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Monthly magazine:
Digicult Produzioni
Redazione / Editing:
Marco Mancuso
Cover:
Arianna D'Angelica
Contents:
Lucrezia Cippitelli, Alessio Chierico,
Luigi Ghezzi, Maresa Lippolis, Loredana Menghi, Claudia Moriniello, Annamaria Monteverdi, Bertram Niessen, Monica Ponzini, Luigi Pagliarini, Barbara Sansone, Silvia Scaravaggi, Domenico Sciajno, Mariangela Scalzi, Giulia Simi, Massimo Schiavoni
Translations:
Claudia Contino, Stefania Longo, Ornella Pesenti |
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NET ART
//Monica Ponzini
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FLORIAN THALHOFER AND THE KORSAKOW SYSTEM
Txt: Monica Ponzini
Area: Net Art
 If Shakespeare considered the world a theatre, Florian Thalhofer believes the world is a hyperlink system. That is how he represents it, film after film, shooting landscapes, stories and revelations which are “assembled” with his original software, the Korsakow System . The result is a non-linear and interactive film, where the audience can decide the plot by selecting a series of links which are generated by a key word. The system was created in 2000 to make the film [korsakow syndrom] , dedicated to a degenerative pathology of the brain of alcohol addicts which destroys their short term memory and make them unable to find space-time directions. The stories are fragmented and not necessarily coherent and are the basic model for Florian's not linear narrative. Starting from a clip, the programme isolates other so called SNU, smallest narrative units, among which the audience can choose, thus obtaining a different plot and so a different film each time. The classic screenplay is divided and the story, or rather the stories, are the result of a common contribution of both the author and the audience, a narrative stream which moves through the Net. And it is actually the Internet which is not only a non-linear communication model, but also the main distribution platform, where its evolution takes place. An evolution which, according to Florian, starts from a way of thinking that is innate in our brain. We met Florian Thalhofer in New York before he started touring the USA for his latest project, [1000Stories], which was developed on vlog and installation at the same time. There he told us about his point of view…
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HACKTIVISM
//Annamaria Monteverdi
HACKTIVISM
//Maresa Lippolis
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THE THEATRE OF ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE
Txt: Annamaria Monteverdi
Area: Hacktivism
 Does anyone remember Enemy of The State directed by Tony Scott and starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman? The story deals with a man targeted by closed-circuit cameras, radars, bugs, satellite indicators, high-sensitive microphones following each of his movements. This movie as many others is concerned with important issues such as control, wire-tapping, data security and satellite espionage. Among them we must mention Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation,The End of violence by the German director Wenders and The listening, shut in 2006 by the Italian director Giacomo Martelli. Recently these issues has been handled by a US group, The Builders Association. Its manager Marianne Weems specializes in theatre stage design richly equipped with digital technology and wide screens. It is the producer which at the RomaEuropa Festival in 2003 showed the multi-prize-winning movie...
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STEAL THIS FILM 2: SHARE ALIKE
Txt: Maresa Lippolis
Area: Hacktivism
 In the wake of the "diy-do it yourself" attitude of Abbie Hoffman ‘s book, Steal this book (1970) , in 2006 a pretended group of filmakers who gathered under the name of "The league of the noble peer" , produced an interesting documentary film, Steal this film , showing how the present time's pirates are causing trouble to the diffusion and production system of knowledge and information with their recreational and disenchanted habits. The film has become and interesting case of alternative distribution and circulation since it has been downloaded by more than 2.500.000 people and than redistributed in the most important p2p European community. In Berlin in the glorious headquarters of pirate cinema (http://piratecinema.org) , a first version of the second part of Steal this film was showed at the end of October. The projection was closely related to the creation and production of the project...
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SOFTWARE ART
//Domenico Quaranta
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THE GATE: OPEN CONSIDERATIONS - PART 1
Txt: Domenico Quaranta
Area: Mmorpg
 The Gate (or Hole in Space , Reloaded ) is an installation realized for the opening exhibition of the iMAL Center for Digital Cultures and Technology in Brussels (4 th -10 th October). Come up in Yves Bernhard's mind, manager of the iMAL Center , the installation was created to handle a only apparently simple question: how to build a bridge between real space and virtual worlds. The objective in mind was the enjoyment of virtual spaces and the interaction with their inhabitants in the physical space without the interaction of a graphic interface. The problem is not new and the solution proposed – the showing in real space of a video-streaming from the virtual world- showed more times not to work. The Gate has not solved the problem and the found solution is far from being the definitive one. Yet a step forward has been made and many people have tried to go beyond the limit. But let start from the beginning. I personally had to face a similar problem just once in my life. In December 2006 I was offered by Mr. Luigi PagliArini to take part to the Peam in Pescara , Italy . There I decided to show a phenomenon I was following for a while: the performer Gazira Babeli, acting on the virtual stage of Second Life. It was the first physical time for Mrs Babeli and we watched her with great interest. At the end we chose to show 3 pictures (a self-portrait and 2 pictures representing 2 of her most meaningful performances) and the video-documentation of other performances. Also the idea of a Gazira Babeli's live performance interested us, but we feared the final output. As all virtual words, Second Life lies upon conventions not for beginners, and we couldn't take it for granted in the variety of audience attending the Festival...
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VIDEO ART
//Silvia Scaravaggi
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VINZ BESCHI, MEDIA DON'T EAT CHILDRENS
Txt: Silvia Scaravaggi
Area: Video Art
 I casually discovered the media, digital, A/V world at school, actually during my first year of university. Before that moment, I didn't even know its meaning. I watched television, I went to cinema, I looked to music videos, I wrote emails, and I listened to music on CDs without an education about that. I never learned to understand the mechanism behind and inside the instruments I used, their history. And I didn't even know anything about their evolutions and implications for the future. Often, when I was young, I listened to voices against a technological and technical development, negative thoughts about the use of new media, about the relation new generations could set with them. Anyway, the first time I critically faced the analogical electronic world, and then the digital one, I thought that if I'd knew them before, I would have surely enjoyed better and earlier all the advantages the media world brings with it and will incontestably bring. It is not the right place to dissert about this, least of all my intention is a generalist speech. I want to talk about a conscious use of the electronic and digital instruments and I want to explain historical and theoretical knowledge of the novelty the creative artists and students took from them, for everybody. It's just one of the valid reason that can make people understand new media are an effective instrument through which look and interpret the world. For this, and many other motivations, near history, philosophy, mathematics and literature, children – who were born and live in a world plenty of media – can understand and learn how to use them in a conscious manner.
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ELECTRONICA//Claudia Moriniello
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WHO IS AFRAID OF THE DARK?
Txt: Claudia Moriniello
Area: Electronica
 Compositore, performer ed installatore sonoro, John Duncan è raro esemplare di quegli artisti totalmente immersi nella ricerca esistenziale, che da oltre un ventennio rappresenta una delle figure cardine del panorama della sperimentazione radicale. La sua lunga e varigata carriera, caratterizzata dall'intensità elettroacustica e da eventi d'arte performativi e di confronto, percorre i risultati delle sue rigorose ricerche nell'ambito dei temi e delle ambientazioni le più disparate (arcani, metafisici, trasgressivi). Duncan dipinge il suo lavoro come un catalizzatore di energia, attraverso cui cerca di invogliare il pubblico a partecipare al processo di ricerca e autoscoperta. Questa intervista nasce a Palermo, e non a caso in occasione di una performance-concerto per quattro canali "surround sound". La platea galleggia immersa nel buio più assoluto e totale, in modo tale da amplificare la percezione sensoriale degli astanti non soltanto nei riguardi della musica ma anche nei confronti di una più pregnante compartecipazione alla creazione dell'atmosfera scontornata e a-dimensionale per un coinvolgimento più totale. Essa completa in un certo qual modo l'intervista fatta tempo fa da Silvia Bianchi per Digimag (http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=717), per cercare di comprendre a fondo l'incredibile universo artistico dell'americano John Duncan (nato nel 1953 a Wichita, Kansas, ma da qualche anno residente in Italia), personaggio che è cresciuto nell'ambito della performing-art, studiando con Allan Kaprow, incentrando poi i propri interessi verso mondi estremi quali quello della pornografia. Nella sua produzione discografica troviamo i rapporti con la scienza, con l'energia, il rompere la materia per rivelare la sua struttura, per analizzare il carattere dei suoi elementi e pervenire all'essenza della sostanza stessa, privilegiano il lavoro sulle onde corte.
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AUDIOVIDEO
//Bertram Niessen
LIVE MEDIA
//Domenico Sciajno
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THE QUASI OBJECTS PROJECT BY LORENZO OGGIANO
Txt: Bertram Niessen
Area: Audiovideo
 Some times writing a Digimag article is a little nightmare. No one of your contacts answers, the issue date gets closer and Marco Mancuso rightly starts asking for some material. his interview is one of the rare cases where the article appears from nothing. I met Lorenzo Oggiano during an inauguration, and I didn't link his name with anything specific. Once visited his website I though made the puzzle of name and face with the extremely fascinating “Quasi-Objects” projects, that I already had the opportunity to see. Hypnotic mutation of micro entities, laboratory flavor and contrast liquid smell. Well I couldn't miss the occasion. More than the meeting with one of the few Italian experimenters that cleverly and consciously use the 3D, I had a fine chat with an artist with theory reflexivity out of common. Good lecture..
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DUPRASS DUO, NEW AUDIOVISUAL POLITICS
Txt: Domenico Sciajno
Area: Live Media
 I had the chance to know part of the interesting work of the Israeli artists Liora Belford e Ido Govrin on the occasion of the Experimental Intermedia Festival in New York. What aroused my curiosity was their approach which, though experimental in its nature, tends to create more relaxed and less aggressive atmospheres than those of other Israeli artists I knew before. The Israeli experimental artists I knew shared the use of energy to the highest degree, a strong political and social commitment (we all know the historical tensions in Israel) and wanted to stress the substantial break and their independence from Western art rules in every aspects, from music to figurative arts. When I talked with them I tried to understand that “difference” and beside that, I found out that behind their work as a duo an interesting activity which has seemingly no borders conceals...
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A.I.
//Luigi Pagliarini
TECHNOLOGY
//Luigi Ghezzi
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POLYMORPHIC INTELLIGENCE: PART 1
Txt: Luigi Pagliarini
Area: Artificial Intelligence
 As I had the impression that for too long both the scientists for Mind and the researchers for Artificial Intelligence had taken for reference completely inadequate concepts, at the beginning of the year I developed the concept of Polymorphic Intelligence. This theory has little by little gained importance, being requested and welcomed all around the world. This is an attempt to explain, in a simple theory, the so called human-machine relation, trying to answer to the several tricky theories and philosophies concerning the different fields regarding the mind. My attempt is to free from any kind of ambiguity our thought, to give a straight and simple definition of mind and intelligence. My definition wants to wipe out the prejudice according to which constructive intelligence- and symmetrically the destructive one- is a exclusive prerogative for human beings or beings in general. On the contrary I want to prove...
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BEIJING, WORLD REASEARCHES POLITICS
Txt: Luigi Ghezzi
Area: Technology
 The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the China Association for Science and Technology (Cast) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) were the protagonist of Beijing meeting of 24 th -29 th September. It deserves an in-depth examination of its contiguous and symbolic meaning. It is impossible to disregard this kind of initiatives to understand how the future developing and technology geopolitical relationship will evolve. During the conference, some deals of collaboration in the formation and publication area have been signed (most of all about the Science magazine), looking for a higher universal commitment for the ethic and sustainable development and for the spreading of the scientific knowledge from the public opinion. Sense - and pride – were part of this meeting, when the president of the CAS Lu Yongxiang affirmed “Throughout the visit to Beijing , Shanghai , and Hangzhou...
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HYPER ARCHITECTURE
//Marco Mancuso
INTERACTION DESIGN
//Giulia Simi
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META DESIGN, LIQUID SPACES & CITIES OF TOMORROW
Txt: Marco Mancuso
Area: Hyper Architecture
 There are people living in cities who are careful observers of the slow changes which are taking place around them. Such people are not inclined to complaining about new telecameras controlling the access to the old town centre, about the prevailing traffic and polluted air, or the advertising billboards covering the facades of the old buildings in boulevards. The changes I mean are those little multimedia sparks which have started to become part of the urban landscape surrounding us: digital screens set in frequently visited places (such as stations, squares and airports), interactive shopping windows, public projections, multimedia advertising billboards. Those elements are more and more discussed and arouse curiosity as much as the latest discoveries in the ever-present demotic. Surely the contents, the message and the display of information that could be conveyed through these digital systems...
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NEAR FUTURE LAB: IMAGINING A POSSIBILE FUTURE
Txt: Giulia Simi
Area: Interaction Design
 Trying to imagine new ways of interaction between body and technology is clearly the great challenge scientists, artists and scholars have been engaged into in the contemporary world. Is there a way not to disappear physically when confronting the digital world? Is there a third way that can overcome the dichotomy -which has not been solved so far - between an anachronistic “return to nature” and a blind trasformation of our body into ones and zeros? Maybe abit of imagination would be enough to get off the beaten track and stop being like trains heading for a planned destination. Near Future Laboratory consists of a group of researchers who is trying indeed to get off the beaten track in order to create new possibilities of interaction between man and machine. Using the pragmatic approach which usually characterizes applied science scholars, we could define their way of working “thought in action”...
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PERFORMING ART
//Alessio Chierico
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THE SENSITIVE STATE OF THE WORLD TO THE WORLD
Txt: Alessio Chierico
Area: Performing Art
 Between the several Italian reality that are entering the electronic and contemporary art world, this year Perugia hosted some events that deserve particular attention. Performance, workshop, interactive environment, exhibitions, competitions, concerts, meetings, festivals: this was “Le arti in città”, that showed between its protagonists Saul Saguatti, Murcof, Giovanni Sollima and Isabella Bordoni. The project of Isabella Bordoni together with Luca Berardi and Angelo Benedetti for “Le arti in città” in Perugia developed in three parts. Public spaces such as escalators and elevators played the recording of the conference “Simplicity and Chaos” by John Cage, held in 1992, and elaborated as poetry to build a soundscape. A workshop f a week collected and edited audio-video material about the city and personal experiences of every participant, realizing an installation inserted in the context of the conclusive performance. The final event has seen the poetical-performance exhibition of Isabella Bordoni, alternated to the music of the violoncellist Ulrike Brand, at the Rocca Paolina. Isabella Bordoni is a poet, director and actress. Her interest is for acoustic and visual events, for technologies sensible to memory and language and for communication systems. Theatre, radio, performance and media are the contexts she enjoy the most. From the middle 80's, she works in the north Europe, particularly inside the research centers of the new technologies applied to arts, of Linz, Graz, Wien and in Germany. From 1985 to 2000 she's fundamental part of Giardini Pensili, Theatre Company of particular relevance in technology and scenic arts ambit. She teaches Videoart and Direction/Dramaturgy at the Beaux Arts Academy in Rimini and collaborates as professor at the Digital Environment Design master at the NABA in Milan .
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NEW MEDIA
//Barbara Sansone
NEW MEDIA
//Lucrezia Cippitelli
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ART FUTURA 2007, THE NEXT NET
Txt: Barbara Sansone
Area: New Media
 From 25 th to 28 th October 2007 Barcelona witnessed the 18 th edition of Festival ArtFutura, hosted as tradition in the stand of del Mercat de les Flores . The subject for this edition was “The Next Net”: experts and celebrities of the field tried to foresee the next developments of the web. Although extremely interesting and well explained during the conferences of the 1 st afternoon, actually the theme was then put aside to make room for spectacle effects, 3Ds and videogames. Everything was as usual conducted by experts able to offer communicative and exciting exhibitions. Moreover everything was accompanied by highly useful information for the one who wants to live consciously the technical developments more and more slipping into everyday life. Yet it is to say that the title was a bit misleading for a festival more concerned in cinema and 3D standard applications rather than in a real experimentation...
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TRANSITIO MX 02: NOMADIC FRONTIERS
Txt: Lucrezia Cippitelli
Area: New Media
 Six months after Interactivia 07, the New Media Biennale of Merida, and some kilometers further north, in the federal capital, the second edition of the Transitio Mx festival (12 th -20 th October 2007) finished, expositive and explorative project dedicated to the video and the creative use of technologies. Transitio Mx developed in the Centro Nacional de las Artes, in the Centro de la Imagen , in the Laboratorio Arte and in all the public spaces of the city in the nearby of museums and artistic institutions. A huge organization, that counts tens of managers, producers, press agents, artistic directors and conference organizers, demonstrating that in Mexico something is moving, but there's also an official instrumental response at the use of new technology in artistic ambit (as Arcangel Costantini said to Digicult almost a year ago http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=719 ). Transitio festival is organized...
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