Digimag 23 - Aprile 2007 - Net Art, Hacktivism, Software Art, Video Art, Electronica, Audiovideo, A.I., Design, Performing Art, New Media

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Montlhy Magazine:
Digicult Produzioni

Editing:
Marco Mancuso

Photo editing / Cover:
Arianna D'Angelica

Contents:
Giulia Baldi, Silvia Bianchi, Lucrezia Cippitelli, Silvia Caracciolo, Francesco D'Orazio, Tiziana Gemin, Luigi Ghezzi, Annamaria Monteverdi, Motor, Bertram Niessen, Eleonora Oreggia, Miriam Petruzzeli, Monica Ponzini, Barbara Sansone, Silvia Scaravaggi, Massimo Schiavoni, Giulia Simi

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

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NET ART
//Giulia Simi

NET ART
//Bertram Niessen

TOWARDS SIGHT PRIVATIZATION

Txt: Giulia Simi
Area: Net Art

Have you ever thought that inside an African mask, the lines of McDonald logo could be hidden? Or that behind the face of the French Prime Minister De Villepin the Gaz the France logo could be found? These are some of the Logo Hallucinations that Cristophe Bruno, French net artist, known because of his ironic and sarcastic drive, is posting on his weblog Logo.Hallucination, project that started last autumn and exposed for the first time at the International Meetings Paris-Berlin of 2006. Maybe Cayace Pollard, protagonist of “Pattern Recognition” and allergic to logos, written by William Gibson, would have had an anaphylactic shock in front of even one of these images, that would have made her suspect about the hidden presence of an industry logo anywhere. A software developed by the programmer Valeriu Lacatusu, based on pattern recognition techniques with neutral nets, tries to find logos of...

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99ROOMS: NET SYNESTHESIA

Txt: Bertram Niessen
Area: Net Art

99rooms is an interesting web-based project that mix real ambient and virtual ambient. It is realized painting worrying figures in an old abandoned factory, then animating them so that they interact through 99rooms. The collective that created this little dream post-industrial slivers is called Rostlaub and it is composed by Kim Köster (The Artist), Richard Schumann (Art Direction), Johannes Bünemann (Sounddesign) and Stephan Schulz (Flash / Programming). There are several reasons why I decided to meet Rostlaub. First of all 99rooms is the first example of re-elaboration of the post-industrial aesthetic, nowadays chewed and digested after 15 years of metropolitan spaces and not, re-adapted in all the sauces. Then I think the kinaesthesia of their project is structured and articulated with a common attention. Eventually, their works is really amazing. And for once, you can see the show from your own home...

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HACKTIVISM
//Eleonora Oreggia

HACKTIVISM
// Lucrezia Cippitelli

CAVANDOLI'S TESTAMENT

Txt: Eleonora Oreggia
Area: Hacktivism

Osvaldo Cavandoli, a master in the art of animated drawing and famous for his character La Linea (The Line) ,died on 3rd March 2007 in Milan, the city where he lived. Here is the posthumous message his son Sergio found in an envelope “to be opened when I will no longer be here”. “This is the recollection of an artist who has always been able both to smile and make people smile even now that he is no longer alive” (Quotation from Massimo Maisetti). I am honoured and sad to publish it… I had the lucky chance to meet 'Cava' in December 2002, while I was writing my university thesis (“Drawing animation. A semiotic analysis”). I would like to quote part of a conversation we had which has never been published before, so that through the warmth and liveliness of his words the simple and practical spirit of such a great person can live again in our memory...

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NEW ART INTERACTIVA

Txt: Lucrezia Cippitelli
Area: Hacktivism

After a year of discussions and debates which took place in a mailing list, it is official the opening of Arte Nuevo Interactiva 07 , the fifth edition of the Biennial of Merida, Mexico, which will take place next June. In the context of International System of Art, the birth of new biennials displaced in the more disparate and decentralised areas of the world, is now everyday occurrence. You just think about the recent examples of the Biennial of Malindi, Kenya, or the Bienal Fin del Mundo of Ushuaia, Argentina, both neo born and looking for an international affiliated which appears wisely pre- built: international artists and mainstream participation in a virgin environment for contemporaneous art. A well tried mechanism from the 90's in which the interaction among the mercantilist interests of international art dealers and local authorities' political interests push to the institution of big cultural industries....

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GENERATIVE ART
//Marco Mancuso

VVVV, THE NEW BORN ONE

Txt: Marco Mancuso
Area: Generative Art

Inside the wide universe of software programming, more and more powerful and performing, inside a revenge never solved between Mac and Pc developers, inside the ambit of a pulse to be open source or not, it is now deafening the noise made by vvvv. Last child of a family composed from software that generate and integrate both audio and video, vvvv was born almost five years ago, inside a fertile German media house Meso , neuralgic independent and not highly financed centre of lots of lab activities managed around software and instruments for media interactive production of artistic and professional level. That will not repeat the Irkam experience lived in Paris almost twenty years ago, but it surely is one of the few European realities that are helping out the research in those areas, even if they do not have analogue funding. Even if it doesn't have the potential of Max and its Msp library , and also its integration for images better known as Jitter , and not even the potential of their open source version Pure Data , vvvv carries out two fundamental jobs that fixed its international success. First off vvvv has been developed on a Windows platform (and don't tell us it is not a hot point), eliminating the oppression created by the duo MaxMsp/Jitter that “works good only on Mac” and so on. Then (but I'm not so sure, as I don't work with those instruments) vvvv seems to be more user-friendly and direct than its brothers, as it is the first modular graphic interface that extend the real-time concept to the potential of audio/video offered by one of the most revolutionary software of the last ten years: Processing.

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VIDEO ART
//Silvia Caracciolo

HOMAGE TO ALBERTO GRIFI

Txt: Silvia Caracciolo
Area: Video Art

After a long desease, the film-maker, photographer craftsman-inventor Alberto Grifi left us this Sunday, on 22nd April. The definition of Grifi as the father of Italian underground cinema was useful to dismiss his case and turn his concept of deconstruction of the artist-director against him. At the same time it made his films cult objects though many never saw them, so that the memory of the collective experiences impressed on them could gradually wear out as their 30-year-old magnetic supports. We like to give back to Grifi , who was the author of La Verifica incerta (The uncertain verification, 1964 , with Gianfranco Baruchello ), an editing film which, breaking up famous Hollywood films excited people such as Man Ray, John Cage e Max Ernst, the right not to be either the master or the father, but rather a comrade among comrades. This comrade falls in love and becomes accomplice to what is going on in front of the camera and for that reason he takes sides, thus leaving fragments of the independent culture of Italian movements of the 70s seen as forms of political action openly criticizing “a militant cinema where you can see a procession of people with their fists clenched, which I have never considered political cinema...at the most it seemed to me it followed the topics... let's say of regime cinema...” One of the main points in the control of Performance over life lies in the paradox which constitutes an image, following the natural tendency to transform any experience into its fetish. Some years ago there was a fashionable quotation which said: when the finger points to the moon there are always those who look at the finger.

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FUTURESONIC 2007: MUSIC FOR EVERYDAY LIFE

Txt: Alessandro Massobrio
Area: Electronica

Futuresonic 2007 brings reflection. A festival of ideas and pioneers – as the curators of the event say – dedicated to the celebration of a fertile forty years (1967-2007), that has an expressive strength able to inform most of the creative energies of the new generations addicted to the exploration of relationship between sound and image. An essential genealogy, the conscience of the roots of a social and artistic movement that finds nowadays its common denominator inside the electronic music, even if its soul belongs to the pop culture of the last century. The research goes further. Futuresonic will occupy from 10 th to 12 th May 2007 emblematic locations in Manchester , in an itinerary path between memory and innovation. The Arndale Shopping Center is the heart of festival and it was once theatre of the explosive attack of IRA in 1996 but even the starting point for an economic boom that carried away Manchester.

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MULTIMEDIA
//Francsco D'Orazio

AUDIO VIDEO
//Marco Mancuso

SONARMAGICA: SONAR MULTIMEDIA 2007

Txt: Francesco D'Orazio
Area: Multimedia

Why do you go to Sonar? Because of music, parties, Barcelona, summer starting, friends from all over the world you meet once a year, new persons you meet, the sea… It is true; they are all perfect reasons which exert pressure on your finger clicking on the flying ticket to Cataluña. There is even another reason why it deserves to be seen. Sonar is maybe the richest Mundial exposition on contemporaneous media environment transformations. Sonar Multimedia is not only a media art festival, but a show on new media too, a series of workshops and conferences on digital media, and every time is a sort of treaty of experience on contemporaneous media passage. With a lucidity deserving of the best scientific research (or of the less academic, make your choice), the multimedia section of Sonar manages to seize with extreme precision the essential outlines of media mutations. Three are the key concepts of Multimedia 2007: magic, immersion and aural society...

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ELEKTRA, FESTIVAL ARTS NUMERIQUES

Txt: Marco Mancuso
Area: Audiovideo

It is now at its eight edition one of the first and most important festival of the world, in the ambit of digital art and audio-visual expression: the Elektra Festival of Montreal . One of the first international festival that focalized on experimental artistic audio-video forms with a wise and clever approach able to analyze the evolution of these years on the borders between art, experimentation, technologic research and communication. So multimedia, but only. Electro music, sound art, graphic and video design, audio-visual, installations and immersions. Themes that characterized the Elektra Festival from its birth and that, from 9 th to 12 th May will turn into real through a program out of the ordinary, brave, that follows a cultural and artistic tradition that makes Montreal an international neuralgic centre on the research about new media and the audio-video multimedia expressive forms. Far from the mainstream atmosphere that...

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ART&SCIENCE
//Tiziana Gemin

ROBOTICS
//Miriam Petruzzelli

WARREN NEIDICH, BETWEEN BRAIN AND CULTURE

Txt: Tiziana Gemin
Area: Art&Science

The emerging of new technologies implies mutations which have a deep influence both on our physical and on our psychic existence. With new technologies the environment changes, as well as and the stimuli we are exposed to. And the way we imagine changes too, letting new meanings emerge within a complex relation net between social, historical, economic and cultural conditions. After the spread of the Internet culture develops new connotations: no more linear and hierarchical, it became rhizomatic and dynamic; space and time categories have radically changed in our system of experiences, influencing the birth of new relations within the brain. New images brought about different aesthethic concepts and redefined the way we feel objects and our relation with the world. The cultural context re-configured by new technologies has thus changed both the object and the subject. And the contemporary...

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ICRA 07, UBIQUITOUS ROBOTICS

Txt: Miriam Petruzzelli
Area: Robotics

From April 10 and 14 and happening for the first time in Italy , the 24 th ICRA's conference was set in Rome . ICRA is the International Conference on Robotics and Automation supported by IEEE , Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, an international association aggregating over 370,000 members in 160 countries and gathering the major experts and high-tech specialists. This association is considered as an authority in a variety of sectors such as aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications, control systems, consumption energy and electronics. No doubt this is the chief international conference on the subject which has involved since 20 years representatives of university, as well as of industry and institutions, highlighting the work of young students and researchers. This conference starts with the great amount of scientific contribution (there are over 1,900 projects) and goes ahead with the introduction...

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INTERACTION DESIGN
//Silvia Scaravaggi

DEAF 07: NOT EVERYTHING IS INTERACTION

Txt: Silvia Scaravaggi
Area: Interaction Design

What does interactivity mean? Which is the original and deep meaning of this word, and how the world of new media and creativity confront themselves with it? In which fields can interaction dynamics be traced back and which are the parameters defining interactive environments, structures, works, networks? The 7th edition of the Dutch Electronic Art Festival , held in Rotterdam from 10 to the 29 th of April 2007, was focused on the most varied realities of this substantial and substantive subject. The days from the 10 th to the 15 th of April well entirely devoted to debates, workshops, conferences, lives and live sets, an international symposium for specialists and scholars, all connected by the red line of interaction. Rotterdam is a perfect location for this kind of operations: brand new city, with new spaces and brand new architectures, innovative realities working daily within the field of experimentation, creative research, with strong international networks. Rotterdam is one of those strategic places, in the middle of the old Europe , one of the fertile environments which never stops; the V2_ - Institute for unstable media, is undoubtedly one of the emerging environments of this panorama.

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NEW MEDIA
//Barbara Sansone

NEW MEDIA MARKET
//Motor

ATM: THE ARTISTIC NOMADISM OF NEW MILLENNIUM

Txt: Barbara Sansone
Area: New Media

The speedy development of new technologies and their incursion into our everyday life, into our way of thinking and relating to the others, into our forms of expression and art, the advantages and dangers they are bringing with them and the direction they might lead us to; all these are subjects that more and more urgently need meditation. While most of the people are experiencing this radical process unconsciously by entrusting spontaneously their behaviour processes to the presence and at this point the need for body extentions such as mobiles, computers and the Internet, many thinkers, researchers, scientists, technicians, organizers and creative people are trying to monitor these changes, to find out how to keep these means democratic and free by protecting them from the abuses inherent in human and mass behaviour, to figure out the new artist's shape, now very different from what we were used to...

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DIGITAL ART: A MARKET FOR STRONG STOMACHS

Txt: Motor
Area: New Media Market

The relationship between digital art (I find it more and more difficult to use that that expression “new” media art) and the market, it is a subject important for artists and professionals which is however still not very developed. We can start thinking about who is involved (or would like to). For snobbism let's start for artists, or more humbly for digital creatives. Those are the one who create digital contents, hardware, software, or hybrids as virtual communities. To create you need energy, which economically speaking means money and time (both as artist's time as users' time, especially in the economy of attention). Let's talk about money…The art system revolves around the creation or attribution of value to objects or processes. Such value is decided by a complex system where critics define the value which will be then decisive in the translations towards private collections or museums. Within the attribution...