Digimag 20 - December 2006 / January 2007

contributo grafico

	NetArt \| HackArt \| SoftwareArt \| VideoArt \| Electronica \| AudioVideo \| A.I \| Design \| PerformingArt \| NewMedia

Monthly Pubblication:
Digicult Produzioni

Concept / Editing:
Marco Mancuso

Photo editing / Cover:
Arianna D'Angelica

Artwork: Saul Saguatti

Contenuti: Silvia Bianchi, Beatrice Bonfanti, Paolo Branca, Claudia D'Alonzo, Sando Fossemò, Luigi Ghezzi, Eleonora Oreggia, Miriam Petruzzelli, Motor, Monica Ponzini, Domenico Quaranta, Barbara Sansone, Silvia Scaravaggi, Domenico Sciajno, Massimo Schiavoni, Lorenzo Tripodi

Translations: Monica Amboni, Giulia Artioli, Micaela Genchi, Ornella Pesenti

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NET ART
//Monica Ponzini

NETWORKS
//Lorenzo Tripodi

13 MOST BEAUTIFUL AVATARS

Txt: Monica Ponzini
Area: Net Art

In the balance between references at the pop culture and digressions in virtual worlds, this is the new project of the 0100101110101101.org (that is Eva and Franco Mattes) the 13 most beautiful Avatars. Presented yesterday online by Ars Virtua and by Rhizome and on parade with a series of digital printings at the Italian Academy of the Columbia University in New York, 13 most beautiful avatars has as declared references the 13 most beautiful boys and 13 most beautiful women 2 videos in 16mm of Andy Warhol where the protagonist must only “exist” in their beautiful, in front of the cine camera which will immortalize their sex appeal. The same artist pointed out that the realization of the videos was “easier than painting. The cine camera has an engine. You simply switch on it and then you can go away.” The preliminaries seem the same for the avatars of 01.org: they are special only because their unreal existence digitally...

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RESISTANT MAPS BETWEEN NET AND ART

Txt: Lorenzo Tripodi
Area: Networks

The meeting-show Mappe Resistenti , Azioni artistiche nel territorio urbano interconnesso took place the 25th and 26th of November, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Villa Croce – Genoa . The event was managed by Alessandro Ludovico, Gianfranco Pangrazio , Tommaso Tozzi and Marco Villani . The intents of the directors was to collect a general vision of a certain production between art and activism about the cartography. In a vast and rather relative meaning, the exhibition is about the transformations of the contemporary landscape, developing forms of critic representations of the power relations in the ambit of the global capitalism, without the omission of an historical vision of the influences that signed this production. Works by Giuseppe Chiari , Vincenzo Agnetti and the movie by Guy Debord , “In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni ”, accompany the installations of 01.org, Cartografia Resistente...

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HACKING
//Eleonora Oreggia

THE PIKSEL BING BANG: TRA CODICE E ARTE

Txt: Eleonora Oreggia
Area: Hacking

Una delle differenze fondamentali, dovuta all'innovazione tecnologica, tra l'archivio delle conoscenze tramite la rete o attraverso i libri e la pagina scritta, e' il fatto che il metodo di definizione e scrittura della storia, e la cronaca come descrizione del reale, hanno subito una potente deformazione. Affidata a pagine web che possono facilmente fornire informazione e ritirarla, aggiornarla secondo il favore dei tempi o metterla rapidamente in ombra, la storia corre nuovamente il pericolo di essere sepolta, dimenticata, manipolata. La pagina stampata richiede contemplazione, e' un mezzo fisso ed evocativo. Come ben sappiamo, piu' un mezzo di comunicazione e' complesso, descrittivo, figurativo, meno spazio e' dato alla visione interiore, alla rappresentazione fantastica, all'intuizione. La capacita' di ascoltare un'immagine, di percepire le voci dipinte in un quadro, annusare l'odore di ...

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GAME ART
//Paolo Branca

GENERATIVE ART
//Silvia Bianchi

TOP-BANANA, INDIE GAMES REMIX

Txt: Paolo Branca
Area: Game Art

Una volta i videogiochi nascevano nei garage, dalle brillanti menti di sviluppatori-demiurghi che, soli o in piccoli gruppi, infondevano vita alle loro creazioni digitali. Da oltre un decennio, le produzioni videoludiche destinate a varcare la porta dei negozi vengono concepite da enormi team di professionisti altamente specializzati: game designer, programmatori, modellatori tridimensionali, animatori, compositori, beta tester ecc… Accanto a queste produzioni destinate al massmarket esistono tutta una serie di progetti, ad opera di singoli individui o piccoli team, che vanno sotto il termine di Indie-Games. Essi sono il frutto di esperienze diversificate e approcci spesso agli antipodi. Gli obbiettivi che spingono gli sviluppatori indipendenti a realizzare le loro opere sono molteplici: si và da chi spera di trovare un distributore per il proprio lavoro a chi, fedele a un approccio dichiaratamente underground, al di fuori delle logiche di un mercato classicamente...

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ONOXO, GENERATIVE VJING

Txt: Silvia Bianchi
Area: Generative Art

Onoxo is a project of experimental media design, realized by the Croatian Vedran Kolac, software artist, vj and motion designer and also member of the collective Strukt Visual Network. From 2002 his interests concentrate on the graphic and video production and on the research within the creation of visuals with the help of instruments such as Action Script and the environment of development of VVVV software. Even if this is the last coming, it is become immediately a point of reference for all who express themselves with audiovisual generative action in real time and who love using a type of language which, according to them, is very simple, immediate and extremely powerful. The works and the generative live visuals of Onoxo reveal therefore an organic dimension contaminated by cold architectures in constant movement, which reflect the ability of the young Croatian to combine the potentialities...

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VIDEO ART
//Claudia D'Alonzo

LIVE CINEMA
//Sara Tirelli

ALTERATED STATES OF PERCEPTION

Txt: Claudia D'Alonzo
Area: Video Art

The show managed by Richard Castelli called Sensi Sotto Sopra have been present at the Palladium in Rome since last 20 th October and included in the 2006 program of the Romaeuropa Festival . Through interactive and immersive works, Richard offered an experimentation of perceptive modalities with whom everyone rapports to art, movies and communications means, but also underline the distortion of the relationship work-spectator triggered by the use of digital, classic theme of the mix art-technology. Interesting characteristic of the show is the matching of sensorial works with conceptual works, that provoke perceptive short-circuits, moments of reflection on sensorial standard dynamics. Hemisphere is part of the first group, installation of Ulf Langheinrich , composed by a dome of ten metres in the Palladium stalls, where you can swim in a bath of audiovisual granules in constant becoming, slow catharsis that remove...

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DEBACKERE: ELECTRONIC LIVE CINEMA

Txt: Sara Tirelli
Area: Live Cinema

Rotor is a young creature that enchanted thousands of people since its born a year ago. The show treaded the boards of the most important new media festivals in the whole Europe – from the debut to V2 going through Netmage , Sonic Acts , STRP! citing some examples. The two Belgian authors of Rotor, Boris and Brecht Debackere , came back to Italy to participate at ScreenMusic, curated by Digicult. Boris and Brecht Debackere arrive with a trolley, inside it their tools : cables, laptops and the code , invisible epicentre of audiovisual tremors. They both say it: Rotor is a compact system, an architecture of parameters they enjoy manipulating live, generating a unique performance each time. It's Live Cinema, instantaneous filmic creation, immersion of the perception in an audiovisual evolving space, emerging practice who's searching for new modalities of narration, born from the evolution of the soft and hard digital technologies...

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SPERIMENTALE
//Marco Mancuso

CLUBBING
//Miriam Petruzzelli

MURCOF, THE POSSIBILE DIALOGUE

Txt: Marco Mancuso
Area: Sperimentale

Murcof is like his music: a concentrate of classicism and modernity, quiet and tension, maniacal precision and tendency to the laissez fair. Murcof real name is Fernando Corona and he was born in Tijuana ( Mexico ). A Murcof's concert is never a banal experience, and frankly this state should be enough to define him as one of the greatest electronic musician in circulation. His third album Cosmos is coming in the first months of the 2007 always produced by Leaf . I had though the privilege and the pleasure to listen to some of the tracks at the Club to Club festival in Tourin and at the Cinematic in Brussels . Murcof confirms his indisputable talent and his compositional intelligence in searching a deeper and more effective dialogue between the experimental electronic music and the classical music, or better the electro-acoustic. The efficiency of his musical formula reside in this dynamic contraposition and reached now a new maturity...

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ECO-SUSTAINABLE? OFF-CORSO

Txt: Miriam Petruzzelli
Area: Clubbing

Nowadays eco-sustainability is a very important and concerning subject. Everyday we are kept on alert by the media and their worrying news about dangers deriving from the traditional exploitation of our ecosystem that in 2050 will become unsustainable. Trading, finance, diet, architecture, fashion, and tourism: by then, eco-sustainability, a concept between fashion and life philosophy, involves every human aspect. This concept arises anxieties and catastrophic post-industrial concerns, but also the hope in feasible development opportunities new materials, technologies, resources and policies can represent. For instance, the world's first sustainable dance club, Off Corso , in Rotterdam , the Netherlands , is powered by dancing: Springs beneath the floor capture motion energy to be converted into electricity. The club – presented last 14 th October by the Dutch section of the movement Critical Mass...

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AUDIO VIDEO
//Marco Mancuso

AUDIO VIDEO
//Domenico Sciajno

CIMATICS, THE RELATION BETWEEN FORM-FREQUENCY

Txt: Marco Mancuso
Area: Audiovideo

Some weeks ago in Brussels took place the Cimatics festival one of the more interesting European appointments for those who are interesting in electronic audiovisual experimentation. Organized by a little group of experts Nicolas Wierinck, Sam Vanonverschelde, Jurgen Van Gemert, Bram Crevits, Arne Depoorter, Pascal Courtois, Geoffroy Delobel, Jerome Frank, Frederic della Faille, tied also to other cultural realities of the city such as the Media Ruimte gallery which hosted a little but very important personal of our Limiteazero (that is Paolo Rigamonti and Silvio Mondino) the Cimatics didn't disappoint the expectations hosting a rich programme of performances and of audiovisual installations based both on the electronic dialogue between sounds and images and on the strumental and cinematographic relation between the two components. Cinematics is, to be honest, maybe not everybody knows this, one of the first European...

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SOGNANDO IL RECOMBINANT MEDIA LAB

Txt: Domenico Sciajno
Area: Audiovideo

Chissà se è mai capitato che qualche video artista-performer si sia trovato a DisneyWorld mano nella mano con il suo nipotino domandandosi: "... cosa ci faccio io qui?" Chissà se è mai capitato che questo video artista-performer giunto nel padiglione di immersione cinematografica, attorniato da 10 schermi che proponevano cartoons a 360 gradi abbia finalmente avuto un fremito pensando: "... magari potessimo noi video artisti e performers progettare ed esporre i nostri lavori in un simile allestimento!" Ebbene, da qualche mese il paese delle meraviglie per chi si occupa di sperimentazione audiovisiva esiste ed è in funzione, si trova a S. Francisco (USA) e si chiama Recombinat Media Lab. Ho avuto modo di visitare questo spazio e di saggiarne le funzionalità in occasione di un mio concerto in California. Accompagnatore di questa visita è stato proprio Naut Haumon, ideatore e sostenitore di questo ambizioso...

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I.A.
//Beatrice Bonfanti

ROBOTICA
//Motor

TECHNOLOGY
//Luigi Ghezzi

FUTURIST CONFERENCE LUZERN

Txt: Beatrice Bonfanti
Area: I.A.

The futurist conference Lucerne, at its second edition, is an annual appointment, which wants to analyze and to document the trends and assessments regarding the studies on the future. The participants were numerous starting from the futurist associations all over the world, real institutes which prefer the future as a subject of study such as ROOS office for cultural innovation, promoter of the event together with Swisscom Innovations, Zukunftstudien in Switzerland, FutureMagmentGroup (Pero Micic) in Germany, ZukunftsInstitut Matthias Horx in Oesterreich, Swedish Institute for future studies or the Copenhagen Istitute for future studies and also in Italy with Future Concept Lab, in England with Shaping Tomorrow, in France with Futurible Group Paris or the OECD international future programme, to professors and researchers representatives of Universities such as Lucerne, Maastricht, Berlin, Moscow, Alicante...

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SUGURU GOTO: NEW PERCEPTION METHODS

Txt: Motor
Area: Robotica

The Milanese meeting with Suguru Goto at the end of November 2006 (on the 27 th concert at Teatro Arsenale , organised by the Federation of electronic music in Italy and the day after the workshop at the Accademia Internazionale della Musica ) showed the subtle charm of this artist (Digimag devoted an article to him in its 12 th number with an interview by Elena Vairani. I could follow both moments in Milan , but I would like to analyse the workshop in particular, as the more informal and relaxed meeting of the second day proved to be a further key to understand not only the technologies used and explained, but, especially the path of the artist. Suguru started his workshop with a technical description of SuperPolm, a sort of controller violin which is mute, used for interface gathering the performer's gesture to guide sound generators (defined in MAX -MSP ). The “violin” shape, the resistances variable to the touch, light switches...

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GLOBUS MEDICUS AND MEDICAL EDIOLOGY

Txt: Luigi Ghezzi
Area: Technology

During the meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in Chicago from the 26 th to 30 th November has been presented the new system Globus MEDICUS ( Medical Imaging and Computing for Unified Information Sharing). It is essentially a grid computing system applied in medical ambit. The grid computing system is in a few words the coordinated and distributed use of a huge quantity of servers and databases that, thanks to a strong interconnection, work together as a unique computer, going over the pikes of work, the economic, mnemonic and energetic costs. A technology considered by the M.I.T. Technology Review as one of the tenth who'll change the world. In particular, the Globus /MEDICUS allows radiologists, doctors and oncologists, but even researchers of 40 North America hospitals to share and enrich a database of radiological images of child diseases...

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INTERACTION DESIGN
//Silvia Scaravaggi

INTERACTION DESIGN
//Marco Mancuso

VICTORIA VESNA'S INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE

Txt: Silvia Scaravaggi
Area: Interaction Design

Victoria Vesna (1959, Washington D.C. ) is an artist, a lecturer, and the chair of the Department of Design | Media Arts at UCLA, School of the Arts and Architecture . Her work can be defined as experimental creative research that resides between disciplines and technologies. Since the ‘80s she has been exploring digital and virtual worlds and the relationship between art and science. New realities are generated by the meeting among artistic, humanistic and technological disciplines. Victoria Vesna is also the Director of the brand new UCLA Art|Sci Center and of the UC Digital Arts Research Network . She realized 16 personal works, she exposed hundreds of collectives, she published more than 20 researches and she has been participating in various conventions for years. She has an extremely strong and dynamic but also rigorous and creative personality. Her research is mainly aimed at exploring the relationship...

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ID-LAB, INTERACTION AND INNOVATION

Txt: Marco Mancuso
Area: Interaction Design

Milan is one of the most important centre of international design. It is the location of meetings and debates of creative realities related to the design mixed with business and show business, as in the case of the Salone del Mobile, a reality that is getting bigger and bigger. We're talking about Interaction Design Lab that, as the name suggests, comes from a rib of the Interaction Design Institute of Ivrea and that, as you can easily understand, loves to work on the experimental borders of the design, through technologies, integrating a certain planning tradition with the most actual tension to the digital. ID-Lab is a workgroup, a study where the most different experiences of professional people flow into: Stefano Mirti , Walter Aprile , Massimo Banzi , Gianlugi Mutti are names that will certainly say something to some of you. The activity of ID-Lab results more and more evident, most of all during last months, when the organization...

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PERFORMING ART
//Massimo Schiavoni

PERFORMING ART
//Barbara Sansone

MOTUS. ESSENTIAL RETURN

Txt: Massimo Schiavoni
Area: Performing Art

The Teatro Maddalene of Padua , inside the exhibition Contrappunti 06- 07 , gave hospitality last 24 th of November to the new video-performance show by Motus , A place [that again] , pièce directed by Daniela Nicolò and Enrico Casagrande from All strange away by Samuel Beckett . Unique occasion to experience a return, a quiet scenic flavour, no words, no interaction, no place as excess of the installation. The show is the attempt to describe the hall of the death wait., a refection on the representation, a description of the inexistence. A sort of research on actor and bi-dimensional plan lightened by a white light. A white screen and a transparent reliquary at the centre of the scene are the premises of the silent and refined performance, simultaneous and poetic, where two young actors reside their time between sensual movements and erotic excess. The accent is posed on the slowness of the action...

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MIL I UNA VEOS: SOUND LANDSCAPE

Txt: Barbara Sansone
Area: Performing Art

On the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of the birth of Cabaret Voltarie , the Sonoscop/Orquestra del Caos , presented on the 3 rd and 4 th of November at the CCCB auditorium of Barcellona, Mil i una Veus (One thousand and one voice). A short review of great intensity, whose main topic was contemporaneous and sound writing, from frenetic poetry, without overlooking the various historical laps, influences and contaminations, to the developments and personal paths the different artists have suggested and are suggesting. The first event was an elegant concert/performance Objectos Perdidos (Lost & Found) , staged by José Iges , Pilar Subirà and Pedro López . The work offers a listening likens to the abstract and dissolute landscape looking at itself through the window during a train trip: the perception of time changes...

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NEW MEDIA
//Domenico Quaranta

NEW MEDIA
//Sandro D. Fossemò

PIXXELPOINT 2006: DRESSCODE

Txt: Domenico Quaranta
Area: New Media

Pixxelpoint was born in Nova Gorica ( Slovenia ) in 2000. It grew up during the years to the point of trespassing the borders and incorporating (from 2005) a series of events managed by the Dams of Gorizia . It is now at its seventh edition and Pixxelpoint it is not one of the digital arts festivals spread all around the world. In fact the initiative positively lives and reflects all the contradictions of living on a frontier that was, only few years ago, an Iron Curtain that is now slowly collapsing, making closer two country different in history, culture and digital interests. It is a unique experience to jump here and there from the border to follow events that develop rather near to each other, giving to the festival an unmistakable atmosphere. This edition, intituled Dresscode , presented, according to the manager Igor Spaniol...

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LA DIGITAL ART BETWEEN BERGSON AND DELEUZE

Txt: Sandro Fossemò
Area: New Media

It is difficult to define what “Computer Art" really is. At least for me. I think that currently there isn't just a single and objective definition. There are many interpretations of works done with a computer which are catalogued under the general and sometimes anonymous denomination of “Digital Art”. I think Digital Art is a graphic representation of images made and coordinated with a computer aiming at expressing artistic dimensions . Unfortunately, the digital artist has always been considered by some as a second-class artist or, worse, he hasn't even never be considered as a true artist, but rather a “graphic designer” due to the fact that this new form of art is made easier thanks to the use of the computer effective graphic means. Sometimes, digital art is put on the same level of sterile graphic elaborations, simple photomontages deprived of real artistic fundament fooling ignorant minds. Nonsense! Maybe...