MILANO 2009: WHERE ARE YOU CULTURE?

Txt: Bertram Niessen e Marco Mancuso / Eng: Chiara Resmini
Area: Hacktivism

Milan is a mean city. People know and have always known it. It is the capital of industry, money and productivity. However, for a long time, Milan was also something else. Like all big industrial cities, for a long time it cultivated, in its working-class neighbourhood, the immigrants' street culture with all their conflicts. At the same time, it was the city of the cultured middle class, of the publishing houses, of the daily newspapers, of graphics and, for some time, of art. Then, at a certain point, something broke. In the vortical processes of social reorganization after the end of Ford's economic ideas, Milan tried to become a cosmopolitan city, open to new trends and able to radically innovate in fashion and design. According to many people, it was at that moment that Milan lost its soul, in the vortex of fashion, cocaine and corruption started in the Eighties. t is difficult to judge and understand if something true that was then..

read more...

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

ANNA ADAMOLO: PRACTICAL CRITIQUE OF IDEOLOGY

Txt: Antonio Caronia, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Loretta Borrelli / Eng: Valeria Grillo
Area: Hacking

The "Onda Anomala" (Anomalous Wave) is the more important social phenomenon seen in Italy in the last years. It started from the school's ground, from the protests against the so-called "Gelmini reform", but its value doesn't seem to be limited to that: it looks like the manifestation of a new process of global social mobilization. The material, cultural and moral uneasiness that starts from the problems of the school, is beginning to concern wider thematic: work, redistribution of wealth, lifestyle, democracy and equality . The movement crosses different social and generational layers: university and college students (surely until now the majority of the people) teachers and parents of the primary and secondary school, precarious teachers and researchers of the university. This last component shows that bases are being set for a generalized rebellion against the new indecent ways of working in the so-called "cognitive"...

read more...

BERARDO CARBONI ALLA PROVA DEL MACHINIMA

Txt: Marco Riciputi
Area: Virtual Worlds

Anche se i facili entusiasmi che Second Life scatenava sembrano tramontati, le sperimentazioni artistiche nel mondo virtuale non si arrestano. È il turno del regista italiano Berardo Carboni, autore dell' ormai famoso lungometraggio Shooting Silvio, produzione coraggiosa che ovviamente in Italia non ha avuto grande eco, che ha finito di girare nel mondo della LindenLab il suo secondo lungometraggio VolaVola\FlyMe. Il progetto prevede una sola sceneggiatura ma due film identici, girati a Roma e su Second Life. Avremo Alessandro Haber, che oltre a recitare come suo solito avrà anche un avatar a sua immagine e somiglianaza, per la versione virtuale. Poi ci sarà Aimee Weber, forse l'avatar più famoso del mondo, che interpreta se stessa e avrà una controparte in carne ed ossa. Per finire, l'attrice newyorkese Bibbe Hansen che reciterà e animerà in prima persona anche il suo avatar. Il lungometraggio è un film d'amore...

segue...

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

CADA: DID YOU SAY YOU WANT AN EVOLUTION?

Txt: Marco Mancuso / Eng: Emanuela Cassol
Area: Software Art

CADA is a cultural, multi-disciplinary platform based in Lisbon: a centre that organises workshops, meetings, cultural activities and events within that grey area that lies at the margin between art and design. CADA obviously focuses on the new digital technologies and software, even though it would probably be more accurate to say that CADA (like some Italian art and design studios such as Limiteazero, Dot Dot Dot, Todo and others) focuses on the use and misuse of portable technologies and everyday items, that can be reconfigured with an attitude that much has taken from the hacking universe, on design objects, on items for audiovisual production, visualization of complex data, communication and interaction. All this relying on today's most widespread software technologies: from Processing to VVVV, from Arduino to Sybian, from C++ to Oper Frameworks. Partly as it occurs in Italy, Sofia Oliveira, Jared Hawkey...

read more...

OTOLAB METHOD

Txt: Claudia D'Alonzo / Eng: Monica Fontana
Area: Audiovideo

The interview to Otolab is a result of the event that was organised on January 16 th by the O' Gallery of Milan, in collaboration with Marco Mancuso, Digicult curator. During that evening, some members of the Milanese collective (which has come at its eighth year of life) could meet, have talks and watched the national exclusive preview of some of their recent creations, such as “Circo ipnotico”(Hypnotic circus) and “Giardini neri” (Black Gardens).A few hours together transported the otolab phenomenon into the gallery event room: not only an artistic entity, yet also and above all a means to improve interpersonal relationships and sharing. That is the heart of the collective, which has been configuring itself as a rhizomatic core that can tag along and connect, cross different worlds and generate them. An open and complex system, in which the mutual relationship of every element causes something unexpected and unpredictable...

read more...

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

IL CINEMA SPERIMENTALE DI INHARMONICITY

Txt: Alessio Galbiati
Area: Vjing

La pratica del vjing ha ridefinito i confini dell'immagine in movimento nell'epoca digitale. Volendo essere sbrigativi il vjing null'altro è che cinema sperimentale. Come a dire che se esiste un precedente di questo modo anti-convenzionale di concepire le immagini in movimento, questo sarà la sperimentazione che per tutto il '900 si è concretizzata nel cinema. Tutte le avanguardie artistiche del secolo scorso hanno utilizzato il cinema come linguaggio attraverso il quale darsi forma e sostanza - si pensi alle 'storiche' o alla pop culture. Tutte hanno saccheggiato e utilizzato il cinema come forma d'espressione, spesso privilegiata, attraverso la quale esprimersi. E' curioso notare come in questi ultimi anni questo legame si sia andato progressivamente sfibrando, quasi che non vi sia più la necessità di caratterizzare la propria opera entro i confini (angusti) della settima arte. Uno dei motivi principali di questo disconoscimento...

segue...

GENERATIVE NATURE

Txt: Marco Mancuso / Eng: Chiara Resmini
Area: Art+Science

Modern ecology began with Charles Darwin's studies; in his “theory of evolution”, published in 1859 in On the Origin of Species, he underlined the adaptation of the different organisms to the various kinds of environment, which are subjected to the age-long examination of natural selection. However, the word was coined by Ernst Heinrich Haeckel in 1869 and comes from the Greek óikos meaning “house” and logos meaning “discourse”: it is therefore a biological science that studies environment and the relationships that the different living organisms establish between each other and with the environment itself. For some time, Haeckel was a strong supporter and popularizer of Darwin's theories, but he soon became one of his most bitter enemies; he firmly refuted the process of natural selection as the basis of the evolutionary mechanism, in favour of a thought that was more focused on the environment as a direct agent on natural organisms, which is able to produce new species and generate diversity. Ernst Heinrich Haeckel's thought and work represent the starting point of this critical reflection: first of all, because it was the theoretical and practical cue suggested by Bruce Sterling during his workshop for Fabrica, to which the text refers; secondly, because it allows me a philosophical and critical reflection aspiring to find a possible point of contact between nature, theories of evolution and programmatic and generative art. Is it impossible? Well, I would say no, on the contrary. Above all if we try to compare and amalgamate, like the colours on a canvas, the German biologist's research on one side with some works of conceptual and minimalist artist Sol Le Witt and the possible relationship between mathematics and nature on the other, and what is known today as art and generative design.

read more...