Digimag 32 - March 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

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

Monthy magazine:
Digicult Produzioni

Editing/Photo Editing:
Marco Mancuso

Cover:
Redazione Digicult

Contents:
Luca Barbeni, Silvia Bianchi, Antonio Caronia, Alessio Chierico, Lucrezia Cippitelli, Giuseppe Cordaro, Fabio Franchino, Luigi Ghezzi, Marco Mancuso, Bertram Niessen, Luigi Pagliarini, Monica Ponzini, Cristiano Poian, Silvia Scaravaggi, Massimo Schiavoni, Giulia Simi

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

----------------------------------
NETWORKING
//Maresa Lippolis

NET ART
//Giulia Simi

LOVINK: FREE COOPERATIONS IN P2P NETWORKS

Txt: Maresa Lippolis / Eng: Caterina Sartori
Area: Networking

During the latest Video Vortex meeting organized by the Institute for Network Culture in Amsterdam at Club 11, the large networker's community met to analyze how video and other materials are shared through the net. In substance the questions that were addressed were how video and audiovisual information is used and shared through the net, how platforms like Vlog and podcast are developing and what tomorrow's television will look like in terms of clustering of information and free construction of programs with independent content. Participation, sustainability and new interaction strategies between artists, produces and public have been central topics of discussion. Piracy was often at the margins of the conference, and sometimes it emerged and got someone intrigued. I was one of those, and I decided to interview Geert Lovink, curator of the event and author of Zero Comments...

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

CARLO ZANNI: INFORMATION IS THE NEW COLOR

Txt: Giulia Simi / Eng: Stefania Longo
Area: Net Art

Carlo Zanni, who was born in La Spezia in 1975, is an international artist whose works have been shown in many galleries and museums, from Rome to New York . In 2005 the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art) in London dedicated a retrospective exhibition to him and published the book "Vitalogy". In his latest works he collaborated with special musicians and composers, such as Gabriel Yared – who won the Oscar for "The English Patient" - and Gotan Project. Zanni 's work is bright and sensitive to current sociological and cultural dynamics and mixes different media and languages creating a continuous dialogue between the arts. Painting, installations, videogames, cinema, net art: his work well represents that “mixing culture ” which is able to create new visions by disarranging and then rearranging media grammar. In the latest years he has started exploring new ways of telling a story and openly...

----------------------------------
HACKTIVISM
//Bertram Niessen

HACKTIVISM
//Antonio Caronia

TROK!: FREE MUSIC IN FREE SPACES

Txt: Bertram Niessen / Eng: Ornella Pesenti
Area: Hacktivism

In Italy , more than anywhere else, the cultural life of experimentation is related to political underground through a system that developed from the 60's. Social Centers and Squat have been locations of the (electronic and not) experimentation of the 90's, with alternate fortune.Anyway, Italy is living one of the strangest moments of the relation between experimentation, public and activism. Political realities slowly entered in a phase of flow after the repression of Genoa 2001, without precedents. There's a return to the private and uncritical dimension of the leisure; new generations aren't interested in taking over their elder sisters/brothers in managing places. By the way, something is moving under the ground. Rome, Milan, Naples, Bologna, Turin. Every metropolis developed different experimental scenes whose dynamics are difficult to map. I do know that during the last four years I had the biggest feed...

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

WHO IS AFRAID OF JANEZ JANŠA?

Txt: Antonio Caronia / Eng: Stefania Longo
Area: Hacktivism

Berlin, 28th January 2008, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe . It's one past midnight. Three people wearing white windbreakers and carrying backpacks with GPS devices and a webcam turned towards their own faces, stop for a second, in silence. Then, each starting from a different point of the trapezium's perimeter, they begin to move following a precise chart among Denkmal's pilasters built to celebrate Shoah's memory. Walking steadily in the cold night of Berlin, each of them starts repeating obsessively their name, as a mantra : “Jaz sem Janez Janša, Jaz sem Janez Janša, Jaz sem Janez Janša…” (“My name is Janez Janša…”).Their faces appear in three boxes on the left of the screen when you log on to the site www.aksioma.org/sec . On the big satellite image of the Berlin memorial three green lines start to be drawn according to the path the three Slovenian artists are walking. Thanks to the GPS, their signal is received...

----------------------------------
GENERATIVE ART
//Fabio Franchino

SOFTWARE ART
//Cristiano Poian

GENERATOR X, OBJECTS THAT DON'T EXIST (YET)

Txt: Fabio Franchino / Eng: Nicola Ferloni
Area: Generative Art

During the presentation of GeneratorX 2.0, which took place in Berlin's DAM in collaboration with Club Transmediale 2008 and Hyperwerk, Marius Watz, the one who organized and curated the event, concluded his introductory speech inviting the audience to go and visit the generatorX exhibition, soon to open its doors. An exhibition of objects which are yet to exist. GeneratorX 2.0 Beyond the screen was the second edition of the most important event in the field of generative methods applied to art and design, with the aim of investigating new possibilities of creation through the usage of code and custom-made software. Divided into three different moments, that is a workshop, a series of conferences/performances and a final exhibition, the festival has undoubtedly been a success. The GeneratorX 2.0 workshop and the following exhibition, during which the objects produced during the workshop...

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

AN HEIDEGGERIAN LECTURE OF SOFTWARE CULTURE

Txt: Cristiano Poian / Eng: Ornella Pesenti
Area: Software Art

During the 30's, Martin Heidegger dedicated a series of conferences to artwork that would have led on to writing of the essay “The origin of the Work of Art”, published in 1950. Seventy years later, Heidegger reflection on art and its essence becomes fundamental again to understand modalities that turn software used to produce art into an artwork itself, opposing its autarkical vocation towards digital code, the do-it-yourself tendency, the logic of free software to what Heidegger defines as the artistic industry. Heidegger thought on art truth gives nowadays a fresh reading key to interpret both the actual contraposition between the concept of software as tool (present in all the artistic ambits) and work (artwork), and the strongly political contraposition, inside the software culture, between traditional art market and software art. In his research on origin and essence of artwork (therefore the art itself)...

----------------------------------
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
//Alessio Galbiati

JACOBS: THE DEMIURGO OF THE MOVING IMAGE

Txt: Alessio Galbiati e Paola Catò
Area: Experimental Cinema

While I'm writing this article, the 12th edition of the Sonic Acts is coming to an end. As every event that is going to finish, it leaves in those who were present and those who weren't the sensation of an enormous anxiety for the loss of a moment that would be better if everlasting. It is though an intuition, an instant, a one-time glow that will never come back. During its four days, the Sonic Acts proposed infinity of different ideas, a thick flow of information, projections and exhibition, remarkable and interesting. I particularly appreciated the twelve conferences, unforgettable moments in a heterogeneous series of personalities from all over the world. They illustrated some of the most interesting and not so known aspects of the actual condition of the moving (or cinematic) image, real lessons of priceless value that we decided to tell through a series of interviews to the speakers. Let's start with Ken Jacobs, as we're not worried by any complex feat. Ken Jacobs is an artist – but the term is absolutely reductive – not so famous in Italy (the first edition of the Turin Film Festival, last intellectual and experimenter, visionary and avant-gardist, unique. Jacobs has been one of the most important artist of the last Sonic Acts edition and probably one of the most “exploited” by the organizers. He held a conference (“The Image , Finger Raised to Lips , Beckons. Disorderly thoughts on synaesthesia and other mysteries of the human sensorium”), he performed in a live-set ("Reverberant Silence: Nervous Magic Lantern Performance") and he was the object of a focus with his recent works ("Nymph", "Capatalism: Child Labor", "Capitalism: Slavery", "Razzle Dazzle: The Lost World" e "Hanky January"), proposed – inside the “ La Zona ” section – three movies of his own in an almost empty movie theatre

----------------------------------
EXPERIMENTAL
/Giuseppe Cordaro

TAYLOR DEUPREE: THE BEAUTY OF MINIMALISM

Txt: Giuseppe Cordaro
Area: Experimental

Nel mondo della musica contemporanea e dell'arte digitale Taylor Deupree è considerato uno dei migliori interpreti della rivoluzione digitale a cui abbiamo assistito in questi ultimi anni. Sound artist, fotografo, grafico, il poliedrico artista americano ha iniziato la propria carriera alla fine degli anni 80 incidendo musica techno, per l'etichetta americana Istinct Records. In seguito a quelle prime esperienze discografiche, e alle promesse non mantenute da parte dell'etichetta Silent che doveva pubblicare un suo disco, nel 97 decide di fondarne una tutta sue e orientata al minimalismo musicale, la 12k. A dieci anni dall'uscita del primo disco, la 12k è cresciuta tantissimo diventando un punto di riferimento per tutta la scena minimal ambient-sperimentale. Molti e importanti gli artisti all'interno dell'etichetta, a cavallo tra ambient sperimentale, techno e minimalismo: da Frank Bretschneider agli Skoltz Kolgen, dall'amico Richard Chartier a Sebastien Roux, da Kenneth Kirschner a Steinbruckel e molti altri ancora. Infinite al contempo le collaborazioni a livello internzionale, al punto da intessere una vera e propria rete di musicisti e artisti visuali, sul confine tra minimalismo e contemporaneità artistica. Si colloca in questo discorso il rapporto costante con la label Raster-Noton ma anche tutta l'attività della sub-label Line (gestita proprio da Richard Chartier) che vanta al suo interno molti artisti di punta di questa scena, dallo stesso Alva Noto a William Basinski, da Asmus Tietchens a Nibo, dai Matmos a Ivan Pavlov. Un musicista Taylor Dupree in grado di prestare la sua arte anche ad arte discipline che lavorano a contatto con il suono o con l'ambiente sonora in senso ampio: a imperitura memoria rimarrà quindi la sua collaborazione per la seminale Tower of Winds, installazione interattiva ambientale. progettata dall'architetto nipponico Toyo Ito per la città di Yokohama nell'ormai lontano 1998. Abbiamo chiesto a Taylor un punto di vista sulla scena musicale contemporanea, di parlarci del suo lavoro, dei suoi progetti e dell'importanza che ha acquisito nell'attuale scena musicale.

----------------------------------
AUDIO VIDEO
//Marco Mancuso

AUDIO VIDEO
//Silvia Bianchi

SONIC ACTS XII: A CINEMATIC REPORT

Txt: Marco Mancuso / Eng: Caterina Sartori
Area: Audio Video

Sonic Acts took place in Amsterdam on the last weekend of February. Its focus was the “Cinematic Experience”, and I believe it to be one of the best festivals that I have attended of late. It managed to strike a stimulating balance between conferences, projections, performance and exhibitions. The main topic represented not so much a conceptual hat to the festival (a rather myopic and tired formula, as many recent festivals have shown) but rather it acted as a guideline along which it was possible to embark on a journey paved with references that swung between contemporary digital culture and its analogical/mechanical/electronic historical reference. Those who have experiences of festival, meetings, conferences and exhibitions based around the digital art world in Italy and Europe know that my sentence is not banal. Once again in 2008, Sonic Acts, just like in the previous editions in 2006, 2004 and 2002...

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

DAFNE BOGGERI: ZIGZAGGING IMAGES AND SOUNDS

Txt: Silvia Bianchi
Area: Audio Video

Dafne Boggeri is undoubtedly one of the most interesting and many-sided artistic personalities who have emerged in Italy in the last years. In her approach to art she has dealt with photography, videos, installations and performances, developing a kind of work where shape and meaning continuously cross media borderlines. Her work was presented in her personal exhibitions Relax, It's Only Me , in collaboration with Sonja Cvitkcovic, Los Angeles (2007), Hidden line on explicit surface n.01, Centre Culturel Français de Milan (2006), Espace Experimental, Le Plateau, Parigi (2004) and in many collective exhibitions such as the Italian-Belgian project Looking for the Border , Mechelen, Strombeek, Milano (2007) e videoREPORT ITALIA_2004/05, Galleria d'Arte Contemporanea in Monfalcone (2006). For the live media sound You can wake up now, the universe has ended, based on images...

----------------------------------
ARTIFICIALINTELLIGENCE
//Luigi Pagliarini

TECHNOLOGY
//Luigi Ghezzi

THE DARWINIAN COMPOSER

Txt: Luigi Pagliarini / Eng: Nicola Ferloni
Area: Artificial Intelligence

As my activity in the theoretical and academic field often involved introductions to Polymorphic Intelligence, I have been developing a series of paradigms and examples to help the reader or the listener understand (if not feel) the deep link between psyche and the cognitive styles of individuals on one side and the simple/advanced technological functions of modern computer science on the other. Among the many models one of the most popular - probably because it manages to approach the different kinds of sensitiveness among the audience - is what I call the Darwinian Composer. The idea and the intention of defining the Darwinian Composer first came as a necessity for academic teaching. Some of my colleagues and I (I'm especially grateful to Maurizio Masini for the brilliant discussions on the topic) had been noticing that the number of students handing in papers composed by Copying&Pasting...

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

THE HIDDEN ROAD TO THE CITY OF THE FUTURE

Txt: Luigi Ghezzi / Eng: Ornella Pesenti
Area: Technology

The first February the German magazine for the “young research” Sciencegarden opened a request for bids called “City in present, past and future” (Die Stadt in Gegenwart, Vergangenheit und Zukunft). The editorial staff proposes to select and reward reportage, reports or interviews that have city as subject and that come from the most different disciplines (engineering, sociology, botanic). The conductor theme is justified by the fact that cities, from Greek polis to modern metropolis, are an unlimited source of ways of reading social, political and technological relationships between human cultures. They're, for example, maps of the augmented need of mobility, energy, pollution, occupation of territory and country erosion. The dynamic of evolution is to beat. The mutations of cities don't reflect only programmed combinations of town planners and builders, but also political parties, expressions of parallel societies...

----------------------------------
HYPER ARCHITECTURE
//Marco Mancuso

AETHER ARCHITECTURE: REAL SPACE, VIRTUAL SPACE

Txt: Marco Mancuso / Eng: Caterina Sartori
Area: Hyper Architecture

Aether Architecture is a design and architecture studio based in Budapest, Hungary , that is known at an international level for its innovative and conceptual approach to media architecture. After having represented Hungary ay the last Venice Architecture Biennale in 2004, and after having taken part in a long list of festivals in the whole world (that includes the participation at the installation exhibition at the Mixed Media festival in Milan in 2006, curated by Paolo Rigamonti and Silvio Mondino, and coordinated by Tiziana Gemin), Adam Somlai-Fisher and his partners are nowadays one of the most refined representatives of that discipline that uses digital (or new integrated technology in general) instruments to physically represent the new virtual spaces, the connections, the correlations, the nets, information flux in contemporary society. In projects such as “Ping Genius Loci“ or “Wifi Camera”, the digital is used as a real architectonic instrument, with the idea of promoting a structural approach that allows the visualization of mediation spaces, between the real and the virtual, between the local and the global in terms of connection between single individuals. For Adam the urban and the virtual space represent a single unity in constant relation, an expanded environment that the architect has to necessarily confront. Since I have started to cover and analyze the relation between audiovisual multimedia, relation with the space and visualization of the relation between real and new virtual spaces in DigiMag, Aether Architecture probably represents a new chapter. The complexity of the theoretical and methodological approach, the intellectualism, which is never self-serving, the attempt to find a totally new and radical role in architecture, are all elements that make Adam Somlai-Fisher on of the protagonists of the new architecture international scene.

----------------------------------
VIDEO THEATRE
//Massimo Schiavoni

PERFORMING ART
//Massimo Schiavoni

THE EYE OF WOMEN

Tx: Massimo Schiavoni / Eng: Ornella Pesenti
Area: Video Theatre

Roland Barthes highlights on “La chambre claire” how photography is no more than an object of three practices where Operator is the photographer, Spectator is everybody and the last one is Spectrum, as this word keeps a certain relation with “show”. The Spectrum of our contemporary society and particularly in art, is taking more and more the connotations of an interior world related to the artist, a personal micro-cosmos where sensibilities, fears and desires are imprisoned by a photo-machine that now with the digital has short execution time in favor of an immediate snapshot that can be real or modified. Well, photography from 60's had the faculty and the ability to “record” artistic events, which is art on art, remembering snapshots of Kaprow or Morris and documentations of happenings and parties of post-conceptual artists. The analogical image century – as Pierre Sorlin says – was signed by a full faith...

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

BABILONIA TEATRI, SOCIETY OF SPECTACLE

Tx: Massimo Schiavoni / Eng: Caterina Sartori
Area: Performing Art

Debord writes in 1967 in his masterpiece "La Société du Spectacle": “le avanguardie hanno un unico tempo e la fortuna più grande che possono avere è, nel senso pieno del termine, quella di fare il loro tempo.” Babilonia Teatri, winners of the Premio Scenario 2007 with their latest theatre performance “Made in Italy”, enter the Italian performance scene from the northeast and rightfully occupy the post-vanguard scene. This young group from Verona emerges from a concept of performance that speaks about the war in Iraq , and it conceives of a different type of theatre that looks at the contemporary. In 2006 they get into the finals of the Premio Scenario Infanzia with Panopticon Frankenstein, devised by Valeria Raimondi and Enrico Castellani, the group's founders, directors and performers. Already at that point they manage to get straight into the hearts of teenagers through the result of the work they...

----------------------------------
NEW MEDIA
//Luca Barbeni

PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY
//Monica Ponzini

SHARE FESTIVAL 2008: MANUFACTURING

Txt: Luca Berbeni
Area: New Media

“Questo libro non intende presentarsi come una ricerca formale, ma nasce da un'idea precisa, cioè quella di studiare la produzione “casalinga” di oggetti funzionali di uso quotidiano.” Così inizia il testo introduttivo di Vladimir Archpov, che ha pazientemente raccolto 220 invenzioni nate dall'estro di una popolazione russa colpita dalle ristrettezze economiche generate dalla fine dell'impero sovietico. Tra gli oggetti la “ gabbia antivandali per lampione ”, una “ stufetta con lampada al quarzo ” e un “ distillatore casalingo ”: cosa centra tutto ciò con Share Festival? Manufacturing, tema della quarta edizione del festival, che si tiene a Torino dall' 11 al 16 marzo 2008, è stato scelto per due ragioni. Per prima cosa, si vogliono presentare le potenzialità della fabbricazione digitale che sta diventando sempre più “personal”. Non meno importante è il fatto che Torino è World Design Capital 2008. Ma Torino è anche un grande centro...

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

CHRISTINA RAY: OPEN SOURCE TERRITORIES

Txt: Monica Ponzini / Eng: Nicola Ferloni
Area: Psychogepgraphy

Christina Ray lives in Brooklyn, New York. She's an artist and a curator focusing her efforts on psychogeography, the creative investigation of physical and psychological spaces inside the cities, she founded Glowlab, an initiative which produces art linked to the fruition and interpretation of urban spaces, as well as the Conflux Festival. A walk with her turns into a parallel journey to discover the city which lays before our eyes every single day, but to which we never really pay attention. A city artists are free to use and transform, before offering it back – for free and without making any money on it. Through their intervention, the environment which surrounds us becomes something familiar and unusual at the same time, an active response to the visual hammering of commercials and messages from the powers that be. In this way, the same building can host layers of graffiti on one side and the sterile sign...