CUM2CUT, LET'S GO INDIE PORN!

Txt: Pier Mario Simula
Area: Hacktivism

With the shout “share and spread pornography!” the city of Berlin was literally raided by courageous men and women, most of which outsiders of the porn industry, who had just a few days to document and edit their very personal idea of pornography, summarized in only 5 minutes. The only imposition, in an atmosphere of total expressive freedom, was the presence of a few elements: a plastic rabbit, a pink star, the words “I'll fuck anything that moves!” and using only Creative Commons licensed music. The rest was up to each author to decide... Created by Activism-Hacking-Artivist's hyperactive Tatiana Bazzichelli, and by Gaia Novati, the CUM2CUT event invited independent video makers and film directors, performers, writers, cultural activists, free-thinkers, artists, queers, homos, heteros, lesbians, trans, and anyone who was willing to mix technology and body in this project: one of the most farseeing and compelling...

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OPEN CULTURE BRIEF

Txt: Camilla Serri and Silvano Galliani
Area: Hacking

There's a new and remarkable supply for people interested in free software and its philosophies, licences, and operative devices: the brand-new Informatics Freedom and Open Culture Brief by Simone Aliprandi, published by Prima Ora and freely available online in pdf format. It is an anthological collection of informative articles and official documents (explained and commented). The author is also responsible for the first Italian survey on the juridical aspects of copyleft. Among the extracts included there are some texts chosen by Emmanuele Bello , the curator of the brief and some extracts taken from digests written by well-known authors such as Bruce Perens, Alessandro Rubini, and Richard M. Stallman. Undertaken themes are copyleft, new models for copyright, GNU/Linux systems and diverse distributions, free documentation and various Italian translations of different documents such as GNU GPL and GNU FDL licences...

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MACHINIMA BY EDDO STERN

Txt: Domenico Quaranta
Area: Game Art

The widespread tendency to identify new technology with innovation, leads to a rather banal misunderstanding, according to which new media artists are all innovators. The artists able to use the tool in an innovative way are actually a few. Eddo Stern is probably one of the few cases where both of the two preliminary remarks are actually fulfilled. Israeli living in Los Angeles, he recently attracted the audience's attention with Dark Game (2006) , a videogame prototype where the two rivals are deprived of their sight: an experiment preceded by complex projects such as Tekken Torture Tournament (2001), a tournament of Tekken 3 in which the blows given by avatars were transferred to the players through electric shocks; Cockfight Arena (2001) , a performance in which the players controlled their avatar on the screen-a feathered devoted to fight against other cocks- with their own bodies disguised and...

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ALEX DRAGULESCU, ART CODE

Txt: Marco Mancuso
Area: Generative Art

We have already talked about the software artist Alex Dragulescu. As a matter of fact Valentina Tanni brilliantly presented the Romanian USA-based artist in the n°17 Digimag issue (September), describing his work with code, his poetic and aesthetic. You can read the article at www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=406. So this is a sort of second episode, a sequel, to fulfil the descriptive picture of Alex Dragulescu from his software and projects. Internet – in comparison to traditional press – allows me to do it and I'm pleased to do it. I thought it would be interesting to talk with Alex, to understand his way of working and his world, his approach straddling art code and code art, his attitude, which is both analytical and connected to the live event and to an aesthetic research with very strict formal codes. As Valentina Tanni wrote in her article: “The criterions that inspired the project come from information visualization...

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THE TECHNOLOGICAL BEAUTY

in the creating scene of New York emerge withouth any doubt a Soho studio, where the director Arvind Palep and the producer Serge Patzak direct 1st Avenue Machine, an agency that realizes spots and music videos in computer graphic and 3D animation since 2004. The first time I see Alias video, Sixes Last, I'm captured by the beauty of a new and lively nature, imprisoned in an orchestrated dance, pulsing harmony and rhythm. I do not even know how, but thanks to the cultural substrate of my own, due to my studies, the theories of the neoclassic German critic J. J. Winkelmann come into my mind. There's something magical in this video and I think the artist as a composer that realizes its own work from its contemplation of the “beautiful nature”. To the classical Greek, in the creative moment, the intellect express the idea , so an ideal beauty that isn't natural, but rather the result of an operation of the artist...

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ABOUT MY SPACE VJING

Txt: Elena Vairani
Area: Vjing

Recently, many newspapers have talked about it for many reasons. Users have expressed their opinion and complaints through forums and on-line magazines, so I asked myself what Myspace really was and what the people who gain from it think about it : musicians, DJ, VJ and filmmakers . It can be a community, a web site devoted to social networking, a chat or, even, as it has been defined, a trap for teenagers, the end of privacy or an evolved form of self-promotion or spam, MySpace has, since the beginning, proposed itself as a social tool, choosing as its claim “a place for friends'”, focusing on friendship, one of the noblest and most personal feelings man has. My research on MySpace started from the definition of Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySpace, defining MySpace as a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles...

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PLAYING MUSIC: A GAME OF SOUND PERCEPTION

Txt: Giulia Simi
Area: A.I.

I attended Playing Music a few months ago, in a small theatre near Livorno . I arrived late, missing – as I was later told – the introduction. What I saw was two guys, each standing in front of a console with 6 numbered infra-red sensors, which, alternatively, through a movement of the hand towards them, activated short and suggestive sound-events, each of which corresponded to (in a big screen placed in front of them) a specific number of a 6x6 numeric matrix. At the end, each sound-event seemed to score a certain number of points. The music, which filled the theatre in quick but intense bursts, alternated with silence, in a dialogue that seemed to somewhat set the pace of strategic thought. After about fifteen minutes the concert reached its conclusion with a winner. The audience, suspended between surprise and curiosity, started to wonder about the rules of the game, and eventually the desire...

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THE ARCHIMEDES PROJECT INSISTS ON THE NET

Txt: Luigi Ghezzi
Area: Technology

It's singular how often the real experiences of the net are neglected from the public to the prejudice of intangible theories which predict whatever paradise in internet and in its social sublimation. One of the cases of unjustified inobservance is the Archimedes Project a part of the Digital Libraries Initiative Phase 2, a National science Foundation program, supported also from the Classic Department of the Harvard University, form Max Planck Institute für die Wissenschftsgeschichte of Berlin and many other American and English departments. An institutional net combined with the academic network of the Program International de Cooperation Scientifique (PICS) makes the digital initiative very important in the international scenery. he project is an open digital library which picks up the most important and popular works of the mechanics. The mechanics is now a part of the physics...

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