Digimag 49 - November 2009 - Net Art, Hacktivism, Software Art, Video Art, Electronica, Audiovideo, A.I., Design, Performing Art, New Media

digimag

NetArt | HackArt | SoftwareArt | VideoArt | Electronica | AudioVideo | A.I | Design | PerformingArt | NewMedia

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Editing / Photo Editing:
Marco Mancuso

Cover: Ryoichi Kurokawa

Contenuti:
Giulia Baldi, Francesco Bertocco, Serena Cangiano, Micha Cardenas, Lucrezia Cippitelli, Claudia D'Alonzo, Teresa De Feo, Alex Foti, Elena Gianni, Marco Mancuso, Annamaria Monteverdi, Alessandra Migani, Penelpe.di.Pixel, Marco Riciputi, Stefano Raimondi, Barbara Sansone, Giulia Simi

Translations:
Luisa Bertolatti, Emanuela Cassol, Margherita Castelli, Sara Cavagna, Monica Fontana, Francesca Lattanzi, Giulia Tiddens

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NETWORKING
//Micha Cardenas

NET ART
//Giulia Simi

I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY
EMERGENCY - EMERGENT AGENCY

Txt: Micha Cardenas & Felipe Zuniga
Area: Networking

How do we deal with broken promises? How can artists work to enhance agency among participant audiences who are anonymous, migratory and in transition? Can the museum become a space for Habermasian democratic dialogue under a state of exception? These are some of the questions that guided the project Emergencia – Agencia Emergente // Emergency – Emergent Agency by the Lui Velazquez collective, which was part of the Proyecto Cívico: Diálogos e Interrogantes (PCDI) public programming developed by Bill Kelly Jr. as part of the Proyecto Civico show curated by Lucia Sanroman and Ruth Estevez, at the Centro Cultural de Tijuana (CECUT) in the fall of 2008. Is it possible to create a discursive democracy, in the manner theorized by Jürgen Habermas, under the state of exception that Giorgio Agamben claims is the contemporary form of governance? Our project, Emergencia aimed...

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PLOTS IN THE NET: BOONE OAKLEY
AND WEB STORYTELLERS

Txt: Giulia Simi / Eng: Monica Fontana
Area: Net Art

Once upon a time there was an internet site, an amount of web pages linked one another and housed in a clearly identifiable space which could be reached by a precise address. Once upon a time there was also the html – which later changed into xhtml - the language behind the hypertext system that can organize and make information intelligible, mainly in pictures and texts, of which web pages are composed. Yes, once upon a time. Then came video. And then came YouTube, a giant website acquired by another even more gigantic website. And there was someone who thought that a website can also be only a little story to be told after all, and that this story could give up with web pages and be listened better in a little theatre already filled with people, rahter than in a huge but desert square. That someone is called Boone Oakley, a US advertising agency that made a revolution on the net some months ago. In fact they...

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HACKTIVISM
//Penelope.di.Pixel

ECO HACKING
//Alex Foti

REFF/REWF
SHORT CHRONICLE OF A CONTAGION

Txt: Penelope.di.Pixel
Area: Hacktivism

For loyal readers of this magazine, REFF is not new: this symbol perhaps resonates in their ears like an echo family and it is plausible that they may know some or all the story behind it. Me ripercorriamola together in his milestones (1). REFF going to RomaeuropaFakeFactory. REFF is the fake version of (almost) namesake Romaeuropa Web Factory, a competition launched in January 2009 by Telecom Romaeuropa Foundation to support digital creativity. Why make it a fake? And why this fake has managed to get cross-party consensus from the world of activism, new media art and even politics? To understand this, we look for in motivation. Initially the Web Factory provided inside clauses bizarre as the prohibition of using techniques such as the remix and the mashup or ask participants the unilateral transfer of rights to works submitted, including for commercial purposes, or to reserve to the promoters...

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CLIMATTIVISTA! THE WIND OF CLIMATE
JUSTICE ARRIVES IN ITALY

Txt: Alex Foti
Area: Eco Hacking

Within a week the ferment of mobilization on climate ahead of the conference COP15 in Copenhagen for a year that stirred Europe, has infected Milan and Turin, and soon, Bologna and Rome. E 'was even coined a new word for the language of Dante and Mike Bongiorno: climattivista! The first mobilizations have taken place on October 24 action day proclaimed by global climate www.350.org, which saw a special edition of Critical Mass in Milan and the presentation of the Climate Justice Action (CJA, www.climate-justice-action.org) at Scighera, the libertarian circles located in the former factory worker Bovisa in Milan. So the information campaign and mobilization for the climate summit in Copenhagen (11-16 December, the Day of Action Movement) came alive in the weekend of Halloween, with a three-day Milan-Turin (versuscop15.noblogs.org) will soon reach even the Roman-Bolognese...

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SOFTWARE ART
//Marco Mancuso

VIRTUAL WORLDS
//Marco Riciputi

SOSOLIMITED:
DECONSTRUCTION TIME AGAIN

Txt: Marco Mancuso
Area: Software Art

Eric Gunther, John Rothenberg e Justin Manor are 3 ironic, smart guys of 30, protagonist of the Sosolimited project, an art and design consultancy formed in 2003. The group specializes in interactive installation, audiovisual performance, live remix and immersive environment, all strictly based on self-programmed softwares and technologies and on a high, very high technical/ realization level. MIT grads, with a solid background in physics, computer science, architecture and music, they have hit the headline and become worldwide famous artists, in a way that only a Country like USA makes it real and effective. Consider for example an important global political event with a remarkable interest from world media like 2008 USA TV Presidential debates. Remember that people all around the world were deeply stirred by the presence of a black Senator with the Muslim name of Barack Obama. Add then the idea...

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CAM GIRLS AND SEX ON SECOND LIFE:
A REPORT

Txt: Marco Riciputi
Area: Virtual Worlds

Rocco Siffredi sounded the alarm: "You Porn is killing the porn industry." A cry of starlets like Eve Laurence withdraws from the business main stream to provide its community of fans tailored services, without passing by production houses, in perfect style "participatory pornography." The magazine Focus goes on sale with a dossier on MP3 players that are vibrators to the music, equipment wii remote to masturbate with your partner and kiss-phone prototype that simulates the kisses. The Orgasmatron in Woody Allen's comparison of all this affection. While waiting to be able to have fun with the wii with my favorite cam girl who sends me in 3D, take the technological revolution of sex very seriously and I do a tour in the Red Light District in Second Life. Is at Amstedam and is always incredibly crowded. In truth there are several Amsterdam each with its red light district, canals and local posts of the lap dance...

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VIDEO ART
//Francesco Bertocco

VIDEO ART
//Alessandra Migani

KENNETH ANGER
AND THE NEW AMERICAN CINEMA

Txt: Francesco Bertocco / Eng: Sara Cavagna
Area: Experimental Cinema

The New American Cinema – NAC, represents one of the most meaningful artistic experience within the indipendent cinematography of the ‘60s, free from Hollywoodian empires and a mythopoetic all-engaging Star System. A group of directors – whose patroness and inspirer was Maya Deren – which included i.a. Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage and Michael Snow – began to meet at the margins of the official cinematography, deteriorating the visual monopoly of great producers. Through poor means which seemed to be a stylistic manifesto, they created a series of experimental films on the wave of the first vanguards, by then still half-asleep in the story of the audiovisual world. The NAC was something more than a movement. There were no manifestos and the only real condensing element was the desire to free moving images from the boundary of the most compromised productions...

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A GUIDE TO LISTENING
TRIMPIN: THE SOUND OF INVENTION

Txt: Alessandra Migani / Eng: Sara Cavagna
Area: Experimental Cinema

In 1956 Francoise Truffaut wrote how "the film of tomorrow will be more personal than a novel and autobiographical like a confession or a secret diary (...). The cinema of the future will be an act of love". Trimpin: The Sound of Invention is exactly this: a pure act of love. The film – I had the pleasure to watch it during the just ended 53rd edition of the London Film Festival – is in fact a homage by the director Peter Esmonde to the creative genius, artist, inventor and musician Trimpin. The film has been shot with an approach to cinéma-verité and it is the result of two years shooting, with many travels by the director to Seattle (where Trimpin has been living and working since 1979) and a travel to Germany, i.e. the artist’s place of origin. Esmonde managed in time to win Trimpin’s trust, since he is backward in being filmed and had lived quite unpleasant experiences with other productions, that wanted to focus...

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SOUND ART
//Marco Mancuso

SOUND ART
//Giulia Baldi

THE RECYCLED SOUND
OF TEATRINO ELETTRICO PIGRECO

Txt: Marco Mancuso / Eng: Luisa Bertolatti
Area: Sound Art

Signal is an international avant-garde electronic and experimental music festival, which will take place from the 6th ‘til the 14th of November in its third edition in Cagliari; the idea was produced by TiConZero, an cultural association that for years has been dealing with research in the music, theatrical and artistic fields. The artists involved represent the emerging levers in research on the border between sound and visual dimensions. The combination of music and video art in an inspired choice made by the frequent connections between various artistic languages, especially for those that regard avant-garde and research productions, which Signal dedicates its interest to. Among the artists present at Signal, the presence of the Teatrino Elettrico Pigreco created a buzz, as a performer but also as a workshop, a workshop about sound and studying the object. A workshop that will be repeated and...

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JOY ITO: ON FREEDOM OF CHOICE,
NAMELY CREATIVE COMMONS

Txt: Giulia Baldi / Eng: Emanuela Cassol
Area: Electronica

It is the talk of the moment. At meetings on the future of music (but also of publishing, cinema, television and visual arts) there is a prevailing topic: the search for new business models for creativity in the age of the digital dematerialization and world wide net; hence the meditation on the necessary changes both in the theoretical and practical approach to copyrights and reproduction. That’s precisely why, some weeks ago, Jonas Woost di Last fm and Dave Haynes at SoundCloud invited Joi Ito, CEO at Creative Commons and, before that, pioneer of web 2.0 and investor for some of the most interesting and innovative enterprises (such as Flickr, Rupture, Dopplr, Fon, and Last fm). The meeting was the hundredth in a series of OpenMusicMedia (open door events on digital music for discussions and networking) and, like the others, it turned out to be every bit as informal (a nice pub and many pints)...

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AUDIOVIDEO
//Claudia D'Alonzo

AUDIOVIDEO
//Lucrezia Cippitelli

FLUID RULES OF AUDIOVIDEO GEOMETRY
AN INTERVIEW WITH SCOTT ARFORD

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

For more than a decade Scott Arford has been one of the reference names for art and music in relation to the new media in the Bay Area of San Francisco, and was awarded a Honorable Mention for Digital Music in the Prix Ars Electronica 2005. Scott Arford is an architect, he is a lecturer and he creates sound and video installations, exhibitions, live media sets, recordings in studios. A variety of media, experiences and outcomes related to a deep theoretical thought. And this is outlined through the works and projects he carries on with other artists, including for example Scott Jenerik, Kit Clayton, Francisco Lopez e John Duncan.Since 1996 he has worked as a creator, a promoter and a cultural catalyst. In fact he founded 7hz a multifunctional space open to everyone and mainly to all artists in San Francisco. Arford's activity is varied but coherent. A common point charecterizes his production...

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ALMOST CINEMA 2009
LOOKING FOR THE KINEMATIC EFFECT

Txt: Lucrezia Cippitelli / Eng: Sara Cavagna
Area: Audiovideo

Almost Cinema celebrate this year its fourth birthday and also this year he accompanied the Film Festival of Gent, an exhibition organized by Eva de Groote, curator of the media area at the Center for Art and Culture Vooruit. As for the last editions (I visited and described it in a critical text published exactly one year ago on http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1324) the exhibition is hosted in the wonderful art Nouveau rooms of the Vooruit center itself. Once again the “Festival in the festival” proved to be a project which was worth a visit from Bruxelles. A difficult bet for an editorial project aiming at collecting works which play with the cinema and the ability to isolate some of its specific features and move them outside the screen. Environment, immersion, movement, sound, lights, images are the core principles of cinematographic illusion. Is it possible to traspose each of these elements into...

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BIO ART
//Serena Cangiano

TECHNOLOGY
//Teresa De Feo

STELARC'S EXTRABODY:
THE TECHNOLOGIC CHIMERA

Txt: Serena Cangiano/ Eng: Monica Fontana
Area: Bio Art

Art concepts and techniques should always be avant-garde, and serve as an approach to men's comprehension as well as an anticipation of what they will be and how they will behave. In light of that assumption, Stelarc, who is a pioneer of extreme performances and of performances helped by interactive robotic systems and virtual reality, represents without a doubt an important reference point for all those who want to deal with an artistic project which uses technology as a means of expression. And for the digital native artists he is a role model not only because of his coherence when he carries out researches on the body using all the means of post-modern age, but also because he has managed to leave fully and predictably an evergreen reflection on man's evolutionary process, even if it is limited in the environmental complexity, through his extension with technological prostheses. Stelarc is an Australian artist...

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IN THE BEGINNING WAS CYBERNETICS
RELATION BETWEEN SCIENCE & ARTISTS

Txt: Teresa De Feo
Area: Technology

What relationship is there between digital art and cybernetic science? Surely more than one can imagine. The concept of the system, the research of process patterns, the importance of interconnections and the relationship between system and environment (be it a machine or living organism), the centrality of information, the phenomenon of retroaction and self-management, the importance of code, are the terms of cybernetic research, but it could also be said that this is true for the research of any artist who works with new technologies. But let’s proceed in order, beginning with the scientist. In the beginning there was Norbert Wiener: that figure of a man that, whoever reads his biography would agree, can only be defined as an “authentic genius”. At 18 months he learnt the alphabet, at 3 years old he learnt to read, at 5 he had fun making declarations in Greek and Latin. At 15 he got a degree in mathematics at the University of Tufts...

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DESIGN
//Barbara Sansone

INTERACTION DESIGN
//Elena Gianni

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ARTFUTURA

Txt: Barbara Sansone / Eng: Francesca Lattanzi
Area: Design

Artfutura has just turned 20 (a really venerable age for a festival on such a topic). It celebrated its birthday at the IMAGINA building in Barcelona.For people thinking they were going to miss the traditional Mercat de le Flors (in fact this would have surely been a more adequate location for it) it has in fact turned out to be amusing to attend this festival in the famous catch@22, the district of innovation which has been the subject of a series of debates, an area still gutted due to never-ending work-in-progress but already with a futuristic stamp. Too bad about the constant broadcasting of football matches by golTV on the maxiscreen located at the entrance which did not create the proper atmosphere for a cultural event. And too bad as well, about the numerous, never-ending sound and video technical problems and the incoherence of the lighting system. These things should work more than well on the occasion of a festival about future...

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NEW EDUCATIONAL MODELS:
THE AMAZING CIID INSTITUTE

Txt: Elena Gianni / Eng: Francesca Lattanzi
Area: Interaction Design

I have been in Copenhagen for two months and I haven’t seen anything yet: no museums nor exhibitions. It’s not that Copenhagen is that big, nor that public transport is inefficient, we are talking about the extremely well-run capital of Denmark; the reason why is that I spend all my time at school. The Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) is a project recently set up by Simona Maschi and Heather Martin. In collaboration with the Danish Design school (DKDS), the CIID offers a year long, intensive master in Interaction Design to a very limited number of students. The educational activity is now in its second year and it is supported by a research laboratory and a consultancy which has contacts with private companies. The program has links with various companies which cooperate with the students and provide research briefs based on the reality of the market. The educational program is something...

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Video Theatre
//Annamaria Monteverdi

CINEMATOGRAPHY OF THE STONE AGE:
WOYZECK BY WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

Tx: Annamaria Monteverdi / Eng: Luisa Bertolatti
Area: Video Theatre

The South African artist William Kentridge is one of the most renowned contemporary visual artists and proposes a poetic view on ancient taste where art and technique come together in the original value and significance of techné: the shows are based on his original filmed animations and recalls those theatres from the beginning of the century that experimented with the rudimental techniques of luminous animation (drawings on pieces of mobile glass, projected thanks to a Magic Lantern), promoting a primitive form of optical art. William Kentridge’s biography is rich with events and experiences connected to the theatre: he frequented the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris, he became a set designer, actor and director of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company and the Handspring Puppet Company in Johannesburg and he put on shows by writers Tom Stoppard and Alfred Jarry; he later became the director of short animation films shot on 16mm as well as an author of drawings and incisions: in their anxious-ridden black comedy where there is a harsh social critique of the South African government before the democratic elections of 1994 in South Africa and before the creation of the Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, and his pictorial allusions to Goya, Bacon, Grosz and Weimar artists that coexist with the atmospheres of the theatre of the Gran Guignol and Beckett-like dramas. He worked for Ubu tells the truth (1996-1997), doing drawings and graphics that make up the visual corpus of the successive filmed animations created for the show that went on stage with puppets entitled Ubu and the Commission of the Truth; he then worked on the drawings for the show Faustus in Africa (1995), on the scenes for Confessions of Zeno (2002), on the musical opera The return of Ulysses (1998) from Monteverdi; Preparing the flute on the other hand is a little theatrical model with two animated films in 35mm where Kentridge reinvents his work for the sets of the Magic Flute by Mozart. The Drawings for Projections make up the heart of Kentridge’s artistic elaborations and is extended to the theatrical sets: these are animated films and mute films created from carbon drawings and inaugurated at the end of the 80’s with masterpieces such as Monument (1990) based on Beckett’s Catastrophe. His work behind the Boles 16mm is difficult and particular, where he creates animated sequences, without a script or storyboard: the sequence is composed of minimal variations and erasures of a few carbon and monochrome pastel drawings on paper, which conserve the evident traces of their own metamorphosis, an action that goes back to the origins of cinema, the first photographic studies of the Marey and Muybridge movement.

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NEW MEDIA
//Lucrezia Cippitelli

NEW MEDIA ART MARKET
//Stefano Raimondi

FUTURE PLACES FESTIVAL
BETWEEN DIGITAL AND LOCAL CULTURES

Txt: Lucrezia Cippitelli / Eng: Francesca Lattanzi
Area: New Media

Future Places – Digital media and local cultures was held in Porto from the 13th to the 17th October. It is a festival, a meeting made up of a series of lectures and concerts, an exhibition, a place in which people congregate in order to discuss technology and creativity. It had two official sponsors: The University of Porto and the University of Austin, Texas. The subtitle chosen for this festival refers to local cultures. This is what attracts this Lusitanian melting pot, conceived by Heitor Alvelos, curator and professor at the Fine Arts Academy of the University of Porto together with Karen Gustafson, the correspondent from the University of Austin, Texas. According to its definition, Future Places should be a “meeting between people who have a question in mind: if digital media can do so much for the development of global communication, knowledge and creativity, what can it do to help the development of local cultures?...

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FROM FRIEZE TO ED RUSHA. OCTOBER
IN LONDON WITH EYES OF AN ART CRITIC

Txt: Stefano Raimondi
Area: New Media Art Market

They are the first days of October, and wearing the shirt with short sleeves and summer still clinging to his back, when you book, as an annual ritual, a short trip, destination, London, to see everything an art lover would ever see. Shows like rain: Miroslaw Balka, and the pure beauty of John Baldessari shine at the Tate Modern, a short distance Kusmirowski transforms the Barbican in a claustrophobic bunker where to look with imagination, old lamps, and remnants of war are ideal home for giant rats grown up on the banks of the Thames and the waste of nearby Mc. Donald. All this while the retrospective of Ed Rusha is about to get laughs of the show in oil on canvas of the skeletons of Damien Hirst. Out in the can-can culture and a thermometer in free fall, London's not forget some to be the "City" of the big banks and big business, big speculation in the past, past and future. Then, the event shouted to the four media, television...