Digimag 31 - February 2008 - 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

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Pubblicazione mensile:
Digicult Produzioni

Redazione/Editing:
Marco Mancuso

Cover: Redazione Digicult

Contenuti:
Luca Barbeni, Antonio Caronia, Alessio Chierico, Giuseppe Cordaro, Claudia D'Alonzo, Alessio Galbiati, Luigi Ghezzi, Marco Mancuso, Annamaria Monteverdi, Eleonora Oreggia, Barbara Sansone, Silvia Scaravaggi, Massimo Schiavoni, Giulia Simi

Translations:
Stefania Longo, Ornella Pesenti, Caterina Sartori, Barbara Viola

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NET ART
//Luca Barbeni

NET ART
//Giuseppe Cordaro

SIGN 69.COM: PHILIP WOOD'S MICROPROGRAMMING

Txt: Luca Barbeni
Area: Net Art

When we talk about sign69, medialounge.org, basically when we talk about Philip Wood, we deal with one of the real net artists who has immediately guessed the intrinsic communicative and expressive values of the net, beyond the technological innovation aspect. This artist has been experimenting on the net since 1995 with his random microvideos. It's more than 10 years that he strenuously continues his (almost) daily accumulation of microvideos, which, inserted in a cumulative matrix that deals with their vision, do not get lost and do not get diluted in time but, on the contrary, accumulate strength and complexity as they grow in number. I am referring to random microvideos because the brevity of the single pieces and the random editing constitute the technical characteristics of these videos. This artist has been able to interpret better than anyone else the encyclopedic nature of the web...

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LA SPADA: THE AESTHETICS OF A DIGITAL WORLD

Txt: Giuseppe Cordaro
Area: Net Art

I knew Giuseppe La Spada by chance, at the wonderful performance of Ryuichi Sakamoto last year during the third edition of Festival delle Arti Contemporanee in Rovereto. In that occasion the Sicilian artist was a guest of his friend composer, with whom he carried out a net art project called “Mo No Aware”few people have heard about, which supports a green cause, aiming at drawing people's and media's attention to radioactive contamination Japan is experiencing in the village of Rokkasho. I can still remember the moment when, while sitting at a table talking about electronic music and visual art, he received a telephone call that informed him he had won the prestigious Webby Awards, the well-known Web oscar , and that he had to go to New York to collect it. For some months, I have kept on exchanging opinions with Giuseppe and after the live performance of Vjing for Fennesz at Powerstock Festival and...

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HACKTIVISM
//Eleonora Oreggia

ANNALIST: CONTROLLO, TERRORE E SORVEGLIANZA

Txt: Eleonora Oreggia
Area: Hacktivism

In anni recenti in Germania, come del resto un po' ovunque in Europa, l'opposizione politica ed il giornalismo di indagine sono stati messi pesantemente sotto attacco da polizia e servizi segreti. Persino scienziati sociali e accademici con posizioni critiche sono stati accusati di far parte di organizzazioni terroristiche per essersi avvicinati ai movimenti sociali e aver usato parole come "gentrification", "precarizzazione" e "marxista-leninista" nelle proprie pubblicazioni. Le stesse parole sono state ritrovate in alcune lettere inviate da un gruppo che ha rivendicato una serie di attentati contro auto ed edifici militari nei dintorni di Berlino dal 2001 in poi. E se fosse tutta una montatura? Se il gruppo altro non fosse che un escamotage dei servizi segreti stessi, al fine di legittimare l'inasprimento del controllo e far passare leggi che limitino le liberta' personali e i diritti dei cittadini? La differenza e' relativa, poiche', che questi gruppi esistano oppure no, in ogni caso la manovra che ne risulta e' la medesima: tenere i cittadini sotto controllo e far si che lo Stato, in qualsiasi momento e per qualsiasi ragione latente, possa decidere di fermare e imprigionare ogni cittadino ritenuto scomodo per la societa'. Con una semplice accusa di terrorismo e' possibile potare le estremita' e bonificare ogni 'Nazione'. Bastano pochi elementi: un'accusa generica ed una analisi faziosa delle abitudini e dei dati personali del cittadino (leggi privacy). Si chiama epurazione ed e' una strategia, vecchia come il cucco, che non ha mai portato nulla di buono nella storia. Il giorno 31 luglio 2007 Andrej Holm, sociologo e ricercatore, e' stato arrestato con l'accusa di appartenere ad una organizzazione terroristica chiamata 'militant group' (legge 129a del codice penale tedesco), accusa che ha colpito anche altre sei persone, tre delle quali hanno passato quattro mesi in carcerazione preventiva nel carcere Moabit di Berlino.

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SOFTWARE ART
//Silvia Scaravaggi

TEST_LAB, LIVE_CODING

Txt: Silvia Scaravaggi
Area: Software Art

V2_Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam is internationally recognized like one of the main centres for research and practice for what concerns new media art and technological and artistic experimentation. It has recourses of several events and workshops to give life to wide discussions about modern age and to propose the most interesting matters of the world creative scene. On the last 13 th December 2007, the research centre V2_ presented the event Test_Lab: Live_Coding. Code is intended like interface for real-time improvisation and performances among the artists on the net. Live_Coding allows the expressive control of the software code in real time over the events and it enables the live improvisation by using the code as the interface for the interaction between different performers, and also between live coders and the audience. Test_Lab: Live_Code has represented the occasion to propose some performances and real experiences of programming languages Live Coding, debates and presentations about techniques and the aesthetic of Live Coding, as well as an experiment of live coded Augmented Reality. In order to understand the activity of Test_Lab inside of V2 and how this event was given birth, what the developments of this technique and this relatively recent theory are, I had the occasion to talk to 2 of the organizers: Michel van Dartel , project manager at V2_, and Artem Baguinski , who has been collaborating at the V2_lab since 2000 like software engineer, working with resident artists, running workshops and some personal projects.

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VIDEO ART
//Barbara Sansone

VIDEO CLIP
//Claudia D'Alonzo

CCCB'S ECCENTRIC CINEMA

Txt: Barbara Sansone
Area: Video Art

"Xcèntric" aims at promoting cinema and video productions which re-discuss images and define the medium through experimental means and intentions. Therefore, it recovers works kept secret or long forgotten through the audience's intimate experience." This is the self-definition of Barcelona 's Xcèntric, a reoccurring event at the Center for Contemporary Culture (CCCB) which presents a program of break-through and innovative screenings and offers the chance of browsing through a rich archive (from the historical, artistic, aesthetical and technical point of view) on a completely personal basis. One of the initiative's best features is its ability to provide a long (deeply bound to the origins but extremely keen on all that's contemporary) and wide (not related to geographical and political reasons - something pretty rare around here...) glance. Xcèntric's first edition took place in 2001 and the festival has grown ever since...

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VIRGILIO VILLORESI: THE MISE-EN-SCENE OF DREAMS

Txt: Claudia D'Alonzo
Area: Video Clip

One of the most powerful characteristics of cinematographic language is to recall the imaginative mechanisms of dreams, to stimulate associations, to evoke atmospheres one can sink into, overcoming logic and letting images speak without using words. That kind of power was well known to Surrealists, who built their allegories of the unconscious and of madness on that potential, as well as to abstract cinema's authors, who created stories according to a shape and colour syntax. Those were examples of how the camera could extract a different reality from what was shot, a reality closer to dreams than to everyday life.That language was used to create, rather than to reproduce or record. The dreamlike tendency of the movement, which at the beginning of cinema was strong and influent, have been gradually beaten by the universally shared rules of narrative cinema Nonetheless, the tendency have...

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EXPERIMENTAL
//Marco Mancuso

ELECTRONICA
//Alessio Galbiati

SCANNER: INTELLECTUAL ELECTRONICA

Txt: Marco Mancuso
Area: Experimental

Since his debut, Scanner has been an unclassifiable artist inside of the crammed panorama of electronic creativity. Actually Robin Rimbaud is well-known in the world of electro-music, appreciated by his own spiritual father, Karlheinz Stockhausen, but he always moves in the fertile ground of contamination of new technologies and of those potentialities offered by the means of electronic expression and integrated media. Scanner built his whole world around his own name, which has always been the same since he began in 1995. According to Robin Rimbaud the scanner is declaredly an instrument, a means to communicate, an electronic device able to capture voices and dialogues of unknown people surrounding us. People who live where we live, who breath, who feel emotions, communicate, love and hate like we do. All these features led Robin to collaborate with various entities and circles, with a fertility...

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TECH STUFF, ELECTRONIC MUSIC HANDBOOK

Txt: Alessio Galbiati
Area: Electronica

The following article is three different things at the same time. Number one: the prosecution of an interview I made to Lucia Nicolai (Editorial Manager of Qoob) published in Digimag 28. Number two: in-depth examination to understand the author/user that was firstly valorized by this experimental television, that is Giorgio Sancristoforo, better known as Tobor Experiment. So, it is an interview to Giorgio, gifted of an unquestionable talent and an extremely interesting person. He's from Milan , age class '74, occupied since years in that multiplicity of professions that tend more and more to converge the musical ambit into the moving images one, an example of contemporary man that wrote on his curriculum the phrase/manifesto “I'm a fast learner”. Number three: it is the discover, through a chat/interview with its author, of “Tech Stuff. Video manual of electronic music”, a book and DVD produced by Isbn Edizioni...

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LIVE MEDIA
//Claudia D'Alonzo

AUDIO VIDEO
//Marco Mancuso

TONEWHEELS: SOUND OPTICAL SYNTHESIS

Txt: Claudia D'Alonzo
Area: Live Media

The history of cinema and of visual arts is rich with moments in which visionary directors take their work into hybrid directions where physics, science, technology and music intersect. Chromatic futurist music, the abstract animations of people like Ruttman, Eggelin and Fischinger, the many visual music experiments of the beginning of the nineteenth century can be seen as the forerunners of contemporary forms of digital audio-visual interaction. Looking at the works of these artists it is tempting to imagine what their reaction would be if their could experience the infinite possibilities of the encounter between audio and visual communication forms that the digital meta-language allows. In this perspective –one that links the history of the audio-visual to its contemporary development- it is even more interesting to discover the experiences of artists that prefer to recuperate almost forgotten technologies that belong...

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SONIC ACTS XII: THE CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE

Txt: Marco Mancuso
Area: Audio Video

At last, after the usual two-year wait, Sonic Acts has come back. In my opinion, it is one of the best run festival inside of the international panorama of digital art. The 12th edition of Sonic Acts , that will be held in Amsterdam from 21 st to 24 th February, will investigate the fields of the Cinematic Experience, with the usual rigour and the always useful comparison between the historical experiences of an audiovisual research narration and the more contemporary researches in the field of synaesthetic relations between audio and video. The rendezvous with Sonic Acts is literally not to be missed as it represents of those few historical moments for meditation and analysis of the path of Audiovisual Art, one of those rare moments when one can try to find a connection between the experiences of the past century and the avant-gardes of the digital era. Through a perfect mix of conferences...

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ARTIFICIALINTELLIGENCE
//Alessio Chierico

TECHNOLOGY
//Luigi Ghezzi

MAN AS PITY MACHINE

Txt: Alessio Chierico
Area: Artificial Intelligence

Well-known writer Philip K. Dick used the word “android” in opposition to the expression “human” as metaphor, not to identify artificial entities. In his reflection on human nature, Dick guesses the impossibility to accept a pure definition of the living as opposite to non-living. He's therefore convinced that the human being cannot be anymore defined in relation to ontology, but only to its way of being into the world. His book are filled up with creatures that, human from the biological point, have an android soul, in the sense that they are not able to experience any kind of feeling. The writer, during one of his speculations, ask himself how a sophisticated intelligent machine can be negated to humanity, in the moment that it interrupts its habitual occupations to come to our rescue. In this case, he answers: “You'll end up attributing, plenty of gratitude, a human character that the analysis of its transistors and relays would proclaim impossible...

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THE OBSERVATORY: THE OBSERVED SCIENCE

Txt: Luigi Ghezzi
Area: Technology

The 15 th January 2008 Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) started The Observatory, a new observatory about science information cover and the journalism world environment. As you can understand, the aim is to satisfy the needs of a type of journalism that treat science in a credible way, informative and independent. It is pretty original the position and availability to confrontation of the review with new media, such as digital magazines and blogs about scientific news (they talk about Gristmill blog magazine, Scienceblogs.com community, Knight Science Journalism Tracker and obviously the New York Times Dot Earth blog). CJR thinks that the Internet and mobile technologies nets has been contaminated by industrial lobbies through information in favor of valorization of verify and evidence methods that should contradistinguish science. The aim of the CJR observatory should be concretely translated in unmasking...

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HYPER ARCHITECTURE
//Marco Mancuso

INTERACTION DESIGN
//Annamaria Monteverdi

dNA: DUST EYE / DUST ARCHITECTURE

Txt: Marco Mancuso
Area: Hyper Architecture

Architecture and technology, design and digital media: a more and more daring connection that may seem outrageous because of its hybrid and audacious nature. After the two episodes dedicated to Lab(au) and Limitezero on the last issues of DIgimag, another piece has been added to this complicated mosaic, which is still far from being completed. I'm talking about doubleNegative Architecture (dNA) , a Japan based agency made of architects, designers, sound & visual artists and graphic designers coming from all over the world. They refer to Sota Ichikawa , who is already well-known inside of the digital art as he was involved in Gravicells – Gravity and Resistance, in collaboration with Seiko Mikami , a project that during the last 2 years has been presented at a lot of international festivals, and also at the Share Festival in Italy . Also in this case, it's hard to entirely analyze dNA works in order to render...

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KONIC THEATRE, TERRA Y VIDA

Txt: Annamaria Monteverdi
Area: Interaction Design

Catalan theatre company Konic Thtr, created by Alain Bauman , artist and multimedia artist, and by Rosa Sanchez , dancer and choreographer, has attracted a large audience with its latest interactive theatre/dance work, NOU I_D , previewed at Cultania, Catania's multimedia theatre festival conceived by Salvatore Zinna. Konic was created in 1992 and specializes in installation and performance projects that blend interactive technology, multimedia, music and theatre. Konic has a long history of activity, it operates in Barcelona and it is considered a pioneer of interactive art. It has been one of the first groups to experiment with theatrical motion capture systems applied to dance. Its artists reside in the major creative centers of the world, and they have presented their works at Ircam, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris , in Madrid , Barcelona , Bilbao , Glasgow , Mexico City, collaborating...

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PERFORMING ART
//Annamaria Monteverdi

VIDEO THEATRE
//Massimo Schiavoni

THE CATALAN TECHNOLOGICAL SCENE

Txt: Annamaria Monteverdi
Area: Performing Art

In this article I have tried to ask some of the key components of Catalan artistic and cultural scene what are the health conditions of that so-called “scene”, which has been the reference point for everybody dealing with theatre and design multimedia art. My question was rather straight and aimed at understanding how the Catalan area situation is in fact different from that of other nations' and whether we are actually experiencing a new “Catalan Renaissance”. My question was answered both by Carles Canellas from Rocomora Teatre and Marceì Antunez Roca, as well as by Konic collective , From that starting point a chat developed, which later on became another article for Digimag. Carles Canellas from Rocamora Teatre was the first to answer, giving a complete and extremely clear explanation to my question: "Personally I doubt we are experiencing a “Catalan Renaissance”...

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FRANCESCO ARENA, ANATOMY OF THE PURE IMAGE

Tx: Massimo Schiavoni
Area: Video Theatre

In 2008 Genoa breathe thanks to different congruent aspects that give a unique vitality of personal human identity, a multiple desire to be free, present and socially participant of the cultural and artistic local and international “Get Set”. Genoa must thank a strategic urban location, a multicultural integrated and equilibrated society, the ability to organize and export first order events, a focused and motivated choice of resources, works, instructions and communications well-advanced systems. But also a huge generational creativity grew to the point of turning the new reference point of the artistic contemporary scene. Francesco Arena surely is an artist that contributed to this step up in class without any help or pathetical favoritism. Artist before any other definition, Francesco knew his evolution as man hand in hand with images genesis. He's been a mute word, which desecrated the representation dialectic in a transfiguration...

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TECHNOETHICS
//Antonio Caronia

NEW MEDIA
//Giulia Simi

THE LANDSCAPES OF TECHNOETHIC ART

Txt: Antonio Caronia
Area: Technoethics

Italy has a peculiar characteristic that is difficult to understand for those who are not familiar with the history of our country. That is that our culture, on the whole, is distanced, always lagging behind, lacking consciousness of, and sometimes even traveling in the opposite direction of the important cultural trends that emerge across the globe. This phenomenon takes place even if the number of people and the forces employed in the most advanced and relevant sectors are not vastly inferior to those of other countries, and their work is by any means not of inferior quality. To put it simply, the activities of these people and of these forces are to a large extent ignored (in comparison to other countries) by the subsystems of Italian culture: universities, businesses, publishers, television, newspapers and media in general. I am exressing these considerations in relation to the symposium “Research and the future: art, technology and consciousness – landscapes of technoetic art 2007” that has taken place at the Centre for Contemporary Art Luigi Pecci in Prato , 7-9 December 2007.

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CCCS:CROSS-SECTIONAL VIEW OF CONTEMPORANEITY

Txt: Giulia Simi
Area: New Media

"Emotional Systems - Contemporary Art between Emotion and Reason" is the first exhibition of CCCS (Centro per la Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina - Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina) - as revealed by the name a part of the Fondazione Strozzi in Florence . In a context such as Florence and Tuscany in general, where contemporary culture has to struggle against a centuries-long artistic tradition, the CCCS (together with other events like the Festival della Creatività , the Biennale d'Arte Contemporanea , and the recent opening of the Museo della Fotografia Fratelli Alinari ) seems to make some space for the debate on contemporary art in Tuscany's main city, otherwise bound to become one of the many splendid - and petrified - museum-cities. The first exhibition focuses on the relationship between artist, "work of art" and spectator, and contribute to...