Digimag 23 - Aprile 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:::

Montlhy Magazine:
Digicult Produzioni

Redazione / Editing:
Marco Mancuso

Photo editing / Cover:
Arianna D'Angelica

Contenuti:
Silvia Bianchi, Lucrezia Cippitelli, Sandro Fossemò, Luigi Ghezzi, Annamaria Monteverdi, Bertram Niessen, Miriam Petruzzeli, Monica Ponzini, Barbara Sansone, Silvia Scaravaggi, Massimo Schiavoni, Giulia Simi, Sara Tirelli

Translations:
Monica Amboni, Giulia Artioli, Stefania Longo , Ornella Pesenti

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NETATTIVISMO
//Marco Mancuso

NET ART
//Giulia Simi

NETACTIVISM, AGAINST CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER

Txt: Marco Mancuso
Area: Netattivismo

Stefano Gulmanelli, ten years of multinational industry, twenty between East Europe, Middle East and Africa . Symbolic analyst, collaborator of several newspapers, researcher of phenomenon related to changes, cultural conflict and social transformations caused by new technologies. He published in 2003 for Apogeo PopWar , il NetAttivismo contro l'Ordine Costituito , one of the most clear critic and journalistic analysis of the recent net-activists event, both online and not. I had the opportunity to write and publish this interview called Web Marketing Tools no more than a couple of years ago, magazine that is no longer available. As the destiny of the interview was linked to the perishable fate of its support and the non-reproducibility of the informative experience, the interview itself was lost, even if it's still current in its form and contents. It is the reason why I found necessary to call Stefano Gulmanelli to propose...

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DIWO: CO-CREATION, CO-CURATION

Txt: Giulia Simi
Area: Net Art

Since last 1st February you have read a post on the netbehavoiur.org mailing list, an open call to collaborate to the artistic and editing project DIWO (Do It With Others). What you have to do is sending any texts, audios or videos you have. They will be shown in an exposition in the HTTP 's London Net Art Gallery . For those who are not so familiar with the mail art and couldn't visit HTPP's Gallery where the projet is shown, we suggest an accurate inspection to release the intricate but at the same time interesting artistic net. Obviously everything must be searched on the web. Let's start from the beginning: DIWO project was created inside the mailing list netbehaviour.org. International artists and editors such as Marc Garret and Ruth Catlow are collaborating to this project. Indeed, they are co-fondators of the digital art collective group Furtherfield.org , one of the project promoter. It reminds straight away to the ribel and anarchic...

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HACKTIVISM
//Annamaria Monteverdi

HACKING
// Monica Ponzini

...CRITICAL ART ENSEMBLE...

Txt: Annamaria Monteverdi
Area: Hacktivism

Recombinant Theatre is the definition the US collective Critical Art Ensemble gave to his performing work . Founded in 1987 in Talahasse , Florida , by Hope and Steve Kurtz, Steve Barnes, Dorian Burr, Beverly Schlee , with the long-lasting cooperation of Beatriz da Costa , the Critical Art Ensamble defines itself as a collective of artists who explore the relations between art, technology, radical political activism and critical theory. CAE 's actions and installations are linked to tactical media, with plagiarizing, boycotting and the creative and subversive re-appropriation of communication media ; recombinant is an adjective loved by the generation of media activists . Their texts, among which Electronic Civil Disobedience (with its famous motto Cyber rights now!) underlines the idea that an alternative tecno-culture can be created by an organized movement ( tactical media movement ) and by a real process of socialization...

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G.R.L. E LA TECHNO STREET ART

Txt: Monica Ponzini
Area: Hacking

New York streets, as every metropolitan city, become more and more seat of word wars. On one hand you read the official messages from ads, on the other hand a whole range of artistic works reminding the passers-by that spaces are not and must not belong exclusively to pre-approved and uniform codes. From graffiti to installations, street art calls for freedom in expression in public spaces. It operates with developing techniques strictly related to new technologies. And they are not always welcomed by the state authorities. So an evening, raising your eyes, you could be not in front of a spray decorated wall but in front of a whole front building, invaded by light wrights “shot” by a projector…Or a monument not covered by paint but by coloured magnetized LEDs. These are some of urban “non-aligned” communication acts realized by Graffiti Research Lab (G.R.L.) , a think tank focussing its efforts...

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SOFTWARE ART
//Silvia Scaravaggi

GAME ART
//Marco Mancuso

MARIA ROUSSOU, IMMERSIVE INTERACTIVE XPERIENCE

Txt: Silvia Scaravaggi
Area: Software Art

Maria Roussou worked for years (1993 - 1997) at the CAVE of Electronic Visualization Laboratory in Chicago . From 1998 till 2002 she directed the Virtual Reality Department of the Foundation of the Hellenic World in Athene. She cooperated with several museums, such as the Minneapolis Walker Art Center , where she was in charge of online art education. She studied Electronic Media and Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at Illinois University in Chicago , she is PhD in Computer Science at London University and teaches New Technologies & Museums for Master of Arts program in Museum Studies at Athene University . She is member of several organizations, such as ACM - Association for Computing Machinery , IEEE – Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, ICOM – International Council of Museums ACM – Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE – Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers...

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8BITPEOPLES, RICERCA E SVILUPPO IN 8BIT

Txt: Marco Mancuso
Area: Game Art

In last number you find out about the Blip Festival , probably the most important international gather of 8bit artists ever organized. In New York Monica Ponzini had the opportunity to assist at the event and describing it in the article on Digimag 21 of February, with the video support of State Grezzi Production. Blip Festival is one of the active projects by 8bitpeople collective, multiform and multifunctional soul composed by more than 9 artists, opened and dedicated to the 8bit audio-visual aesthetic of video-recreational matrix. The message is clear from the start: “Our primary interests were to provide quality music for free and most importantly to have fun” . That is: you don't bother us with your analysis on the aesthetic low bit phenomena, we're here to take what was left behind and enjoy in the most simple and genuine way, sharing all this with as much people as we can, free. Even if it is still excluded by...

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DIGITAL CINEMA
//Barbara Sansone

VIDEO ART
//Monica Ponzini

DIGITAL BARCELONA FILM FESTIVAL

Txt: Barbara Sansone
Area: Digital Cinema

Dal 23 al 27 maggio 2007 a Barcellona si terrà la terza edizione del DiBa (Digital Barcelona Film Festival). Si tratta di un Festival giovane ma cresciuto rapidamente grazie alla sua originalità e qualità, che si propone di presentare le ultime tendenze audiovisuali nell'ambito di una vasta gamma di generi (lungometraggi, documentari, animazione, videoclip, cortometraggi), ma soprattutto vuole essere un'occasione per entrare in azione e fare cinema condividendo questa esperienza con chi è animato dalla stessa passione. Come dice il nome stesso del Festival, tutti i film selezionati sono realizzati in digitale e vengono inoltre proiettati digitalmente da un server centrale. L'evento si articola in diverse sezioni. Nell'ambito del DiBa Screen, vengono proiettate creazioni cinematografiche in digitale di registi affermati o di nuovi talenti, selezionate tra le produzioni dell'ultimo anno e di tutto il mondo. Nel corso della prima edizione, nel 2005...

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CLOSED CIRCUIT

Txt: Monica Ponzini
Area: Video Art

For the first time in the Metropolitan Museum a community gives an overview of the last ten years of videoartistic productions. Closed Circuit is a gathered and concise exhibition showing at the same time a growing interest for new medias, still “hosted” in the Fotographic section, from institutions like Met. Eight works of eight different artists – from US but not only- traced a little path halfway between a static, brief prospect typical of photos and the dynamic, time-based point of view of videoart, characterised by images interweaved to a peculiar narration. So you find Wolfgang Staehle with is Eastpoint (September 15, 2004) who, in tune with the landscape tradition, “depicts” the goes by of a day in the Hudson's valley thanks to over 8000 still images synchronized at projection rhythm. Ann Hamilton in abc shifts hypnotically from pictures to videos effacing abc letters painted on a sheet of glass with little...

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ELECTRONICA
//Marco Mancuso

SOUND ART
//Barbara Sansone

SONAR 2007, SMILING TO THE FUTURE

Txt: Marco Mancuso
Area: Electronica

The Woodstock of the electro contemporary music is back to lighten the most cosmopolitan city of the entire Europe : Sonar and Barcelona , an indissoluble relationship, almost symbiotic, between a worldwide event and its city. Sonar is talked every year as good and bad show, but every year the kermes is on, comfortably the same as the past and differently chaotic in its proceeding, always attentive and focalized not only on the music and sound but also on the entire world of multimedia art, technologies and communication. Far from the intellectual arrogance of many new media art international festivals, near to the socio-cultural perception that young and not have of the changes, even if it remains faithful to its imprinting of “advanced music” exhibition, it is now a boiling melting pot of realities linked to the new media in a bigger sense. The collaboration and media partnership of this year with Digicult could maybe be the most indicative...

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CARDIFF-MILLER, IL POTERE EVOCATIVO DEL SUONO

Txt: Barbara Sansone
Area: Sound Art

From 2nd February to 1 st May 2007 in Barcelona Contemporary Museum MACBA (Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona) you can visit the show The Killing Machine i altres histories . Co-producers of the exhibition are the museum and the Institut Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt ( Germany ). The show will also take place in the Miami Art Central Museum . We are speaking of a piece of experience having a great impact on visitors offered by two artists, Cardiff and George Bures Miller . They are now living in Berlin after having studied and established in Canada as notable electro-acoustical sculptors. Hard to describe for its sensory nature in works, this exhibition is characterised by a special main character, the sound. Works are plays with no actors, or better, these latter are let to be imagined by the public while standing in front of sets. The imagination is also helped by objects and lights moving and among all by ...

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LIVE CINEMA
//Silvia Bianchi

AUDIO VIDEO
//Silvia Bianchi

OPTRONICA: THE AUDIOVISUAL CULTURE

Txt: Silvia Bianchi
Area: Live Cinema

The second edition of Optronica took place in London from 14th to 19th March, in the restructured National Film Theatre Complex, opened with the name of BFI Southbank and in the incredible IMax Cinema , near the first one. This edition confirmed the British festival as an not to be missed appointment for the lovers of Live Media and Live Cinema, and as meeting for the experts of the sector. The festival was at its second edition, thanks to the collaboration between British Film Institute , the artists and audio-visual producers Addictive TV and the association Cinefeel . The choice of BFI as location completely met the performance exigencies of the selected projects, followed by a vast public comfortably seated in two cinematographic rooms inside the building. Optronica is one of the few festival in the UK that is completely dedicated to the new audio-visual languages and their different exceptions, from experimental to entertainment live media, that find place in clubs after the closing of the festival at the Institute of Contemporary Art , with the shows of Exceeda, Addictive TV, Speedy J &Scott Pagano .

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CINDY KEEFER: LA STORIA DELLA VISUAL MUSIC

Txt: Silvia Bianchi
Area: Audiovideo

“Projected light and Colour: Early Visual Colour Organs and Light Shows”. This is the title of the talk that Cindy Keefer from the Centre for Visual Music of Los Angeles held at the NTF1 of BFI during last Optronica Festival day in London . A long and passionate retrospective about the first forms of audio-video expression, from pioneering experiments on coloured organs of 1700, through the multiple projector of lights by Fishnger of the middle 20's, to the legendary light shows of the 60's. Cindy Keefer is one of the founders of the CVM , American centre that diffuses and preserves the memory of the Visual Music , that boasts of artists from the international panorama of audio-visual animation between its founders. In a moment of changing and innovation, the talk of a real historian of the visual culture such as Keefer constituted a moment of recognition on the beginning of this form of expression that...

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ART&SCIENCE
//Silvia Scaravaggi

TECHNOLOGY
//Luigi Ghezzi

SPANISH SPRING : ART, SCIECE AND TECHNOLOGY

Txt: Silvia Scaravaggi
Area: Art&Science

Some traces of events, collaborations, meetings, inaugurations enriching the Spanish panorama in this spring 2007 and which prove the ferment in the environments of research and study on subjects connected with the relation between technology, science, environment and economics. A significant example of the activities revolving around those subjects are the meetings of NOW - meetings in the present continous, held on the 22 nd and 24 th of March 2007 at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona - CCCB . At its third edition, the meetings are part of the platform NOW , which was conceived as a middle term project from 2006 and 2009, an active and fertile territory of reflections on the present and its transformations in the field of science, technology, art, society and spiritualism. The principal idea of the project reflects the necessity to change generally the approach to studies , research...

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ORWARE, ACCETTAZIONE SOCIALE DELLA TECNOLOGIA

Txt: Luigi Ghezzi
Area: Technology

Language and the Scientific Imagination è il titolo del Call of Paper che la International Society for the Study of European Ideas (ISSEI) propone per una conferenza che si svolgerà ad Helsinki dal 28 luglio al 2 agosto 2008, in collaborazione con il Language Centre della University of Helsinki. Ho già sottolineato in un precedente articolo quanto le relazioni tra i campi artistici e quelli scientifici siano oggetto di rinnovata e importantissima attenzione. La conferenza di Helsinki invita a riflettere ancora una volta sulle possibilità di dialogo tra le scienze umanistiche e quelle naturali, dell'informazione e delle tecnologie. La conferenza verrà suddivisa in 5 sezioni: la prima tratterà storia , geografia, scienza; la seconda politica, economia e giurisprudenza; la terza pedagogia, sociologia e Women's Studies; la quarta letteratura, arte, musica, teatro e studi culturali, ed infine la quinta religione, filosofia, psicologia e linguistica...

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INTERACTION DESIGN
//Sara Tirelli

AUDIOVISUAL DESIGN
//Bertram Niessen

DEAF 07: INTERACT OR DIE

Txt: Sara Tirelli, William Bottin e Marco Mancuso
Area: Interaction Design

The most important axiom of Palo Alto's school says “You cannot but communicate”. Thus, when communication is mediated by new media or technology, you might not but interact, unless you want to risk your skin. Interact or Die is the warning of the ninth edition of Dutch Electronic Art Festival (DEAF), the international art and new media biennial organized by V2_Institute of Unstable Media which will take place in Rotterdam from 10th till 29 th April. By emphazising the unavoidable process of interaction, conditio sine qua non of human behaviour, new flexible interactive models are proposed and analyzed, with their characteristics that cannot be strictly defined, but on the contrary follow ever-changing rules of relation. Those kind of interactions can last longer and can more easily adjust themselves when compared to classical interaction models: the point is that current issues about economic ecological...

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QUAYOLA...VISUAL DELICATESSEN

Txt: Bertram Niessen
Area: Audiovisual Design

Davide Quagliola is among that group of sensible Italians who left their native shores to move to less sunny yet more hospitable places. Having moved from Rome to London, his work had been long associated with that of HFR Lab (a visual experimentation duo together with Chiara Horn), a project of sound and video, graphic and music on the border between installations and live performances which, also thanks to the good choice of moving to London, succeeded in creating a considerable professional connection net which probably would have been impossible to have living in Italy. Lately Davide has continued his artistic work by himself using the name of Quayola , always attentive to what happens in Italy and connected to the growing artistic movement of electronic audiovisual experimentation, yet constantly collaborating with internationally well-known English musicians and video...

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PERFORMING ART
//Annamaria Monteverdi

KLAUS OBERMAIER, LA STRANA DANZA DEI NEW MEDIA

Txt: Annamaria Monteverdi /Students Master Digital Environment - Naba
Area: Performing Art

Klaus Obermaier, electronic musician and Austrian digital artist, creator of many multimedia and cross-media works (from video art to web projects, from interactive installations, to computer music), has participated on the 14 th of February in the initiative Mercoledì da Naba , meetings and cultural meetings of the new Accademia di Belle Arti di Milano. As students of the Naba Master in Digital Environment Design, we have met and interviewed the artist in our laboratories before the conference. On this occasion the artist illustrated his artistic path and the use of technology within his creations. Klaus Obermaier has carried out since the Eighties innovative works in the field of dancing, music, theatre, new media, he has participated in the most important international festivals (Ars Electronica di Linz, Intermedium/ZkM, Singapore Arts) and has collaborated with the dancers of Nederlands Dans Theatrer, Chris Haring, DV8 , with musical groups such as Kronos Quartet, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the Balanescu Quartet , and with musicians such as Ornette Coleman, John Scofield, Peter Erskine. D.A.V.E. a video-dance show, was presented at the Villette Numerique in Paris in 2002; Apparition , interactive choreography, at Ars electronica 2004. The last production for the Bruckner Fest of Linz in 2006 in front of ten thousand people was Le Sacre Du Printemps by Igor Stravinsky, concert for orchestra, interactive dancing and stereoscopic 3D images by Ars Electronica Futurelab . Now, the great artist teaches and collaborates with different Universities and prestigious cultural institutes and recently he has become visiting professor at the IUAV of Venice for “New media in dancing, music and theatre performance”.

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NEW MEDIA
//Marco Mancuso

NEW MEDIA
//Sandro Fossemò

BROECKMANN, CONTEMPORARY NEW MEDIA ART

Txt: Marco Mancuso and Lucrezia Cippitelli
Area: New Media

The last edition of Transmediale represented for us a change edition and after gathering many opinions and impressions during the festival we can say that, according to many, it was an edition of difficult comprehension. Despite it, as point of reference for all who deal with new media, Transmediale is on everybody's lips, even after its end. And as each important appointment it is always under floodlights, giving confirmations and wrong-footing with its changes. In general it seems Tranmediale has definitively broken the frontiers pushing towards mainstream contemporaneous art . Anyway, it isn't a new thing to who has recently visited festivals. If, on one hand there are festivals loyal to proposing new media as trade union between science, technology, art, design and communication, on the other hand there are many reviews engaged with legitimizing some works of new media art as historical ones...

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WINDOWS VISTA, MORE DOMINION OVER REAL

Txt: Sandro Fossemò
Area: New Media

We must be careful with using Windows software univocally. Microsoft has not only reached the monopoly of the market, but it has even realised, in a certain way, a particular IT platform suitable for a media planning of Reality. The application which manages data manipulation is the IT mean through which some news can easily enter houses together with television, as in the case of Orwell's Big Brother. This is the risk. If an operative system doesn't allow you to manage freely information, without being spied on and being obliged to follow particular and complex technical procedures, the risk is to be subject to a certain type of administration which wants to use the IT mean to close a certain type of communication open and subjective, in such a way as to oblige those who surf the web or use IT programs to think according to flat schemes for thought. It is as if it existed a big univocal business