosing sight of the real contents of the project. This 30-years-old English man proposes a simple, poetic and clever idea, whom realization goes further than the narrow expositive spaces...

segue...

SOFTWARES SENSORIALI E MATERIALI DIGITALI

Txt: Tiziana Gemin / Eng: Camilla Serri
Area: Software Art

There is an exhibition of some works created by the artists Alessandro Capozzo and Katja Noppes in Venice , at the Ex Cantieri Navali. The collaboration between these two protagonist is really interesting, considering the possibility of a dialogue between conventional art and new tecnologies. The two artists have different technical competence and way of representation. Alessandro Capozzo, media artist and designer, interested in musicology, uses program languages as expressive medium. He creates generative softwares, where the code is something that create complex systems. Katja Noppes, scenographic artist, worked on video and painting. In her works is easy to see her interest for materials and different surfaces, as traces of life. The relationship between technology and personal memory and the man-nature relationship are keyword in her work....

segue...

Sonic Acts is an electronic art festival set in Amsterdam , made of conferences, concert and performance and everything is in between. This year it took place in 2 historical location in Amsterdam , ParadisO and De Balie, with lecturers as Arjen Mulde, Ben Fry, Golan Levin and Casey Reas. We talked for a while with Lucas van der Velden and Gideon Kiers. The first one is the artistic director of Sonic Acts, while the other one is one of the 3 curators. Together they worked on the Sonic Acts XI DVD, eleventh chapter of the best audio video production of the festival. They both are into Telcosystems, artistic project about the construction of collaborative audiovisual systems. Just to point out the vitality of this scene and its protagonists, that move easily from different platforms, to festivals, dvds, magazines and webprojects...

segue...

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- top -----------

PFADFINDEREI, FIRST CLASS DIGITAL SHIT

Txt: Silvia Bianchi / Eng: Camilla Serri
Area: Vjing

For those who are interested in audiovisuals and vjing, Pfadfinderei needs no presentations. For those who are not so used to move between clubs and festivals or just don't pay attention to the screen in the clubs (At Sonar, Pfadfinderei were on the Sonarclub screens), well, Pfadfinderei is a 7 graphic designers, video artists group from Berlin . Born in 1998 it is both a design studio and one of the greatest visual artists crew. Creators of graphic image of the recording label B-PitchControl, they have being into international vjing for years. Their style is vestorial graphic, typography and motion graphic in a unique combination. Their long collaboration with Modeselktor bring them to public for the paris Dalbin and audio video project, Labland. We interview them at the Ultrabeat Out festival, which took place in Rome on June the 3 rd and 4 th at the EUR.

segue...

DIGITAL ART WEEK, MEETING POINT A ZURIGO

Txt: Bea Bonfanti / Eng: Giulia Artioli
Area: Technology

From July the 12 th to the 15th in Zurig will take place a series of meetings keens on digital art and those people who are looking for the complex relationship linking art to technology can't miss. The Digital Art Week is organised by the Computer System Institut of Zurig and is a parallel event to the Canadian Interactive futures (Steve Gibson, Julie Andreyev and Randy Adams) which takes place in January during the Victoria Independent Film and Video festival. The Symposium organised is called [con.[text]], to emphasize the importance of the work context and brings the attention back to the role of the spectator who becomes more and more a part of the work, especially thanks to the potentialities of new media. Using new technologies, the work proves to be delightful, the more the message is comprehensible, the less the presence of technology is visible. Digital Week organisers have selected presentations, workshops...

segue...

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- top -----------

CONTAMINATING VICISSITUDES OF ART AND SCIENZE

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

The tradition of the modern historical thought induces us to think about art and science as two separate entities. On one hand science, the reign of the rational, the cognitive and of research, on the other hand the field of creativity, sensoriality and intuition. Such as Martina Heßler emphasizes in her essay Bilder zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft. Neue Herausforderungen für die Forschung”(“The Images between Art and Science. New challenges for research”, in Geschichte und Gesellschaft , nr. 2, 2005) is only from the 18 th century that such polarization of science and art has started to assume an institutional body: on one side, we meet the artist, absorbed in a world of galleries and shows, as well as in the bourgeois circuit of art market, on the other side the scientist, absorbed in his lab, sometimes more impenetrable than an atelier with the whole social imaginary surrounding both figures. Such...

segue...