LUDIC TECHNOLOGY. HACKER SPACE FESTIVAL

Txt: Clemente Pestelli / Eng: Virginia Cavalletti
Area: Hacking

What would the Net look like today without the hackers? What would computers be today without the contribution of free software and open source? Which are the convergence areas between art and technological experimentation? These are just some of the questions that Hacker Space Festival poses to its audience. This festival, at its first season, is an ambitious variation on Italian hackmeetings and other important European events, such as the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) Camp . Hacker Space Festival 2008 was held from the 16th to the 22nd of June at the /tmp/lab near Paris and, since the very beginning, it has set the ambitious goal to gather people from the most varied cultural and technological backgrounds, so as to give life to a sharing network among the different experiences of different European hacklabs. The special merit of the project was its insistence on the social and ludic dimensions of new technologies...

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BRUMARIA, MILITANT PUBLISHING

Txt: Lucrezia Cippitelli / Eng: Chiara Resmini
Area: Hacktivism

Brumaria is a six-monthly magazine that was founded in Madrid in 2002. It is an artists' project, a militant editorial project that reflects on the fertile boundary ground among artistic, social and political practices, with an engagé and maybe old-fashioned view, which in a period of post-post cultural and political relativism really makes a big impression. It is enough to read the tagline of the magazine to be taken back to some decades ago: “ our objective is to circulate theoretical/practical materials relative to artistic and aesthetic ideas and their relation to the inherent social and political structures ”. In ten publications, Brumaria has talked about globalisation, spectacularisation of the information, net art and artistic practices connected with networking, art and revolution, art and “radical political imagination”, video art, chainworkers, Avant-garde. After three issues dealing with more general topics, Brumaria...

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THE ARTIST AS ARTWORK IN VIRTUAL WORLD - PART 1

Txt: Domenico Quaranta / Eng: Francesca Magnaghi
Area: Game Art

In the last years, we saw an increasing development of artistic activities in virtual worlds. At the beginning, these virtual worlds were just game-places (MMORPG) [1] or communication tools (chat, MOO, etc...) [2] , and included art as a mere peripheral issue, that was seldom supported and often refused by other users. It was due to the fact that the purpose of these worlds was different, but also to the lack of the necessary tools for the development of artistic practices and of points of reference. For this reason, art in virtual worlds used performances as its own means of communication: improvised events, that are often forgotten (but constant) in those worlds and that adopt the players' communication tools to convey a message. I know only one “constructive” example of architecture in virtual world by an important artist in 1997: Lawrence Weiner. Weiner was consulted by an ada'web for an online project, and decided to focus on the idea of Internet as a public space, exchange and communication tool, that needed to be reinvented. He brought into the virtual space his famous statements and his unique way of using physical space of galleries and museums. Ada'web staff, a new media venture launched three years earlier by the curator Benjamin Weil, decided to work with Palace , a three-dimensional chat that in the 1990s seemed to be a great success. Through Palace, users can create, design and furnish their own thematic “palaces”. In collaboration with ada'web and during his exhibition at Leo Castelli's gallery ( then, now & then , February 15 th – March 15 th 1997), Weiner launched Homeport , a “palace” that represents in Palace virtual space the white cube of the gallery, covered with symbols and writings. The program users can use this space as a public space where they can meet and chat.

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FUTURE PAST CINEMA: SONARMATICA 2008

Txt: Claudia D'Alonzo / Eng: Chiara Resmini
Area: Live Cinema

With the title “Cinema Beyond Cinema”, the Multimedia section of Sonar 2008 wanted to offer a look on the different meanings that the word “cinematographic” has taken on nowadays, in particular through the “SonarMàtica” exhibition with the title “Future Past Cinema” and the “Digital à la Carte ” video interactive database. The redefinition of the concept of cinema, as a perceptive and experiential phenomenon of the image in motion, is a more and more important topic in many festivals dealing with electronic art; it is enough to think about the concept Cinematic Experience of the last Sonic Acts festival in Amsterdam , which took place last February. People find the theoretic necessity of putting the contemporary audiovisual experimentation in a wider and more definite disciplinary panorama, the cinematographic one, by tracking down, in the experiments on the optics and the perception of pre-cinema, the theoretic...

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THIERRY DE MEY, MUSIC MOVEMENT

Txt: Massimo Schiavoni / Eng: Francesca Magnaghi
Area: Audiovideo

Thierry de Mey is a contemporary composer and director who works on every creation as it was his first one, with the same intensity and passion, the same commitment and humility. He studied the piano and the percussion instruments together with cinema; these studies gave birth to videodance. Sometimes he plays the director role, sometimes the soundtrack composer...but in both cases he is unique and his collaborators are often essential and irreplaceable, such as the choreographers Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Wim Vandekeybus. The work Rosas danst Rosas already shows his desire to experiment and risk with the theme of classic ballet with Anne Teresa, a Flemish choreographer and director who founded in 1983 Rosas, a company made up only of women, and she made her debut with this show when she was just 19 years old...

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SOME WAYS FOR DIGITAL INCLUSION

Txt: Luigi Ghezzi / Eng: Virginia Cavalletti
Area: Technology

Beth Kolko <http://bethkolko.com/index.php> is an Associate Professor of Technological Communication at the Department of Technical Communication at the University of Washington. After dealing with verbal speech rhetoric in general and with communities in digital environments, she shifted her attention to the idea of diversity in technology, studying cultural technological transfer phenomena in developing countries. Her goal is analysing not only the difficulties of innovation in those countries, but mainly how these countries, when dealing with the larger quantity of information coming from communication networks, compensate for the lack of services, infrastructures and software thanks to innovative practices. Her approach took the shape of the five-year Central Asia + Information and Communication Technologies project, funded by National Science Foundation for 1.23 million dollars. Through a wide range of methodologies, the project takes into consideration the profiles of use of new technologies by users who operates in environments with multilingualism and low literacy skills. In a more macro-social view, it sets the goal of studying the impact of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies), within the limits of use and adjustment, in some countries of Central Asia, such as Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan , Tajikistan , and Uzbekistan . Latest developments of the project can be found on the blog CAICT ( http://depts.washington.edu/caict/blog/index.html ), while some results from the period 2006-2007 are available on the website.

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