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Editing/Photo Editing:
Marco Mancuso
Cover:
Redazione: Mylicon/En
Contenuti:
Francesco Bertocco, Loretta Borrelli, Lucrezia Cippitelli, Elisabetta Colombo, Teresa De Feo, Luigi Ghezzi,
Elena Gianni, Marco Mancuso, Donata Marletta, Matteo Milani, Annamaria Monteverdi, OtherehtO, Stefano Raimondi, Marco Riciputi, Giulia Simi, Barbara Sansone, Massimo Schiavoni
Translations:
Carla Borrelli , Luisa Bertolatti, Emanuela Cassol, Valeria Grillo, Monica Fontana, Chiara Resmini,
Ali Ustun |
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NET ART
//Giulia Simi
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CHRISTOPHE BRUNO: FROM DADA TO GOOGLE
Txt: Giulia Simi
Area: Net Art
 Christophe Bruno - whom I previously interviewed in Digimag 25 is one of most known net.artists worldwide. Lucid, ironic, desecrating, he has faced since a long time issues related to language commodification and control by late-capitalism, from "Society of the Spectacle" to "The Age of Access". For the "Google Adwords Happening" , online performance consisting in a poetry advertising campaign through the renowned adwords system, he won a honorable mention at the 2003 Ars Electronica. The project, whose subtitle was "How to lose money with your art" , tried to subvert the crux of contemporary art, increasingly market-oriented in the controversial "age of mechanical reproduction" currently in its advanced stage. He was censored by Google - he will explain why in this interview - and his advertisements remained online only for 24 hours. Nonetheless, 12.000 visitors saw them. Words are cloned, emptied, monetized. Words are controlled, induced, counterfeited. Welcome to "semantic capitalism", last step of a society which seems to vampirize all of our thoughts, dreams, desires. "Dadameter" is the title of his last great project, currently exposed in the virtual space of Jeu de Paume gallery in Paris. It is a satyrical display of the "decay of the aura of language" - as the subtitle recites, with a clear tribute to Walter Benjamin - elaborating a cartography of words stored in the Internet to measure our distance from Dada. It was indeed Raymond Roussel , eccentric writer much loved by dadaists and surrealists, who inspired Bruno. His theatrical works, entirely based on combinatory word games which reveal the ambiguous, evocative and playful side of language, seem to precede somehow the mechanization of language that would have acquired different meanings after a century: "from Dada to Google".
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HACKTIVISM
//Loretta Borrelli
HACKTIVISM
//Barbara Sansone
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ART AND EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE AFTER FUTURE
Txt: Loretta Borrelli / Eng: Valeria Grillo
Area: Hacktivism
 On February 19th at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Carrara , Franco Berardi (Bifo) presented the "manifest of the after-futurism". Domenico Quaranta, Tommaso Tozzi, Pier Luigi Cappucci, Matteo Chini e Giacomo Verde participated to the conference.
For this occasion, Massimo Cittadini organized inside the Academy an exposition where installations and videos realized by the students of the Academy were shown. The day after, exactly one century after the publication of the futurist manifesto, the text has been presented by the same author in Rome , inside the Luigi Pintor hall of the site in Carta. The other chairmen of the lecture were Renato Piccolini, Gianluca Peciola e Pierluigi Sullo.
The manifesto had already been released online in the days before the two events. An operation of ironic rewriting of the founding text of an avant-garde that doesn't propose itself, naturally, like being at the base of a new avant-garde adventure...
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THE INFLUENCERS 2009:
ANALOG GUERRILLAS
Txt: Barbara Sansone / Eng: Monica Fontana
Area: Hacktivism
 This year from 5 th to 7 th February The Influencers festival was held at the premises of the CCCB in Barcelona. The minds that are behind this exciting event, at its fifth edition, are: Bani ( lively and curious curator and designer), Eva and Franco Mattes ( 0100101110101101.org), and Marco Deseriis (journalist, researcher at the Department of Media, Culture and Communication of New York University and author of the book “Net Art, the art of connecting”). The large audience consists of people of all ages, many supporters who go every year to the Catalan capital just for this event not to be missed. As the festival gives importance to the message on disadvantage of the medium, this year's edition emphasized largely other components as opposed to the technological quality of the assembled projects. To tread the boards of The Influencers, artists must work in unclassified areas, embrace transversal...
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GENERATIVE ART
//Teresa De Feo
//Otherehto
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GENERATIVE MODULES
BY GUIDO SMIDER
Txt: Teresa De Feo / Eng: Luisa Bertolatti
Area: Generative Art
 The “Do-it-yourself” practice amongst young electronic artists seems to be increasingly popular, as is the crossing-over of expression and the convergence of media used. We could say the result is something that always has an aspect which is virtually three dimensional, configured as a usable space, created by the convergence of sound, images and live influences. Those who are passionate about and work with music, therefore, who adopt digital instruments, with an obvious spirit of shrewd desire and experimentation, cannot conceive sound connected directly to its visual influences, through its capacity to create spontaneously in a vital almost organic space, most of all in the case of those who work with music and applications generated in real time. Sound, images, live influences, the search for spontaneity of synthesis of these elements, build terms of a new modality in the way to approach “music”...
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BEYOND BODY BOUNDARIES
Txt: Otherehto
Area: Software Art
 The physical, biologic body occupies in most religions a dogmatic position. Being often negated of its importance and value, it has been perceived as something we should overcome in favour of some mental spiritual revelations. Therefore, the human body has been transformed into the vehicle for transcendental experience stimulation reachable through self-denial practices like asceticism, chastity and martyr. In religious rituals, uncleanliness is generally referred to all fluids generated by the organic body. Some religions have special treatment methods of semen and menses, which are viewed as particularly impure. In Kafka's novel The Trail , the main character, Joseph K., is arrested by authorities for reasons unknown and not stated. He gets condemned by a cryptic law he does not understand. He knows nothing about his guilt save the fact of the guilt itself. This phenomenon could be nominated as "ontological guilt"...
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VIDEO ART
//Francesco Bertocco
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PHILIPPE PARRENO: NO GHOST JUST A SHELL
Txt: Francesco Bertocco / Eng: Luisa Bertolatti
Area: Video Art
 I would like to begin this presentation of the work of a great French video artist and experimental filmmaker, Philippe Parreno, with two specific terms: “acquisition” and “definition”. These are living a new semantic splendour inside the vocabulary of new technologies, mainly connected to the world of images, or the properties of images in function to their relationship as objects, even if virtual objects. I will not delve into the relationship between digital image and objectivity, a combination that I will leave to a more precise elaboration, but I will consider those terms and their function in relation to images. What is “acquisition”? In every day language, the term acquisition is referred to the absorption of particular data: we acquire in order to obtain something within our system. But regarding images, “acquisition” is the direct action between the object-oriented world of the physical support of the image and the virtual world of the computer, or rather their elaboration and revelation as pseudo-objects, entities, that live in their own state. We acquire a digital image, be it in movement or static, to allow it to be shared and developed in the way we see fit: if it should continue to live in the virtual universe, modified or not, or if it should be developed and made into a physical object such as print (for static images). But what do we mean by, or what is this new vocabulary: the word “definition”? Aided by a conversation between Hans Urich Obrist and Philippe Parreno, we notice how the problem of “definition” enters into a relationship with the state of new images: “From the 80's onwards, Sony and Thompson have faced the theme of resolution. The point is not to produce images, but to produce images with a good resolution”. Resolution does not become the central problem around the image, but allows us to realise what the formal aspect is. The internal dynamic of resolution is the process of composing the image; its revelation shows the unfolding of elements that make up the image, the pixels, that are the atomic fabric of its surface. But all this is not so simple.
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//Matteo Milani
//Lucrezia Cippitelli
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BRIAN ENO: SYNTHESIST
Txt: Matteo Milani / Img: Ali Ustun
Area: Experimental
 On Monday 16 February, Brian Eno has inaugurated the 258 th year of the Venice Academy of Fine Arts on the island San Servolo , where the principal courses of the school ‘New technologies for the arts' are transferred. I re-discovered Brian Eno as a future thinker, Brian Eno as composer and visual artist, Brian Eno as experimenter of art with his free-standing vision, the multi-disciplinarity, the meeting and integration between different arts. An example of this is his work in Long Now Foundation , a cultural institution born for promoting and diffusing the mentality of ‘'the slower/better'' confronting the present mentality of ‘'faster/less expensive'' in the arch of next 10.000 years. The foundation, in fact writes the years using five digits instead of four: 02009 instead of 2009. I comprehended the success of an artist, which navigates through various disciplines without any subscription to a particular category and...
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DICK RAAIJMAKERS: A MONOGRAPHY
Txt: Lucrezia Cippitelli / Eng: Carla Borrelli
Area: Sound Art
 Rotterdam's V2, together with Nai Publishers, recently published a monograph which presents an important in-depth examination on the Dutch composer, conceptual artist and theatre director Dick Raijmakers to the international public. The work is called “Dick Raijmakers, a monograph”, and it is edited by Arjen Mulder (editor and author of plenty of books published by V2, such as “Understanding media theory”, one of the most precise books about media studies, published in 2004) together with Joke Brouwer. The monograph is a translation into English of a Dutch book already published by V2 in 2007. It is really a great opportunity for those who are interested in the trespassing of art into sound and technology, to enter the Dutch environment and piece together – through the story of of performances and visual art works realized Raaijmakers from 1965 up to now – a network of relationships and contacts which can explain...
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AUDIOVIDEO
//Donata Marletta
LIVE MEDIA
//Marco Mancuso
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JAN ROHLF: MUSICAL(MIND)
Txt: Donata Marletta
Area: Audiovideo
 Jan Rohlf is a young artist originally from Tübingen, who from 1994 lives and works in Berlin . Jan in mainly a visual artist, but he is also engaged in various collaborations and cultural projects. Together with Oliver Baurhenn and Remco Schuurbiers, he's co-founder and artistic director of ClubTransmediale - International Festival for Adventurous Music and Related Visual Arts (CTM). In 2005 has also founded DISK – Sound & Image Initiative e.V., an organisation devoted to the promotion of experimental art and music. Another project of international resonance that involves Jan is the creation of the global network I.C.A.S. – International Cities of Advanced Sound, an organisation that gathers the artistic directors of numerous festivals dedicated to digital culture, which aims to create sustainable structures in order to offer a platform for the exchange of ideas and projects, critical reflections, co-productions, and to promote collaboration...
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ELEKTRA 2009: 10 PIONEERING YEARS
Txt: Marco Mancuso
Area: Live Media
 We are almost there. Next May it will be held in Montreal, French Canada, the tenth edition of the Elektra festival, not only one among the longest-lasting but also most interesting and impervious to time within the audiovisual art and live media festivals. Those who follow and are interested to the festivals scene, especially those crossing various disciplines - experimental cinema, video, music, live media and digital audiovisual art, know well what I mean: although festivals remain in fact the most "comfortable" platforms where to attend concerts, experimentations and installations which investigate the artistic relationship between sounds and images - as well as to meet and confront with other artists, critics and curators - it is also true that this formula seems to have entered a crisis a few years ago, excessively contaminating itself with mainstream-event and popular exposition ambitions, and often inserting the artists in a perverse...
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ART+SCIENCE
//Stefano Raimondi
//Elena Gianni
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APOCALLISSI SCIENTIFICA E SCANDALO ARTISTICO
Txt: Stefano Raimondi
Area: Art+Science
 La ricerca scientifica e quella artistica sono state sempre accomunate a più livelli: agli sviluppi dell'una corrispondono gli interrogativi e le sperimentazioni dell'altra, con il comune denominatore del progresso tecnologico. Analoghi i feedback mass-mediatici, incentrati sempre e comunque sul terrore scientifico e sullo scandalo artistico. In concreto ogni nuova ricerca scientifica solleva sempre dubbi sui margini d'errore che gli sono insiti. Il risultato è sempre il medesimo: la fine del mondo, la trasformazione dell'umano e, in alternativa, la frantumazione etica, morale e religiosa della comunità scientifica. La nascita dei festival scientifici, conferenze, tavole rotonde, rivolte a un pubblico eterogeneo, è una risposta a questo fenomeno di terrorismo mediatico: l'obiettivo è quello di avvicinare le persone alla scienza non attraverso il fascino della paura ma con il piacere del controllo, dell'indagine. Una prima conseguenza è il proliferare...
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DARIO NEIRA: THE FLESH BECOME WORD
Txt: Elena Gianni
Area: Bio Art
 A Torino si trova il PAV, parco d'arte vivente, nato su quella che prima era un'area industriale, una industria metalmeccanica per sospensioni di auto. Piero Gilardi, uno degli iniziatori del progetto, ex-presidente del parco, lo definisce come: “un cantiere ininterrotto, un intreccio dialogico di esperienze aperto alle alterità innovative, in omologia con i sistemi viventi della biosfera”.Il PAV è un luogo in evoluzione, una sede espositiva, un “parco d'arte contemporanea, come territorio artistico in via di sviluppo e non un contenitore che si accontenti solo di ospitare progetti ed esposizioni” che “si struttura e definisce con la processualità del vivente, piante, animali, persone e attraverso le relazioni che si formano tra essi” (dal sito web del PAV). Il PAV è costituito da una vasta area verde che accoglie all'interno una struttura in legno. Tale struttura ospita le mostre e le attività del parco. Accanto alla mostra permanente, che raccoglie, fra le altre opere, una interessantissima serie di installazioni interattive dello stesso Piero Gilardi, c'è la temporanea “Greenhouse (winter)” curata da Claudio Cravero, dove sono esposte le opere di tre artisti italiani: Giuliana Cuneaz, Filippo Leonardi e Dario Neira.
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DESIGN
//Elisabetta Colombo
GRAPHIC DESIGN
//Marco Riciputi
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FRANCESCO MENEGHINI: THE SHAPE OF LIGHT
Txt: Elisabetta Colombo / Eng: Carla Borrelli
Area: Design
 His calling card is a moving portfolio, which can be visited on the internet site www.fra-me.it, although video art is only a part of his composite work. Francesco Meneghini is, in fact, a multifaceted character embracing different areas of new media's environment, starting from graphics to motion design and multimedia art, and confirming as one of the few and most creative persons in this sector. Born 1977 in Vicenza, he lives and works now in Milan and Venice, but he confesses he has always a packed baggage to be able to move all around the world, from Canada to Australia, passing by New York. After his diploma at Urbino ISIA he became one of Fabirica's pupils (Fabrica is Benetton's communication research centre), where he started to become conscious of his potential and of his own working habitat. His first “serious” work is “Q”, the pioneering project of a set of installations exploring relationships among....
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RITORNA IL CINEMA 3D: FORSE PER RESTARE
Txt: Marco Riciputi
Area: Graphic Design
 Dal ventisette gennaio al primo febbraio si è svolta a Bologna l'undicesima edizione del Future Film Festival, la rassegna dedicata alle nuove tecnologie software applicate al cinema. Più di 150 appuntamenti tra proiezioni e incontri, 27 lungometraggi in anteprima, oltre 30.000 presenze: questi i numeri della manifestazione vinta da Martín Fierro, dagli argentini Lliana Romero e Norman Ruiz
con una menzione speciale a "Sword of the Stranger" di Masahiro Ando. Il pezzo forte della programmazione era però il 3D DAY, che per la prima volta in Italia ha riunito per una tavola rotonda le major cinematografiche, distributori, esercenti e fornitori di tecnologia 3D (dai sistemi di proiezione agli occhiali) per fare il punto su quella che è considerata la nuova frontiera del cinema del futuro. L'evento ha raggiunto un tale successo che a detta degli organizzatori diventerà un appuntamento fisso di tutti i FFF a venire...
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PERFORMING ART
//Massimo Schiavoni
PERFORMING ART
//Annamaria Monteverdi |
PRODUZIONI ROMANE PRODUZIONI LIBERE
Tx: Massimo Schiavoni
Area: Performing Art
 Roma, 2004. Nasce ZTL - Zone Teatrali Libere una sorta di rete informale di operatori teatrali indipendenti che raccoglie identità e vocazioni molto diverse. Ne fanno parte spazi polifunzionali come Rialto Santambrogio e Angelo Mai, il teatro Furio Camillo, , la compagnia teatrale Triangolo Scaleno Teatro e il collettivo artistico Santasangre, attivo all'interno del Kollatino Underground, ovvero strutture che esprimono un nucleo operativo estremamente vivo. E' una molteplicità non facile, sia da rendere leggibile all'esterno, sia nel proprio funzionamento interno. Ed è una struttura flessibile, che ridiscute sempre la propria aggregazione. Questa molteplicità di anime si è manifestata anche nella diversificazione di volta in volta del proprio modo di esprimersi: una nottola informativa, il contributo al convegno Teatrinvisibili la coorganizzazione del convegno istituzionale del Festival Teatri di Vetro, il progetto di produzione ZTL-pro...
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FUTURISMI TEATRALI A LA SPEZIA
Txt: Annamaria Monteverdi
Area: Performing Art
 Forse non tutti sanno che la città della Spezia ha ospitato un nutrito gruppo di artisti e di eventi futuristi: oltre all'Aereopoema marinettiano infatti la città ligure ha dato i natali al poeta, intellettuale e letterato Ettore Cozzani, formatosi culturalmente agli ideali postrisorgimentali e fondatore della rivista futurista “L”Eroica” che ebbe vita lunga (fino al 1944) e che ospitò tra gli altri, testi originali di D'Annunzio e dello stesso Marinetti. Tracce di architetture civili e di opere visive futuriste (mosaici, sculture, oggetti d'arredo) sono sparse nella città, contribuendo a un itinerario originale purtroppo ancora non sfruttato in pieno dall'amministrazione comunale. In epoca di celebrazioni per il centenario del manifesto futurista (pubblicato sul quotidiano francese “Le Figaro” il 20 febbraio del 1909) La Spezia accoglie una nuova produzione dell'associazione Xlab da un'idea del giornalista Corrado Ricci ispirata a "La vista del mondo"...
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TECHNOLOGY
//Luigi Ghezzi
NEW MEDIA ART MARKET
//Marco Mancuso
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THE FUTURE OF SCIENTIFIC NEWS
Tx: Luigi Ghezzi / Eng: Monica Fontana
Area: Technology
 “Science Journalism's Hope and Despair” is the fruit of a year and a half monitoring of the media and came to existence in a particularly important period for science journalism. In fact, it appeared during the conferences that were organised at short distance in February. The first conference was organised by Woodrow Wilson Center about the theme of niche issues that are increasing online and seem to undermine the traditional newsrooms; the second one was organised by the American Museum of Natural History and was about the standard journalism rules for the climate change. The starting point for the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington was the existing crisis situation of science journalism, that is a journalism dealing with scientific topics. As expected, the congress halved into pessimists, excellently represented by some broadcasting stars, and optimist web content writers...
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EXPANDED ART, EXPANDED BOX
Txt: Marco Mancuso / Eng: Valeria Grillo
Area: New Media Art Market
 From February 11 to 16, 2009, took place in Madrid the 28th edition of Arco, one of the most important international fairs dedicated to contemporary art, if not perhaps the most important, that also this year has seen the presence of the section Expanded Box, an island devoted to art expressed through new technologies.
Curators of Expanded Box 2009 were the Italian Domenico Quaranta - whom Digimag's readers know well (for the stads section) and Carolina Grau (for the cinema section). Surely fascinating, especially the section cared for from Quaranta, both for the heterogeneity of the artists and the proposed works, as well as for the level of the forum organized on February 15 with the presence of critics and curators such as Jon Ippolito & Joline Blais, Roberta Bosco, Geert Lovink, Inke Arns, Régine Debatty, Zhang Ga , Joasia Krysa. A rich ensemble of critical voices coming from both the world of the...
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