Digimag 21 - Febbraio 2007 - Net Art, Hacktivism, Software Art, Video Art, Electronica, Audiovideo, A.I., Design, Performing Art, New Media

contributo grafico

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

:::DIGICULT:::
:::DIGIPOD:::

Monthly magazine:
Digicult Produzioni

Director / Editing:
Marco Mancuso

Photo editing / Cover:
Arianna D'Angelica

Contents:
Gianluigi Anzalone, Silvia Bianchi, Beatrice Bonfanti, Lucrezia Cippitelli, Teresa De Feo, Luigi Ghezzi, Alessandro Massobrio, Alessandra Migani, Miriam Petruzzelli, Monica Ponzini, Domenico Quaranta, Silvia Scaravaggi, Massimo Schiavoni, Giulia Simi, Elena Vairani, Valentina Tanni, Francesca Valsecchi

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

----------------------------------
NET ART
//Giulia Simi

NETWORKS
//Elena Vairani

INTERACTIVE PICTURES BY NICOLAS CLAUSS

Txt: Giulia Simi
Area: Net Art

I didn't know Nicolas Clauss until a few months ago, when I occasionally read the communicate of the Bananram Festival that announced the purchase of one of his work Scalpe for 15.000 euros. Maria Rita Silvestri , director and curator of the festival, defines the work as “characterized by a strong European identity” and states that “he contaminates with poetry the digital instrument”. My curiosity was already going sky-high and in less than one sec I was on his site. I there discover a complex work, educated but involving at the same time, where analogical dialogues with digital openly, creating evocative, poetic, challenging images. Born as a painter, Nicolas Clauss get in touch with multimedia on 1999, 33 years-old, after a six-years travel, back to France . He attends a 3D university course, but love is not at the first sight...

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

MY SPACE VJING, BULLETTIN FROM THE NET

Txt: Elena Vairani
Area: Networks

There are rumours about MySpace being the responsible for some new bands come into the limelight recently such as Hawthorne Heights, Arctic Monkeys, The Feeling a Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Lily Allen. Even many bands and Italian artists have something to say about MySpace potentialities. Some have found a discography contract, others interesting contacts for DJ set and nights, others many contacts and download of their tracks thanks to public relations through the network. The better way to know what users think about MySpace, concerning the potentialities of the tool, is exactly contacting them through the Bulletin. This is what I did to realise this experimental article for Digimag, focused on the Vying community, one of the most active and blooming communities within MySpace. I sent a Bulletin which has gathered in a few days the most different answers...

----------------------------------
HACKING
//Lucrezia Cippitelli

HACKTIVISM
//Francesca Valsecchi

ARCANGEL COSTANTINI, HACKING AS ART AND LIFE

Txt: Lucrezia Cippitelli
Area: Hacking

Arcangel Costantini is a volcanic artist that works in Mexico City. From the last 90's his works have been oriented to the realization of projects later defined as Net Art, whose he's one of the most representive international exponent. He's now taking distances from this kind of definition, as he wants his work to have a larger and more complete collocation. He's the creator of the Atari Noise , a project developed in 1999 as console to create audiovisual pattern ("audiovisual noise pattern generator keyboard, a game info-deconstruction”, as he defines the project), realized playing on an Atari 2600 , one of the most popular and universally known videogame machine of the 70's, with whom generations of kids played for almost 15 years. From this starting point, Costantini elaborated audio and video performances, installation and an interactive part of the site playable by the users..

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

NETWORKING, THE NET LIKE ART

Txt: Francesca Valsecchi
Area: Hacktivism

Tatiana Bazzichelli, known online as T_Bazz, presents her book "Networking. La rete come arte ", edited by Costa&Nolan, a new point of view on the technological and cultural panorama which takes shape in Italy and involves the movements and the experimentations of the underground, of the digital nets and of the auto-organized experiences of the computer communities. The book proposes a new reading of the creative and shared use of the technologies and keeps count of not only the socio-technical aspects of the instruments and of the activities of relation which they encourage, but also of the artistic and cultural meaning which they create and created: the networking is then an activity of creative cooperation oriented at the creation of relationships, but it was also able to define new meanings with transversal practices at the subjects and in specific at the artistic experience...

----------------------------------
SOFTWARE ART
// Monica Ponzini

GAME ART
// Monica Ponzini

CORY ARCANGEL, RE-COSTRUCTING CODE ART

Txt: Monica Ponzini
Area: Software Art

He lives and works at Brooklyn and he is one of the most interesting digital artists in America . His works are exhibited at the Whitney Biennale, at the Guggenheim, at the MoMA and the PS1. He began with the hacking of filters for the Nintendo, continued with a version of a slow motion Tetris and with a 15 minutes video on Super Mario. Recently he has composed a Colors film of Dennis Hopper in a symphony of single lines of colour, extending the first line of pixel in the all screen and repeating the same process for every line of 33 days of projection. He made Dazed and Confused of Richardson Linklater dub in English by an Italian office and he played on the synchronies of two projections of the video clip Sweet Child O'Mine of Guns and Roses in which a note was missing from a version. His last effort entitled the Bruce Springsteen “Born to Run” Glockenspiel Addendum, where the music...

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

BLIP FESTIVAL, LOW-BIT ART IN LOVE

Txt: Monica Ponzini
Area: Game Art

If your first love has been Pong , and not the girl or boy next door; if your childhood physical activity was taking Mario from a platform to another; if you brought your Game Boy with you to the toilet to get to the next level of Donkey Kong ; if you answered yes, the Blip Festival is for you. Organized by the Newyorker association The tank and by the collective 8bitpeoples , defined by someone the “ Woodstock of the Chip Music” , the festival is a celebration of the old electronic world and its infinite, unexpected elaboration with the actual one. Forty artists from all over the world came to this kermesse of the low-bit art that brings back instruments of the past – from the Game Boy to the Atari, through the never forgot Commodore64 – and creates sound and visual performances. Modified cartridges, essential graphics and re-configured sound chip – simple and primary elements if compared with the nowadays possibilities...

----------------------------------
VIDEO ART
// Monica Ponzini

VIDEO CLIP
//Alessandra Migani

VIDEO ART
// Valentina Tanni

JONAS MEKAS, VIDEO ART OF IMPROVISATION

Txt: Monica Ponzini
Area: Video Art

Jonas Mekas says about his films that they are linear and horizontal, that there's a past and a present and it deals with mostly stolen moments from his everyday life, friends, places and discussions. There's no solution of continuity between one video and another, the only link is himself who decides to switch on the video camera following the instantaneous impetus without an exact plan and then he selects them, he establishes the possible assemblage and he defines the sequence. The filmed everyday life becomes raw material to prune, to transform into films which keep the immediacy of the moment caught by chance mixed with the aura of the protagonists, very special friends: John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol, Philip Glass, Salvador Dali… He assembles them, breaks its simplicity and makes them not linear. And it is because, like in real life, the most part of the actions hasn't got a precise...

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

NEW MUSIC SHORTS: NEW TALENTS GROWIN'UP

Txt: Alessandra Migani
Area: Video Clip

The new short forms of audiovisual communication live nowadays continuous contaminations of genres and shapes. If we observe short movies and music videos we can see happily that separation between genres is not so defined. Often in some short movies music becomes so important that dialogues vanish on the background, or on the other hand in music videos happens that suddenly dialogues cover music becoming sharp. Consciousness of the existence of this new field of short forms, called music shorts, in between short film and music video, has lead the innovatory online channel BBC film network to the launching of a winning and compelling initiative. The saying that appears on the webpage is ‘We have the music, now you make the film' and it expresses perfectly the idea. So, last summer the different involved situations such as BBC Film Network, BBC New Talent and BBC Electric Proms, got together...

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

EVIL EVOLUTION

Txt: Valentina Tanni
Area: Video Art

Technology progress miracles have always generated utopia and nightmares. Hopeful visions of a better future, but gloomy and catastrophic predictions too. The risk within the rash use of scientific discoveries and their products is a subject which, since the First Industrial Revolution, when the panorama of cities and suburbs started to show the signs of a firm “artificial” invasion, has been animating sociologic debates as artists, writers and filmmakers do. From Frankenstein to Blade Runner, where the dangerous connection was between man and metal, between nature and robotics- up to new backgrounds opened by bio and nano-technologies, the subject of rebellion and sequent loss of control of man, of one of the two parts at stake (both nature and technology itself mature enough as to become a second nature) is now a topos...

----------------------------------
ELECTRONICA
//Marco Mancuso

SPERIMENTALE
//Silvia Bianchi

SPERIMENTALE
//Miriam Petruzzelli

JOHN DUNCAN, MUSIC OF INVISIBLE

Txt: Silvia Bianchi
Area: Sperimentale

Something Like Seeing in the Dark is the title of world premiere sonic performance, realized especially for Netmage 07 by John Duncan e Leif Elggren. John Duncan, American by origin, though stateless resident of countless countries (over six years in Japan, six months in Sweden, more than a decade in Italy, while maintaining citizenship in the strange kingdom of Elgaland-Vargaland) distills his experiences in ways that go far beyond the limits of sound-art. The research of John Duncan for over twenty years verifies the psycho-physical limits of the individual, ranging from performance art (with unique events at MOCA (Los Angeles), MAK (Vienna), MACBA (Barcelona), Museum of Tokyo -MOT), to audio installations (most recently at O'Artoteca (Milan), Atlantic Waves (London), The Institute of Contemporary Art - ICA (Boston), Eco e Narciso (Turin), MUTEK (Montreal), the NoorlandsOperan (Umeå), Fylkingen (Stockholm)...

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

LADYTRON, E' DI NUOVO L'ORA DELLE STREGHE

Txt: Marco Mancuso
Area: Electronica

C'era una volta l'electro-clash. Questo articolo potrebbe iniziare così, come l'attacco di uno di quei racconti un po' favoleggianti e con il sapore un po' retrò delle cose già viste e vissute. Nel grande show business della musica elettronica di oggi però, che brucia velocemente mode e personaggi, etichette e stili tra i più fantasiosi e creativi, alcuni artisti riescono a staccarsi dal gruppo e a raggiungere ambiziosi traguardi. E' questo il caso, decisamente, dei Ladytron, fenomeno pop degli ultimi anni grazie alla pubblicazione nel 2001 e nel 2002 di due album folgoranti per gli amanti del genere come 604 e Light and Magic nonché di alcune vere e proprie hit come Playgirl o Seventeen o True Mathematics. Il quartetto di Liverpool (Daniel Hunt, Reuben Wu, e le vocalist Helen Marnie e la bellissima Mira Aroyo) ha appena dato alle stampe il suo terzo album, Witching Hour, dopo una lunghissima assenza durata quasi 4 anni, dovuta prima...

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

NO SIGNAL: OVERSEAS MUSIC

Txt: Miriam Petruzzelli
Area: Sperimentale

What will Fellini's movies be without Nino Rota's soundtracks? Chaplin's silent movies without its music counterpoint he composed even after sound advent? Chaplin, who believed that cinema's essence was its silence, has taught us that sound isn't composed of words, but notes. A century after cinema's invention the link between music and image in motion prevail in each communication system amazing and reinventing over and over again. Many things have changed, even thanks to new technologies, but creativity, this unceasing need to express visions and alternative paths capable of becoming lucid and dreamy interpreters of this incredible reality, to guide our experiences. In other worlds Art, research, passion, innovation. This, at least, is an interesting reading of the contemporaneous edited by TiConZero, cultural association and musical research centre from nearly a century...

----------------------------------
VJING
//Silvia Bianchi

LIVE MEDIA
//Alessandro Massobrio

AVIT C23, PIXELS WANT TO BE TRUSTED

Txt: Silvia Bianchi
Area: Vjing

The second edition of Avit C23 took place in Berlin from the 27 th to the 30 of January together with the 23 rd annual hacking conference: Computer Chaos Conference. The event, organised by the new association Visual Berlin, gathering from less than a year, video artists active locally, configured as an exchange moment between European realities (and not only) active within visual experimentation and as a confrontation with the wide "computer addicted" community gathered in Berlin on the occasion of the Chaos Conference. Central location of the event Art & Beauty Area of Bcc, congress centre located on the heart of the Alexander Platz, which housed Avit's Vying showcases and dozens of Computer Conference workshops, devoted to computer culture and hacking. Near BBC, M12 was selected as the second location for Avit, housing in the afternoon readings and showcases, and in the night audio-video showcases...

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

LIVE IXEM 06...A SUMMARY

Txt: Alessandro Massobrio
Area: Live Media

The last 17 th December there was the 6th Edition of the Italian contest of electronic experimental music and arts Ixem, at the Rialto Santambrogio in Rome, in an intimate and cordial environment; it was enough to dilute the competitive tension which was however present, to testimony the importance that the festival/competition of Antitesi has on a national level. 10 projects were presented during the event which starts from the 6 and finishes late at night with the proclamation of the winning project, Incastro di Mondi. Among the very few non audio-video participants together with Invisible fields in which Gianluca Beccuzzi aka Esa process at the pc stones and rubbles, Incastro di Mondi is a short performance in which three instrumentalists Mario Garuti, Grazia Mari and Luca Bossi (respectively at the violin, low clarinet and transverse flute) improvise controlled via game pad by Tommaso Perego...

----------------------------------
A.I.
//Teresa De Feo

TECHNOLOGY
//Luigi Ghezzi

NETWORKED NATURE: NATURE AND ELECTRONIC ART

Txt: Teresa De Feo
Area: A.I.

Art and nature have always hooked on. The two divines contend the primacy of the creation of the forms. And it matters! The first one is the mother of the artificial forms, the other one has obviously the natural forms. We all know that. Or maybe not? Is it still valid this honest separation of roles? A group of artists from NY reflects on the question and, using sophisticated technologies, answers no. machines animated by phototropism, living micro systems, hydroponics environments, the lysergic growing of mould. The electronic art doesn't want to represent the natural world, but also imitate its processes. This is Networked Nature , a collective exhibition of artists that work in a network and reflect on the importance of a definition between the human and the nature. They mix politic and commitment, new technologies and the collaborative and unanimous...

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

SOME BUOYS FOR THE SCIENCE BY THE BAY

Txt: Luigi Ghezzi
Area: Technology

In San Francisco, from 15th to 19th 2007 there will be the meeting Science by the Bay. The annual conference is organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the most important non-profit scientific associations of the world. The AAAS is surely one of the most influent scientific associations, thanks above all to the publication of the magazine Science and to the news service Eurekalert.org, an informative system supported by the universities, medical centres, newspapers, governmental agencies, multinationals and other organizations which gives continually scientific news regarding the most different fields of the knowledge: from farming to mathematics, from archaeology to medicine, from atmospheric sciences to pedagogy of the scientific literature. The international meeting Science by the Bay, conforming to the aims of the association, has the aim to promote...

----------------------------------
INTERACTION DESIGN
//Silvia Scaravaggi

MOTION GRAPHIC
//Marco Mancuso

ROOSEGAARDE, A INTERACTIVE SUSTAINABLE WORLD

Txt: Silvia Scaravaggi
Area: Interaction Design

Daan Roosegaarde (1979) is a young sculptor/architect working in Rotterdam , the Netherlands. In 2006 he launched Studio Roosegaarde in which series of interactive artworks are created. He studied at the Academie of Fine Arts AKI in Enschede and the Berlage Institute, a Postgraduate Laboratory of Architecture in Rotterdam. Roosegaarde's works explore the dynamic relation between architecture, people and new media. His sculptures are a collision of technology and the human body. In this interaction the sculptures create a situation where visitor and public space become one. Roosegaarde's projects have been shown in exhibitions at NAi, V2 & Netherlands Media Art Institute and published in Items and NRC Handelsblad . His last work Flow 5.0 has been exhibiting at Ljubljana Triennale, Slovenia.

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

MOTOMICHI NAKAMURA, JAPANES HASTA LA MADRE

Txt: Marco Mancuso
Area: Motion Graphic

In un ambiente, artistico e professionale, in cui sempre più spesso il riconoscimento di una precisa levatura artistica è determinato, soprattutto a livello grafico e visuale, più dalla capacità di utilizzo eclettico del software open source più recente che da una visione estetica più ampia e stilisticamente matura e riconoscibile, il lavoro del visual artist, vj e motion graphic designer giapponese/americano Motomichi Nakamura, riconcilia con la semplicità, la dinamicità e la potenza espressiva della graphic animation. Flash si sà, è un software le cui potenzialità, sia in ambito progettuale web che in un contesto più artistico, è universalmente riconosciuta ma da pochi conosciuta in profondità, nonostante quello che molti accreditati pensano e dicono. Certo, è un software proprietario, non dà la possibilità di mettere mano al codice né tanto meno di condividere i file sorgente, ma quando vi capiterà di venire a contatto...

----------------------------------
VIDEO DANZA
//Massimo Schiavoni

BIGONZETTI-PLESSI. ALL STANDING

Txt: Massimo Schiavoni
Area: Video Danza

A Romeo and Juliet different in the forms and the stereotypes, strange vision and pure creation, impeccable refined and contemporary creature signed Bigonzetti-Plessi, guarantee of innovation, quality and aesthetic-artistic perfection. The video-sculpture embrace the modern dance and brings fresh air, new stimulations and new horizons that we weren't used to. The soul of the matter invest the dancers, the technologic dancing scenography is a pretending of feelings that hustle the common sensitivity and conception. A love story, the most known in the whole world, re-adapted in a post-conceptual key where the symbols are leaders and the sense is universal in every country for every person. The score of Prokofiev give life to bended bodies magisterially oiled and guided, unique visual impacts, dramaturgic and performative abstractions, multiplication of two lovers that couldn't avoid their love for each other that not even Dainese , protagonist out of his habitual context, can protect. Mare verticale, Naufragio della pittura or Roma II, to mention some installations where water, air and fire are protagonists and even favourite themes of Fabrizio Plessi, here they immerge and transfigure in a non-flowery set environment, but highly contagious to support the relationships man-machine and light-colour .

----------------------------------
NEW MEDIA MARKET
//Domenico Quaranta

NEW MEDIA
//Gianluigi Anzalone

NUOVI MEDIA E MUSEO: AN ITALIAN WAY?

Txt: Domenico Quaranta
Area: New Media Market

From 16th December 2006 to 16th January 2007, the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum proposed a colossal itinerant show, projected by Agricola de Cologne and Antonio Manfredi . The little and entrepreneur museum of Naples did more than what's in the first line: it took the choices inside the show for its permanent collection, 260 multimedia works, audio, video and photography plus 100 texts of creative writing and visual poetry. Everything has been possible thanks to the particular conception of this challenge. Selfportrait – a show for Bethlehem – show for Peace is an expositive project conceived by Wilfred Agricola de Cologne, one of the most active and prolific artist and curator of the New Media Art, as a peace message, addressed by a universal practice and universally comprehensible, the self-portrait as affirmation of an existence made to cancel every cultural separation and...

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

PEAM 2006: REPORT FROM DIGITAL ART

Txt: Gianluigi Anzalone
Area: New Media

Al Peam 2k6 di Pescara, dal 6 al 10 Dicembre, c'era tutto ciò che desideriamo ed inseguiamo disperatamente. Probabilmente, l'autentica ragion d'essere di ciò che leggiamo, ascoltiamo, osserviamo, programmiamo e pensiamo tutti i dì. V'erano tecnologismi low-tech e hi-tech, ibridazioni e purismi, estetica assoluta e ricerca concettuale avanguardista, hacking e anti-hacking, mentale e corporeo, reale e virtuale, storia, socialità e individualismi, ma, soprattutto, un atmosfera colma di reciprocità, d'intenzione comunicativa, e - mi si perdoni la mediocrità – un'autentica coltre di gioie, entusiasmi ed amore che, se frazionato per i mq 2 della tanto piccola quant'ospitale Ecoteca, rendeva l'aria assolutamente “irrespirabile”. Un Diamante era stato promesso e un Diamante c'è stato regalato, in questa edizione del Peam. Ma scendiamo dunque nel pratico, oserei dir, “l'inutile” descrizione analitica dei singoli interventi estetici...