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Editing/Photo Editing:
Marco Mancuso
Cover: Kurt Hentschlager
Contents:
Giulia Baldi, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Silvia Casini, Emma Goldman, Alessio Galbiati, Luigi Ghezzi,
Carla Langella, Marco Mancuso, Donata Marletta, Matteo Milani, OtherehtO, Jaun Martin Prada, Stefano Raimondi, Marco Riciputi, Clemente Pestelli, Massimo Schiavoni
Translations:
Carla Borrelli , Luisa Bertolatti, Emanuela Cassol, Valeria Grillo, Monica Fontana, Chiara Resmini,
Ali Ustun |
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NETWORKING
//Donata Marletta
NETWORKING
//Tatiana Bazzichelli
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CYBERCULTURES 4: A JOURNEY IN VIRTUAL SPACE
Txt: Donata Marletta
Area: Networking
 From the 13th to 15th of March Salzburg hosted the fourth edition of the multidisciplinary conference Cybercultures, academic meeting that aims at examining and exploring the diverse implications that derive from the use of information technologies in the field of interpersonal communication. Cybercultures encourages critical exchange and debate on theoretical topics regarding the varied and numerous dimensions of the virtual world. Some of its main themes include: Cyberspace, Virtual Communities, 3D Video Games and Virtual Worlds, Interactive and Digital Art, Politics and Cyberjournalism. The conference is part of a wider project called Inter-Disciplinary.Net, an international forum, which through the organization of conferences and the publication of hard copy volumes and e-books, promotes exchange and interaction of ideas, projects and research on a series of issues related to contemporary world...
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VITTORE BARONI: FROM MAIL ART TO WEB 2.0
Txt e Img: Tatiana Bazzichelli / Eng: Luisa Bertolatti
Area: Networking
 Vittore Baroni was born in 1956 in Forte dei Marmi, Italy, and lives and works in Viareggio. A Music critic and investigator of countercultures, he has been one of the most active operators in the mail art planetary circuit for the past three decades. Since 1978, he has been promoting exhibitions, events, publications and collective projects on Art Networking and net cultures that anticipated the Internet. He also dealt with visual and audio poetry, street art and comics meticulously. I met Vittore in Viareggio, in his house in Via Cesare Battisti, a treasury of wonders for all those interested in the dynamics of the net and creative correspondence, seeing as he collects hundreds of materials, envelopes, stamps, records and works from collective projects accumulated over thirty years of postal communication. We spent a lovely afternoon together, surrounded by the surprises hidden in his archive that often come back...
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HACKTIVISM
//Clemente Pestelli
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GIACOMO VERDE: ACTION BEYOND REPRESENTATION
Txt: Clemente Pestelli / Eng: Luisa Bertolatti
Area: Hacktivism
 Many people will already know Giacomo Verde's name and activity: a video maker, performer and, as he likes to define himself, techno artist. For those who do not know Giacomo's work, perhaps it's sufficient to say that he represents one of the ideal bridges between the first pioneer season of video and multimedia experimentation in Italy and the current experimental phase. He has been working in the theatre and visual arts since the 70's. From the 80's he has developed works connected to the creative use of “poor” technology: video art, techno-performances, plays, exhibitions, workshops. He was the inventor of “video-storytelling” – theatrical performances that involve narration, micro-theatre and macro live filming – a technique also used for video-backgrounds in live concerts, recitals of poetry and plays. He was one of the first Italians to create an interactive work of art and net-art. His constant theme is dealing with playful experimentation in techno-anthropological mutations taking place and creating connections between different artistic genres. Although he has worked with many means of expression – theatre, video, computer, and web – what makes his artistic production unique is the constant and coherent political use from the bottom of electronic and digital technologies searching for “actions beyond representations”. From the pretext of the publication of his book “Artivismo Tecnologico – texts and interviews about art, politics, theatre and technologies”, we tried to focus on his point of view on possible relations between art, activism and technology, from presumed errors and aes-thetical failures of video art to the current static phase of utopias and movements on the net.
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//Otherehto
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PSYBODY DESIGN
Txt: Otherehto
Area: Software Art
 Questo testo presenta il background teorico che ha ispirato la nascita del psybody design, un work-in-progress formulato per la prima volta all'inizio del 2008. Psybody design verrà presentato pubblicamente a novembre 2009 alle conferenze Multiple Ways to Design Research (Lugano, CH) e Consciousness Reframed X - Experiencing Design, behaving media (Monaco di Baviera, D). Il corpo si sta virtualizzando … Onnipresente e radiante, ci impesta dalle pubblicità e dallo schermo dove la sua IMMAGINE scolpita (in materia digitale) emana vibrazioni del superego – quell'"ideale dell'io"che secondo Freud non solo gestisce i nostri modelli comportamentali ed etici ma che, grazie al suo collegamento con l'Es, funziona anche come un'oscena agenzia di controllo che recapita bersagli offuscati dal pathos. I diktat che ci vengono imposti contengono ordini di scala ultraterrena (o in termini aggiornati transumana) che l'agenzia rilascia per farci aggomitolare su noi stessi nonché per deriderci quando nonostante tutti i nostri sforzi non riusciamo ad eccederli. Riporto ora un recente episodio che può, nonostante la sua apparente trascurabilità, suggerirci degli spunti per un discorso “d'occasione” sulla concezione contemporanea del corpo. Il mattino successivo a una notte di lavoro mi è capitato di fare la spesa. Uscendo dal supermercato, la commessa mi ha salutato dicendomi: "Come stai? Non hai dormito vero?" . Dopo un mio leggero scuotimento della testa con il quale confermavo la sua intuizione, lei aveva concluso: "Il viso non mente …" . Dopo aver provato un lieve imbarazzo di fronte a tale denudamento, cercai di comprendere meglio il motivo della mia reazione: non è solo il viso a non mentire ma l'intero corpo, il quale funziona come una mappa che fornisce delle indicazioni riguardo al luogo che viene lì riportato. Su questa mappa corporale viene trascritta la memoria personale (conscia ed inconscia) dello psicocorpo: le nostre basi genetiche, le esperienze, ma anche i traumi e gli accidenti nei quali siamo inciampati, ferendoci durante lo sgocciolamento della propria vita.
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EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
//Alessio Galbiati
VIDEO ART
//Giulia Baldi
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ANTONIO MARTINO, THE REFLEXIVE STALKER
Txt: Alessio Galbiati / Eng: Ali Ustun
Area: Experimental Cinema
 1977 Class Antonio Martino is, without any shade of doubt, one of the most interesting documentary authors of the last years, the very many awards obtained by his works are there to show this, if only the vision shall be enough. Gifted by a dry and essential style Martino has five documentaries, five documentations on the ominous effects of the human-act, searching the memories of the five environmental catastrophes, among which the humanity which had the disaster of living them. I wanted to deepen and share the knowledge on this author because his style appears to be among the most stimulant ones of the Italian Scienography also in the productive means, because what his experience teaches is that we live in the times, in which the possibility of making cinema has never been such reachable by everybody. He has collaborated with POLIVISIONI, an independent group of film-makers, with whom he deal...
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IN VIDEO COLLABORATION
Txt: Giulia Baldi
Area: Video Art
 Towards the end of the '90s, long before the whole world found out about web 2.0, social networking and co-creation online, Furthernoise/Furtherfield, a collective of activists and radical artists that was founded in the UK by Marc Garret and Ruth Catlow, focused their activity on concepts such as horizontal collaboration, sharing, involvement, openness, co-creation. In short they were turning the culture of individualism and D.I.Y. (do it yourself) into a culture of community and D.I.W.O. (do it with others), and artistic collaboration from contextual into relational. Technology was still a limited, but rapidly evolving phenomenon, their resoluteness was endless and their goal was clear: to bring down limits, political, social, cultural and geographic barriers - be they real or imaginary - through the direct and shared experience of art, including digital art. 10 years on the concepts of collaboration, universality...
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//Matteo Milani
//Marco Mancuso
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VALERIO ADAMI AND THE PICTORIAL SOUND
Txt: Matteo Milani / Img: courtesy Valerio Adami / Eng: Chiara Resmini
Area: Experimental
 Valerio Adami (17 March 1935) was born in Bologna, but he was in Milan during the war. He initially drew ruins: houses devastated by bombs. Felice Carena's studio, then the meeting with Oskar Kokoschka in Venice and later the Brera Academy with Achille Funi marked his education route. He started from an expressionistic painting that was influenced by Francis Bacon's works and later dealt with the resolved figuration, following the models of American Pop Art and particularly of Roy Lichtenstein; he thus developed a sort of fantastic and ironic comics story, where ordinary objects are put in depersonalised interiors, becoming symbols, sexual as well, of modernity. In 1958 he began to travel and he lived and worked in many cities in Europe, in the United States, in Latin America and in India – and he struck up new friendships: writer Carlos Fuentes, philosopher Jacques Derrida, painters Saul Steinberg, Richard Lindner...
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ESTHER MANAS & ARASH MOORI:SOUND & SCULPTURE
Txt: Marco Mancuso / Eng: Emanuela Cassol
Area: Sound Art
 Last month Digimag devoted a section to Domenico Quaranta, curator of one of the two parts of the section Expanded Box at Arco Madrid 2009. Among the very heterogeneous works on show, encompassing different languages and media, one in particular represents in my opinion one of the exhibition's highlights: the work "Every Man and Woman is a Star", by the two artists Esther Mañas and Arash Moori. The work, exhibited in the stand of the Ayuntamiento (organized by Madrid Art Council), is set within a precise and complex framework of artistic and contemporary sound research, devoted to the physical representation of the auditory experience, its visualization and concretization in terms of symbiotic relationship between the work, the audience and the surrounding environment. A "classical" audiovisual installation, consisting of sound and neon lights, in an interactive and synesthetic connection between sound...
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AUDIOVIDEO
//Emma Goldman
LIVE MEDIA
//Marco Mancuso
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EXPLODING CAVE
Txt: Emma Goldman / Eng: Valeria Grillo
Area: Audiovideo
 With a double reference both to the "existentialist caves" of 1950's Milan and the experimentation of Andy Warhol's "Exploding Plastic Inevitable", "Exploding Cave" is a 2-days event that will be held in Milan on April 17 and 18, in the spaces of Cox18, structured in a series of meetings, workshops and performances that investigate the relationship and the least common denominator that ties cinema, sound, video and digital arts.Organized by the same Cox18 with the collaboration of Digicult, Exploding Cave suggests the idea of an explosion, of an effort to "go beyond" the normal audiovisual perception towards multiple directions, both in the practices of audiovisual creation and in the performative methods. It investigates the phenomenon of the "optical unconscious", the concept of matrix, the analysis of both production and fruition forms that work to the rediscovery of a primary root of the audiovisual language, a common...
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ALAIN THIBAULT: ELEKTRA FROM PAST TO THE FUTURE
Txt: Marco Mancuso / Eng: Monica Fontana
Area: Live Media
 Hereafter we will carry on an approach analysis on Elektra 2009, with the tenth edition of the festival of the Audiovisual Art research and the New Media Art, which is the most interesting and complete in the entire North American territory. And in general one of the finest on the international scene, as well as one of the most appreciated by the artists. This should never be underestimated, in my opinion. For the April issue, I found it appropriate to have a direct talk with Alain Thibault, pioneering artist of the synesthetic and immersive relationship existing in the audiovisual field, together with the artist Yan Bruleux known as Pureform. Alain is also the famous artistic director of Elektra, as well as distinguished promoter of the development, growth and consolidation of an entire artistic movement, as well as a cultural and professional research that in the last decade set Montreal on an international artistic experimental area through...
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ART+SCIENCE
//Stefano Raimondi
//Silvia Casini
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CHRIS WOEBKEN: LA GIOIA IN DIVENIRE
Txt: Stefano Raimondi
Area: Art+Science
 Uscito dalla nidiata di designers della Royal Academy of Arts, ricercatore presso la New York University, Chris Woebken è tra i più originali interaction design americani. Dopo aver esposto le sue idee alla mostra Design and the Elastic Mind, realizzata al MoMA di New York nel 2008 e curata dalla direttrice del dipartimento di architettura e design del Moma, Paola Antonelli (di cui Digimag aveva parlato nel numero 34 - http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1158), ha preso parte alla Biennale di Design a St.Etienne e si appresta a partecipare alla mostra Extreme Frontiers, Urban Frontiers di Valencia. La biologia cellulare, la realizzazione di interfacce capaci di mutare i nostri punti di vista, la realizzazione di universi possibili o immaginari, sono alcuni dei campi in cui si svolge la ricerca di Chris Woebken, che si definisce come un experience designer, un progettista di esperienze..
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MARC DIDOU: RESONANCES
Txt: Silvia Casini
Area: Art+Science
 Marble, bronze and wood coexist with reflected images: what firstly appears as an abstract monolith, sudden reveals another face thanks to concave or convex mirrors. Marc Didou's original way of assembling the ancient art of anamorphosis with a cutting edge medical imaging technique is constitutes a remarkable encounter between art and science, where Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), set free from the scientific laboratori, is made available to the public as sculptures to interact with. Marc Didou is a world-renokwn Breton sculptor, winner of the Michetti Prize in 2005, with many solo and group exhibitions both in Italy and abroad. Since the ninetees he has been using MRI as a new medium for sculpture with the result of re-thinking his art research and production after the encounter with this technology. Based on the physics principle of nuclear resonance imaging, thanks to complex software and data...
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HYBRID DESIGN
//Carla Langella
GRAPHIC DESIGN
//Marco Riciputi
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MATERIAL HYBRIDIZATION
Txt: Carla Langella / Eng: Valeria Grillo
Area: Hybrid Design
 The important progresses made by the science of materials in the last decades, have offered to the artifacts' projecting new and unusual opportunities to interpret the traditional concepts of materials' family, characteristics and sphere of application that in the past were typical of the materials selection for designers, architects and artists.
Contemporary materials acquire an always higher content of information and functionalization. They can be projected to adapt to complex requirements and applications, and to perceive and react to stimuli in ways everyday more similar to those belonging to living beings. All this requires new approaches and new cognitive instruments to choose the most suitable materials to render the expressive wills of design and arts.A scenario easily defined "hybrid" because it is characterized by material entities with unusual technical and aesthetical features, not enclosable...
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THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
Txt: Marco Riciputi / Eng: Ali Ustun
Area: Graphic Design
 'They ask me what does Benjamin Button have to do with the Future Film Festival, what a question!'' bursts out Oscar Cosulich, the art director of the kermes which presents the Italian Premiere of the film of David Fincher. Justifiably disappointed, because the ‘special effects' always make you think of something heavily-noisy like ‘travel to the centre of the earth' or ‘King Kong, 20 meters tall'. – Young as in Kalifornia. Instead, the special effects applied to cinema will always be visually less invasive. On the other hand, it's enough to reason by fresh mind on Button/Pitt in his 20'ies, from ‘Thelma & Luise'-style features or ‘Kalifornia': Rejuvenation is not a certain fruit of the make-up artist, on the contrary if we talk about the make up, we need to talk about the digital make up elaborated on the computer. The plot of the film is marked as: the story of a man, who is born in his eighties and whose age flows on the contrary, event...
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PERFORMING ART
//Massimo Schiavoni
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PATHOSFORMEL FEVER
Tx: Massimo Schiavoni / Eng: Valeria Merlini e Monica Fontana
Area: Performing Art
 26 January 2009. Pathosformel received the special prize UBU 2008 with the following award : “young company aiming at an abstract and physical theatre to be pursued with an already distinct and layered sign, by which the research on material and form is the starting point to evoke a fragmented and deconstructed visionary theatricality of great charm, which exploded in the national and international scene, achieving a significant relationship between conceptual art and theatre.” They have been staging for more than four years and their innovative style revolutionized and turned upside down contemporary theatrical scenes that needed continuous lifeblood, when the Made in Italy was enormously flourishing. And this is possible thanks to such companies, as Pathosformel, that aren't intimidated by experimentation and comparison, in a multimedia society which is always growing and nevertheless watching attentively and giving critiques on those works masked by dramatic techniques. Daniel, Francesca and Paola create woolly works of art appearing on a stage or in a room, where the scene and the audience, the artist and the user, breathe together, where the eye comes into drama and the sound comes into opera. There is nothing to envy in the theatrical projects by Aleksej Krucenik or by Malevic, when the timidity of the bones uncovers bit by bit, and shows scenic and physical abilities, accepting personal imagination, suspended trainings, tuning and “dancing algebraic equations”. A relaxation we tend to love through the white colour, when the absence of the body is that little bit extra and where we can watch a sort of natural birth; a cautious performance, a palpable acrobatics, an impudent delicacy. An elegance that elbows and suddenly disappears as long as wax is melting, being this material pure and ephemeral, malleable and spiritually erotic. The mise en scène is not much traditional or at least it disperses alternations, still tasting the typical materiality of a Joseph Beuys or a Marina Abramovic. We are in front of a new theatrical aesthetics, a new poetics that embraces sculpture and sound, performance and choreography, cosmopolitan scenography of the invention.
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SOCIAL MEDIA
//Luigi Ghezzi
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DARWIN FROM THE MICROSCOPE
Tx: Luigi Ghezzi / Eng: Monica Fontana
Area: Social Media
 Darwin is turning 200 years old and we must admit that if we consider this period of time by the topicality of his scientific work, he doesn't look his age at all. Although Italy is not celebrating him except for small events (a Country with a catholic scientific freedom) there's someone like the National Research Council that with a number of Almanacco Science thought at least about mentioning the anniversary. I do not want to dwell on the debate creationists vs evolutionists, because there's loads of good articles that can animate the discussion, and because I do not think this can further enrich the huge scientific heritage that Darwin left us. If one of the most interesting aspects of Darwinian theory is its contemporaneousness, however, it's worth dwelling on those aspects that reveal the impact on society today, such as the ways in which it is accepted or rejected. This was the main concern of Venla Oikkonen, researcher at the Christina Institute for Women's Studies at the University of Helsinki. In her contribution Narrating Descent: Popular Science, Evolutionary Theory and Gender Politics (Journal Science as Culture, V.18, n.1 marzo 2009) has deepened and made more complex the idea of science popularization. In fact one of the goals of scientific topics (even the arduous ones) is to go about under the form of a story: documentaries, news articles, radio broadcasts are an example. They are stuffed with stories of heroic scientists, molecular struggles of gay sea horses, and so forth. As regards the Darwinian scientific discourse, some authors have focused their attention to the narrative forms thanks to which it became popular and how he generally influenced the cultural values associated with it (see e.g. Myers, 1990, Writing Biology : Texts in the Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge and Mellor, 2003, "Between fact and fiction: demarcating science from non-science in popular physics books." Social Studies of Science 33:4 ).
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