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| Monthly magazine:
Digicult Produzioni
Concept / Editing:
Marco Mancuso
Photo editing / Cover:
Arianna D'Angelica
Artwork:
Abstract Grooves
Contenuti:
Silvia Bianchi, Laura Colini, Teresa De Feo, Claudia D'Alonzo, Fabio Franchino, Tiziana Gemin, Luigi Ghezzi, Luca Merzello, Bertram Niessen, Eleonora Oreggia, Luigi Pagliarini, Miriam Petruzzelli, Monica Ponzini, Barbara Sansone, Massimo
Schiavoni, Giulia Simi, Domenico Quaranta
Translations: Monica Amboni, Giulia Artioli, Iris Cartia, Ornella Pesenti |
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NETWORKS
//Laura Colini
NETWORKS
//Silvia Bianchi
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SEMANTIC VJING
Txt: Silvia Bianchi
Area: Networks
 The number of images surrounding us is everyday increasing in events and place of every kind. Sometimes probably you have thought about the existence of a secrete meaning behind the images that are projected on screens of club and festivals and about that meaning construction. The existence of a meaning does not appertain and feature all vjing works, but is often subordinated to an aesthetic use of images turned on sensation and emotions. Semantic vjing born from the need of giving images a sense and of building a narration also in the absence of a story board. Various projects appertaining to this section experiment different ways to play with images starting from words. We start in these review from the work of Eugenio Tisselli, artist of mexican origin based in Barcelona, author of the software "Semantic Vj". Already know in the Net Art world as founder of the group Vaina System, Eugenio Tisselli, won in 2003...
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DROPPING KNOWLEDGE: TAVOLA DELLE VOCI LIBERE
Txt: Laura Colini
Area: Networks
 Heinrich Heine scrive: "Dovunque si bruciano i libri, alla fine si bruciano anche gli uomini". A Berlino nel 1933 di libri ne bruciarono a migliaia e Bebelplatz divenne il luogo simbolo della Bücherverbrennung il rogo della cultura voluto dai nazisti. Oggi sulla stessa Bebelplatz, piazza che si apre sull'arteria berlinese dell'Unter den Linder, campeggiano enormi libri dorati con i nomi dei grandi della cultura tedesca. Il 9 settembre del 2006 il simbolo di Beblplatz si rinnova in chiave moderna, ospitando centinaia di nomi della cultura mondiale contemporanea in un evento mediatico unico nel suo genere che va sotto il nome di Table of Free Voices (ToFV) all'interno dell'iniziativa Dropping knowledge – The living library. Il 9 settembre e' stato il culmine, nonchè il primo evento urbano di un'azione iniziata circa due anni prima sotto la direzione di Ralf Schmerberg, cineasta tedesco, insieme a un gruppo di collaboratori berlinesi. Dropping Knowledge...
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FLOATING GENDER: TRAVEL NOTES FROM ETC
Txt: Eleonora Oreggia
Area: Hacktivism
 A text written in Italian is similar to a Zen exercise to an emigrant. The concentration comes when you write by hand, at the back of a printed paper. English keeps your mind busy, your brain is mixed up with the sounds of a long travel: Spanish, Hungarian, Romanian and Dutch, just as familiar to me as Milanese is. Paper and pen are magic, basic and fundamental tools. The evocation flows peacefully through the “normal subject”, a “me” whoever. As history is always someone's history and personal acts tickle and pierce. A written text is a subjective path to the memory as well as a free association game. It isn't a complete and thorough report, but the symptom of a reflection. Romania is a curious country. Not only for the charm of the Gipsy community, coming from India and settled here a millennium ago. And nor even exclusively for vampires, Dracula and Transylvania . Romania represents even Communism, and the beginning of the Revolution...
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GAMING REALITIES, VIDEOGAME ART
Txt: Domenico Quaranta
Area: Game Art
 The love affair between art and videogame has a long history at his back, which could be dated back in the mid Nineties. A series of shows and publications sanction, along the years, stability, and yet the news of their marriage reaches us as a surprise. It is difficult, in fact, not to see a jump of quality in the organisations, during those months, of three events of high level which express, in different ways, the point on this event. The 7 th of October MoMA of New York will propose in worldwide review the documentary 8 BIT: A Documentary about Art and Videogames (Mutationengine 2006), presented by the curator Barbara London : “ 8 BIT chronicles… the relatively recent history of video game-based art, but also suggests that the bit-bending antics of the post-video game generation hint at a new current in the uncharted waters of 21st century art history.” In the cast artists of the calibre of Cory Arcangel...
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FURTHER PROCESSING, GENERATIVE FUTURE
Txt: Fabio Franchino
Area: Generative Art
 The 23rd of September 2006 Further Processing was opened at the Galleria Mediemturn of Graz, another rare attempt, such as C.Stem (Torino) and Bitform (New York) to make emerge, from the dark world of underground, generative practices and creation of systems meant for creative production. The show presented ten central positions of ten artists on the issue of generative art and software art attributing to the language of Processing programming a fundamental centralizer role. Processing is an environment of development created by Ben Fry and C.E.B. Reas in 2001 at MIT Media Lab during the computational design course by John Maeda . Marius Watz was the curator of the show and, thanks to the support of the Kunstverein Medienturn gallery, has created this collectivity involving the most important and famous artists of this field. Those artists are: Pablo Miranda Carranza, Fabio Franchino, Ben Fry, Golan Levin, Lia...
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VIDEO ART
//Miriam Petruzzelli
VIDEO ART
//Claudia D'Alonzo
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LIGHT UP Y(OUR) CONTEMPORARY
Txt: Miriam Petruzzelli
Area: Video Art
 If, as De Kerkhove states, we are in the electric era, it is then allowed to consider the forms of digital culture to be a sort of Diogenes' lantern with which illuminate our “humanity”. Light up your contemporary , that is to say Transart, at its sixth edition between Trento and Bolzano, seems to boost this vision through a hectic schedule of events and performances where research, contamination and quality combine to form an original blend of music, dance, theatre, art and new technologies on the background of new and fascinating train warehouses, factories and deserted monuments. After a suggestive opening (8.09) with the Arabian Nights by the Absolute Ensemble in which Occidental music pop/rock was combined with the typical sonorities of the traditional Arabic repertoire, the festival has devoted a long week- end to the contaminations between video, art and music, in the suggestive fortress of Fortezza...
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ABSTRACTA 06: CINEMA ASTRATTO REMAKE
Txt: Claudia D'Alonzo
Area: Video Art
 From the Twenties on authors coming from visual arts have started to manipulate the cinematographic language to snatch it to pure narration and reality reproduction: Eggeling, Ruttman, Léger, Picabia address their camera beyond the phenomenal reality, giving the cinema musical rules of rhythm and composition, experimenting the use of the film as material, made up of light and shade. Abstract cinema, which do not tell about and do not show nothing but itself, defined by Rudolf Kuntz “absolute”, antithetical category to diegetic cinema. Among the historical abstract cinema festivals the last one dates back 1951: one of the shows of the group COBRA , is organized by Jean Raine a Liegi and animated by the works by Fernand Léger, Marcel Ducham , Germaine Dulac, Max Ernst, Luigi Veronesi, Len Lye, Hans Richter, Henry Moore. This research tendency distinguishes from commercial cinema paths. We can find its fundament...
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ELECTRONICA
//Marco Mancuso
SPERIMENTALE
//Barbara Sansone
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CHRISTIAN FENNESZ: ELECTRONIC PUNK FRONTIER
Txt: Marco Mancuso
Area: Elettronica
 Christian Fennesz is an atypical character of the electronic contemporary music universe. Anti-star per excellence, shy and reserved as his music, Fennesz has obtained during the last ten years international fame and prestige in a world sometimes too mean of sensitive and eclectic artists. His past of punk guitarist gave him the opportunity to unite the acid and distort sound of his guitar with glitch and noises made with his laptop, with a maniacal cure of details and perspectives, in an elegant and powerful key, tough always sensitive to the border between experimentation and electric blinking. With his début album from 1997 by the label Mego, Hotel Parallel , he pointed the way to the electro glitch music of the last decade. He then produced Plus forty seven degrees 56' 37" minus sixteen degrees 51' 08" (Touch Records) and Field Recordings 1995:2002 , without forgetting the six hands masterworks Magic Sound...
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SCHONBERG RETURNS IN BARCELLONA
Txt: Barbara Sansone
Area: Sperimentale
 Seventy-five years ago, Barcelona welcomed Arnold Schönberg between its wonders. Today the city remind its illustrious Viennese guest with an exhibition dedicated to his character and his artistic and creative production, not only musical. This event, from 8th September to 1st October 2006 thanks to the Fundació Caixa Catalunya, was put up in the sinuous spaces of the Milà House , known also as La Pedrera , maybe the most famous architectural work of Gaudì with the Sagrada Família. It is not a case. In fact the construction was terminated, after five years of efforts, in 1911, year of the death of Mahler and the affirmation of the modern music that saw in Schönberg one of the most important exponent. The same year, the Austrian composer inaugurated a strict ideological and collaborative relation with Kandinsky and many other poets, painters and writers occupied actively in the thoughts about the linguistic...
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AUDIOVIDEO
//Monica Ponzini
AUDIOVIDEO
//Bertram Niessen
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CARTSEN NICOLAI, L'ESTETICA DELL'ERRORE
Txt: Monica Ponzini
Area: Audiovideo
 It is called Xerrox, it is inspired to the photocopy process, and it is a project that explores the borders of recognizability of an information. It is the last creation of Carsten Nicolai , a.k.a. alva noto . It is a live for laptop and video, where the original sampling is reproduced and varied, disturbed to create a product that shade off its characteristics without losing completely its identity. The result is a synaesthesia where noise and glitch transfigure the information to create a new code, that keeps some properties of the origin. Carsten Nicolai is one of the electronic experimental music guru since years to an international level. Immerged in a creative flow that rarely repeats or trivializes itself, Nicolai is subject to a constant process of music evolution with no end. With the other masters that brought the electro sound in the academic areas, Nicolai has been able to become a reference point not only for those who see him...
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DESIGNING NEW AUDIOVISUAL UNIVERSES
Txt: Bertram Niessen
Area: Audiovideo
 There are several dimension during an audiovisual performance. Time management, relation with the space, chromatic and formal balance, project and composition coherence, audiovisual sync, liveness, synaesthesia. Maybe more than anything else, there is the immersion. That means realize a multi-sensorial ambient completely detached from “what is outside”, a world apart, deeply experiential, a break with the everyday life. A one-way ticket for a spaceship. Although visual music is an expressive form that accompanied the twentieth century, it is absolutely the last decade that the discipline started to live alone, that everybody could benefit from. The audiovisual performance (or mixed-media, or live media, or live cinema, or viewsic, or whatever the name you decide for it) suffer the influence of many other artistic forms that border with it. Design, architecture, painting, cinema, music, theatre, coding and many others...
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ROBOTICA
//Luigi Pagliarini
BIOGENETICA
//Luigi Ghezzi
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ROBOTS@PLAY
Txt: Luigi Pagliarini
Area: Robotica
 I just got back from Denmark, where I attended the first edition of Robotsatplay . Spread over several dates, the event – which soon we may call one of the most significant events on robotics in the Old Continent - took place in the historic center of Odense, one of Denmark's oldest cities, consecrated to the god Odin, and birthplace of Hans C. Andersen. Trying to assess the state of the art of the world of robotics, the event seems to have the objective of gathering into its two fields of research and robotics development (both scientific as well as industrial) the innovations that identified as being more interactive and ‘playful'. The name chosen for the event is indeed a clear indication of its purpose – in terms of design, functionality, and potential impact on society. The event hosts a variety of section on different themes, located in different sites, in an organizational effort that I can only call gargantuan – thankless...
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BODY IN THE 21ST CENTURY: MORE THAN SKIN-DEEP
Txt: Luigi Ghezzi
Area: Biogenetica
The exhibit Körper, Gesicht und Seele (Body, Face, and Soul) is one of the many events that in the last years have developed around the body. The contents focus on the typification of femininity from the 16 th to the 19 th century, from the pictorial imaginary of the Renaissance up to the androgynous subjects of contemporary performances. Another artistic experience that definitely brought the theme “body” to the forefront of contemporary attention was the exhibit Körperwelten/ Body Worlds , a medical-engineering synopsis of the reflections on the body-material. The exhibit, conceived by professor Gunther von Hagen , now on its second edition, aimed at showing the potentialities of the plastination process . In the process the immersion of bodily tissues in a mixture of polymers stops (or slows to an extreme) the progression of organic decomposition. An additional benefit of plastination is that the body can later...
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INTERACTION DESIGN
//Teresa De Feo
GRAPHIC DESIGN
//Luca Merzello
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WHO IS TOSHIO IWAI?
Txt: Teresa De Feo
Area: Interaction Design
 The ones who work with the electronic arts must know the Peter Pan of the digital culture: the Japanese Toshio Iwai. The Japanese, who looks always very upset, nearly an icon of the first generation of digital artists, at the level of a Tim Burton's story, still surprises with his refined and brilliant inventions. Recently at the Sonarama he staggers everybody thanks to one of his devices, which is as usual “simply” extraordinary. The instrument is called Teneri-On and it was the protagonist of one of the most beautiful performances in the last edition of the Sonar in Barcelona . Teneri-On (that in Japanese means “something in the hands”) is an interactive musical instrument, which is able to create sounds and sound effects. It is composed by a tablet/interface with 16x16 buttons and it is very easy and comfortable to use. It is sufficient to press the buttons directly on the display to create music and lights and to compose...
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WEFAIL, THE WEB IRONY
Txt: Luca Merzello
Area: Graphic Design
 Some studies give their mind to their technical capacities, to likely future imaginaries, to complex navigations and elements in 3d in order to celebrate the net and the new way in which they think it should be. Wefail is a study of graphic design which simplifies everything and turns it into practically art. Their approach is made of elastic puppets and characters full of details and particulars not only in a graphic level but also within the animation. They are assembled in uncommon horizontal navigations as inside a long two-dimensional aisle. This approach is combined with a great sense of humour and so it makes their creation more human and kinematical than many other works of graphic design in the net and not only; maybe it hasn't a great level of interaction with the user but it is always attractive and pleasant. In the Wefail project the use of the web is clear and declared; it is not only a platform to diffuse the one's own work...
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VIDEO PERFORMANCE
//Massimo Schiavoni
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THE END OF NEVERENDING CINEMA
Txt: Massimo Schiavoni
Area: Video Performance
 Here it is. From Settembre 28 to October 29 2006 the summer creative workshop where young artists, musicians, DJ's and VJ's have animated Trento's Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea , turns into an actual showing, and all the experience gathered during these months are gathered in The End , an exhibit of the works thus realized. Everything is orchestrated by performer Anna De Manincor of the Zimmerfrei group , who gave life to an experience she had never had before: transfer the whole process of artistic production inside a showing, and have some of the most significant contemporary artists “work” in close contact with each other. The Galleria thus becomes a place of creation and exposition. The museum – as the neutral space where works of art, designed to communicate, are kept and classified – is now expanded to a broader, relationship-based scale, a dialogic and dynamic context, embracing specific and transversal competences. In short, Trento 's Civic Gallery becomes the home of work-in-progress - shared, this time, with live spectators. If “the eye is an organ that adds great distance ”, this experience lies in the dark, where a thousands eyes and a thousands hands have “kneaded”, so to speak, the carefully chosen ingredients of their creative stay, sparing no energies, and overcoming all distinctions between high and low culture, showing how the model of transmission can lead to taking a step beyond traditional boundaries, as Baudelaire taught, in the rejection of every systematic character...
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NEW MEDIA
//Tiziana Gemin
NEW MEDIA
//Giulia Simi
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SIMPLY ARS ELECTRONICA
Txt: Tiziana Gemin
Area: New Media
 The contemporaneity is irremediable influenced, in its various domains, by the use of the technologies, which should be used to simplify our life and to make the sharing of our experiences more direct. But the new technologies influence us and persuade us to not always spontaneously behaviours in order to permit the interaction between the mankind and the machine; forcing us to these actions, in some way, they complicate our life. We find us in an intermittence state between two not opposed but complementary conditions, between two terms which characterize our everyday life; we are today always suspended between simplicity and complexity. The art, which uses the new technologies as a creative instrument, contains itself both the aspects, and the artist, who expresses himself with such tools, tries to hide the technological side, to make it less visible, in order to close the gap psychological gap which...
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STRUTTURA, A WRECK IN THE DIGITAL SEA
Txt: Giulia Simi
Area: Video Art
 According to the Italian dictionary, Structure means an organic system of elements, materials or not materials, on a mutual coordination and interdependence terms. This is also what we find during Tuscan three days of studying and comparison between the languages and the new media art. Structure, this year at its second edition, is a system of elements on a mutual coordination and interdependence terms. The organizers are an example of it: a group of boys and girls with a different cultural background but they share the same theoretical and practical participation to the digital media. The result is a winning mix, which perfectly combines the artistic look with the technical one; in pursuit of destroy useless barriers between working and school camps, which are only apparently different. Besides the exposition of some installations and the projection of a video review taken from the prestigious Festival of Pesaro...
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