Digimag 45 - June 2009 - 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

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Editing / Photo Editing:
Marco Mancuso

Cover: Yayoi Kusama

Contenuti:
Francesco Bertocco, Silvia Bianchi, Loretta Borrelli, Silvia Casini, Lucrezia Cippitelli, Claudia D'Alonzo, Luigi Ghezzi, Mark Hancock, Jeremy Levine, Marco Mancuso, Donata Marletta, Valeria Merlini, Matteo Milani, OtherehtO, Monica Ponzini, Marco Riciputi,
Max Schiavoni, Giulia Simi

Translations:
Luisa Bertolatti, Philippa Barr, Emanuela Cassol, Sara Cavagna Valeria Grillo, Monica Fontana, Chiara Resmini, Giulia Tiddens

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NETWORKING
//Giulia Simi

THE AWARE AND CREATIVE
TECHNOLOGY OF GOTO10

Txt: Giulia Simi / Eng: Luisa Bertolatti
Area: Networking

Freedom, autonomy and the control of instruments and creation processes should be the basis for every project, be it artistic, political or social, which could be considered as being democratic. But the concept of autonomy, which brings with it the thorny and inevitable aspect of responsibility, seems to increasingly move away from our intellectual production environments on all levels, which are often transformed in empty and “blackmail” communities deprived of passion and incapable of putting together or sharing visionary ideas and projects of cultural and social transformation. It is by chance, or maybe not, that the best proposals to overthrow the capillary control system of late capitalism are those that come from the ultra-technical environment of programmers/artists. The visionary idea, which is also realistic, is the capacity to network in an autonomous and free way, taking advantage and amplifying the technologies available, which can be a central node for a new model of life based on sharing information and processes locally and globally. The collective GOTO10 (the answers of this interview were elaborated with the name GOTO10 by Karsten Gebbert, Claude Heiland-Allen, Aymeric Mansoux, Marloes de Valk and Thomas Vriet), active internationally for years in the technological activist environment, is a good example of how a group of programmer-artists manages to face and win against the swamps of our time through a creative, aware and thought-out use of technology. I interviewed them so that they could tell us about some aspects of their complex project.

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HACKTIVISM
//Loretta Borrelli

HACKTIVISM
//OtherehtO

FROM CFU TO FUNEN:
INTERVIEW WITH JAKOB JAKOBSEN

Txt: Loretta Borrelli / Eng: Luisa Bertolatti
Area: Hacktivism

Last year you could have been walking in an Italian city piazza and suddenly find yourself among many people who were attending a University lecture. These actions were organised in order to take Universities and Academies out of their closed and consolidated norm. Self-learning in Italy has taken on the form of a network, Uniriot, composed of students determined to create autonomous learning zones where they have time to re-elaborate their own training and intentions. It's not just a proposal for the sharing of knowledge, as alternative to the institutionalised learning process, but also an opportunity to make relationships stand out among single entities, in the awareness of having to be present in one's own social context, one's own training and one's own time. This practice has involved the Art Academy, in particular in Milan . Artistic training in the past few years has been turned upside down mostly...

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A_CTIVISM

Txt: OtherehtO / Eng: Emanuela Cassol
Area: Hacktivism

In this article I would like to introduce some of my thoughts on the forms of protest in art. My statements were conceived on occasion of the round table “Out of the fiction of protest – Art and political activism” that took place on 24 May 2009 in Milan. In order to synthesize my thoughts I have decided to divide the article into three hypothesis aiming at eliciting the development of topics that either deny or confirm a given stance. Hypothesis 1: Within the sphere of art expressing ACTIVISM is linguistically impossible, because such practice [any political form of art] is immediately renamed ARTIVISM. The renaming determines the image though which performances reach the public, which affects their power, the potential of impact of the «power-action». The idea that lies at the basis of this hypothesis is that every labelling of the processes...

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VIRTUAL WORLDS
//Mark Hancock

FREE SOFTWARES
//Marco Riciputi

_AUGMENTOLOGY 1[L]0[L]1_:
INTERFACE BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

Txt: Mark Hancock
Area: Virtual Worlds

The _Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ project reaches out into a multitude of networked environments, like a multi-tendrilled creature, it explores and reports back information to a central hub, located at the _Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ blog. Existing in the virtual, the task is to explore other synthetic worlds and attempt to reflect back something of the nature of living within them and our own world. The resultant collection of projects and ideas can be considered a “Synthetic Reality Manual” as Mez Breeze, who initiated the project, describes it. Mez, along with Joseph DeLappe, Shane Hinton, Trevor Dodge and Greg J. Smith are developing and testing ideas that come from explorations of on-line encounters and the development of virtual personae. Using a range of platforms that include World of Warcraft, EVE On-line and Second Life, as well as the multifarious social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed.

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BLENDER AND THE 3D
WITHIN NEARLY...EVERYBODY'S REACH

Txt: Marco Riciputi / Eng: Chiara Resmini
Area: Free Softwares

“Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License”. Behind this synthetic definition opening the official site of “Blender” free software and open source, not only a programme for 3D modelling hides, but also an authentic work philosophy and a community of users that has developed thanks to the opportunities that new technologies have offered in many fields. Blender will be the protagonist of a very interesting workshop in the period of warm up of the next Hackmeeting in Milan, which will take place at the Bicocca university in June. How can it survive on the market? It must not cost anything. This seems to be the solution found by Ton Roosendaal, the Dutch creator of Blender; his history begins by the middle of the Nineties, when the programme was developed and then put on the market by Ton's company, the Not a Number...

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VIDEO ART
//Francesco Bertocco

EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
//Claudia D'Alonzo

DOUGLAS GORDON:
THE TIME OF NARRATION

Txt: Francesco Bertocco / Eng: Valeria Grillo
Area: Video Art

In the works of video artist Douglas Gordon - one of the most important "visual artists" of his generation, awarded with the prestigious Turner Prize in 1996 when he was just 30 years old - the timing of movie narration gets twisted by a new device, that modifies its extension, its message, and the perception of the action it encloses.The video processing transforms the movie into a new and vast temporal platform, where normal time distribution to which we are used, is twisted by its same images. It is not casual that Douglas Gordon himself defines his work as a search of the unconscious of the movie, a layer not immediately perceivable, which exists only when the movie is de-structured. Douglas Gordon shifts the function of filmic timing on another level, showing thus a new perspective from which looking at a visual text already known ("Psycho 24 Hours", 1993): what's at stake is the willingness to accept...

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CINEMAHACKING:
INTERVIEW TO PAOLO GIOLI

Txt: Claudia D'Alonzo / Eng: Luisa Bertolatti
Area: Experimental Cinema

Paolo Gioli is one of the reference Auteurs of Underground Italian Cinema. He has experimented in his research on images and vision, painting, photography and cinema, deconstructing and often inventing techniques, reproduction and shooting methods ex-novo. The 45th “Mostra del Nuovo Cinema” (New Cinema Exhibition) in Pesaro, which is held between the 21 st and 29 th of June 2009, with a great homage dedicated to the Auteur with a film exhibition and a photographic exhibition, held in Palazzo Gradari in Pesaro, and the publication of a volume, curated by the Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Centre for Experimental Cinema Foundation), are among the most recent celebrations of his work. Paolo Gioli lands in film at the beginning of the 70's, passing through painting initially and later through photography. In cinema he finds instruments and linguistic characteristics with which he can build his own personal...

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SOUND ART
//Matteo Milani

SOUND ART
//Marco Mancuso

WALKING IN THE CITY
WITH CHRISTINA KUBISCH

Txt: Matteo Milani / Eng: Valeria Grillo
Area: Sound Art

Christina Kubisch, one of the most important sound artists on the European scene, began to work in 2003 on a project called "Electrical Walks". This project uses custom-built headphones which transduce electromagnetic fields into audio signals, through an interaction between force fields which allow the audience to listen to a concert of ambient sounds in public spaces specifically projected. Christina Kubisch's activity consists therefore in mapping a territory, in order to detect hot spots where audio signals are especially strong or interesting. The audience wearing the headphones takes part this way to the discovery of new acoustic spaces, by means of an aural itinerary through a thick net of electromagnetic information which are invisible and omnipresent. Actually, the activity of the German sound artist is much more varied and it has started many years ago: in the 1970's for example, she had many performances...

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THE SOUND ECOSYSTEMS
OF AGOSTINO DI SCIPIO

Txt: Marco Mancuso / Eng: Philippa Barr
Area: Sound Art

Those who know me and my interests can imagine my reaction when I was asked to write the catalog of the exhibition Digital Direct di Modena, curated by Caleffi Gilberto. One of the artists I was most interested in was Agostino di Scipio, and this is evident in any analysis of the texts chosen for the catalogue: where the interview, as a reflection on the content exposed to direct contact with the author, becomes a moment of openness and honesty between artist and critic. The interview that follows is the full version of the interview done by Agostino di Scipio for Direct Digital, which was obviously not fully published in the catalog. Di Scipio, within the exhibition Modenese, used the hospital Sant'Agostino to make one of his most interesting and mature environmental installations,"Stanze Private - Private Rooms". This work was was represented by the new gallery Mario Mazzoli based in Berlini, one of the first galleries...

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AUDIOVIDEO
//Monica Ponzini

VJING
//Silvia Bianchi

RASTER NOTON SHOPPING STYLE

Txt: Monica Ponzini / Eng: Monica Fontana
Area: Audiovideo

Experimentation. Carsten Nicolai's (aka alva noto) artistic production, (one of the few artists in the digital art who does not need any presentation) has always been characterized by an element of constant research: thinking about sound frequencies and visuals, digital and minimal aesthetics, where noise and glitch are bound to mathematics and geometric shapes, has gone through an evolution that made him one of the most important, long-established and famous artists in the international electronic scene. Linearity and constant search for new forms of expression and multimedia also marked the advancing of his audio-visual production label Raster-Noton (or better: raster-noton. Archiv für ton und nichtton ), which Cartsen Nicolai has founded and is still editing together with Olaf Bender (aka Byetone), musician as well and part of the Berlin label roster. A platform and a network that does not only consider...

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MAPPING FESTIVAL

Txt: Silvia Bianchi / Eng: Sara Cavagna
Area: Vjing

The last Mapping Festival edition took place from the 8th to the 17th of May in the fervent city of Geneva . Focussing above all on visual aspects, this festival is different from the many others of electronic music which animate the Swiss city. Also this year it confirmed to be not only an incredibile showcase fot the vjing international scenery, but also an evidence of the real Swiss style in regard of technical organization and rich program. I could happily take part as artist in the first festival day and I remained open-mouthed in realizing how the developers of Module8 are the same infallible event organizers able to successfully manage such a rich festival all over Geneva citycentre, using many different spaces including the Bâtiment d'art contemporain, the Galerie Labo, L'écurie, Le Cabinet, Le Spoutnik, and Le Zoo / Usine. Focussing on vj's needs – from the constant presence of technicians to the careful chiose...

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ART+SCIENCE
//Silvia Casini

TECHNOLOGY
//Luigi Ghezzi

SCIENCE IS SEXY: FELICE FRANKEL

Txt: Silvia Casini / Eng: Valeria Grillo
Area: Art+Science

“I'm not an artist”. “I put science into pictures”. This is how Felice Frankel begins: scientific photographer at the MIT, last 20 th of May she presented and discussed her work in the lecture "Speaking of science through images: scientific photography", organized by the University of Trento for the program "Writing and talking of science". Author of many publications, i.e. "Envisioning Science, On the Surface of Things e Images of the Extraordinary in Science" con George M. Whitesides, Felice Frankel has followed many paths during her professional career: she first started as a biologist and lab technician, then she went on to landscape architectural photographer she then won a scholarship as “artist-in-residence”, until her present profession of scientific photographer. Inside the science lab, thanks to the collaboration with other scientists, Felice Frankel translates into images objects and scientific concepts she...

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50 YEARS AFTER BARON SNOW'S
TWO CULTURES

Txt: Luigi Ghezzi / Eng: Monica Fontana
Area: Technology

May 7, 1959, we are at the University of Cambridge, at the annual Sir Robert Rede's Lecturer . A British physicist and author holds a conference entitled "The Two Cultures" in which he attributes many political, environmental and cultural worldly problems of our time to the break of communication that took place between science and the humanities. The speaker's name is Charles Percy Snow, namely Baron Snow, and his as simple as controversial famous definition of "two cultures" will become a topos of the cultural and epistemological debates in the second half of the twentieth century. Fifty years have passed since that speech and the anniversary did not slip the British journals: New Scientist, Financial Times, Telegraph stressed the driving force behind Snow's formula, that while it was just too dichotomouson the one hand, it has created a number of important pedagogical and epistemological debates between...

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SOUND DESIGN
//Silvia Scaravaggi

INTERACTION DESIGN
//Jeremy Levine

THE MURDER OF CROWS

Txt: Valeria Merlini / Eng: Philippa Barr
Area: Sound Design

Until a few days ago it was possible to visit the installation "The murder of crows" by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller in the main hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, a museum dedicated to contemporary art. The two Canadian artists, known for their multimedia projects, which combine sculptural, visual, installation / sound and narrative elements, have been working together since the mid 90s to develop a poetics based on the real game between perception and illusion (see also ' article by Barbara Samson - Cardiff-Miller: the evocative power of sound ", Digimag 23. The installation was originally commissioned by Thyssen - Bornemisza Contemporary Art in Vienna for the Biennale of Sydney 2008, and on this occasion was presented in the "works of music from visual artists." organized by "Freunde der gute Musik Berlin in 1999, with the collaboration of Nationalgallerie, and since 2002...

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THE SCIENCE AND ART
OF COMPLEX SYSTEMS

Txt: Jeremy Levine
Area: Interaction Design

Within quantum mechanics, "reality" is an evolving state that includes the interaction of the observer as a component of the system under observation. The same thing can be said of any interactive work of media art. Human behavior contributes complexity to any interactive system of which it is a component, whether it reside in quantum space or cyberspace. From this perspective object-based art is akin to classical particles, while interactive media art is more like the quantum particles whose form is always evolving. In both cases our intuitive understanding of "objects" with discrete boundaries, separated by space is challenged by our experience of non-locality and entanglement, both real and perceived. In both cases, the choices made by human beings are injected into the structure of the system under observation, resulting in a single complex system...

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TECHNO THEATRE
//Massimo Schiavoni

SABRINA MUZI:
ABOUT THE BODY WITH NO LIMITS

Tx: Massimo Schiavoni
Area: Performing Art / Eng: Giulia Tiddens

The Italian artist Sabrina Muzi from Marche region, has been living for several years in Bologna, dividing herself between exhibitions and residences from Florida to Corea, between daily life and small joys in which through performatory, photographic, installatory-videos processes and contaminations, she returns us an inner art and aesthetic identities which involve all senses, transuded and amplified through her tiny explosive body. The body as a place of canceled identity, as appropriation of space, as a place of discovery; the body as research and as a direct and symbolic communication instrument, the body as exchange and denunciation commodities. The body as “other”, as a rite. A reconstructed body. A body without limits. Her video-recorded performances arise from far away, from her origins, from her fears and loneliness, from the strength of a simple woman, full of life, from her will to make herself heard and to love. Sabrina feels her social role, a female able to show something, sometimes without any filter, sometimes transfigured. Like in “Tortures” where a hand prevents the artist to see and speak and it cancels and dominates her; a wicked and repressed deed which arises evil thoughts. It is not the image, but the “body of the image” which gets away from obvious meanings to burst into the context that Sabrina creates and suffers. She is the protagonist, against her will, of a metaphorical liberation. Obsessed by staying and by doing, as in “Accerchiamento”, vain attempt and pure renunciation. Fears and desires are guided by the awareness of the human limits and the very fact of being bound to the nature of her body, obliges the artist to use creative strategies which almost tend to alienate the reality of life invading in this way the sphere of representation...

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NEW MEDIA
//Donata Marletta

NEW MEDIA
//Lucrezia Cippitelli

THE DIGITAL MARKET OF ELEKTRA

Txt: Donata Marletta
Area: New Media

Last 6th and 7th of May Montreal's Cinémathèque Québécoise has hosted for the third consecutive year the International Marketplace for Digital Arts (IMDA), event organized within Elektra, new media and audiovisual art festival. The International Marketplace for Digital Arts is a meeting for professional networking among those active in the field of production, creation and diffusion of digital arts. The first of the two days of the market, dedicated to the presentations of festivals, art galleries, labs and a range of organizations and cultural institutions that operate on a international level within the field of new media art, offered to its participants the occasion to attend to the presentations of various high profile socio-cultural projects, opening a window over the huge contemporary panorama that rotates around the art and digital culture's world. The value of the IMDA resides in the ability of the organizing team, above all Alain Thibault...

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IMAGING SPACE:
DIRECT DIGITAL SYMPOSIUM

Txt: Lucrezia Cippitelli / Eng: Sara Cavagna
Area: New Media

As one of the five sections of the new periodical art exhibition and electronical world Direct Digital - edited by Gilberto Caleffi - the Symposium staged last Thursday 28th May in Sala Delfini della Galleria Civica di Modena suggested an analysis on the permeation of art, architecture and mass media in space planning and imaging. With a quite anglophone title, "From Art to Design and back" , the Symposium aimed at exploring a wide area in which four characters, completely different in education and objectives, faced eachother to offer a point of view on mass media and space invention: Golan Levin, Paolo Rigamonti, Boris Debackere e Lucrezia Cippitelli (that is me).They had been invited to speak at the eve of the exhibition Direct Digital inaugural day, among important intarnational artists and me, i.e. an art historian. I played the quite awkard role of a person who presents things belonging to the past and then...