 |
 |
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
----------------------------------
SOCIAL NETWORKS
//Giulia Baldi
NETWORKING
//Giulia Tiddens
|
|
DISTRIBUTED CREATIVITY MODELS:
THE CROWD-SOURCING
Txt: Giulia Baldi
Area: Social Networks
 It was maybe predictable and it is definitely significant: Creative Review's has included crowd-sourcing among the topics covered in their 'Year in Review' December issue.
I haven't checked the magazine yet, but I am researching on digital creative crowd-sourcing models since a while and I think they represent such an interesting opportunity for creatives that we should celebrate here.
Known in academic terms as a "distributed problem-solving and content-production model", and in marketing ones as "the outsourcing of functions normally performed by a supplier or contractor to a crowd of people or a community", crowd-sourcing is a neologism first used by Jeff Howe, editor of Wired US, in an article that dates back to 2006. There, he describes the shift that creatives (mostly copywriters, designers, photographers, illustrators, animators, videomakers, directors... or wannabe so) are taking in the networked society...
read more...
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- top -----------
MEDIAMATIC TRAVEL:
ONLINE CULTURAL TURISM
Txt: Giulia Tiddens
Area: Networking
 The Mediamatic travel project, carried out by Mediamatic Bank, one of the most important cultural centers in Amsterdam and in Europe, is ready to turn the world of cultural tourism upside down. If you connect to the following website http://travel.mediamatic.net/, you can find an endless list of cities, spread all over the world, with which it is possible to interact following definitely innovative approaches.
For a small outlay you will be able to go to your chosen city and to get in touch with the contemporary artistic scene thanks to a local guide on that specific field, or you can simply get some information about certain places which escape the standard logic of pocket travel guides. Trails expressly created for artists or people dealing with art who will be able to explore cities following completely different points of view. Furthermore this project also includes an exhibition, on which I particularly wish to focus my attention on this issue...
read more... |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
----------------------------------
ECO HACKING
//Clemente Pestelli
HACKTIVISM
//Zoe Romano
|
|
LESS TALK, MORE ACTION
AN INTERVIEW TO THE YES MEN
Txt: Dedalus / Eng: Giulia Tiddens
Area: Eco Hacking
 Over the last months, in the middle of the turmoil for the mobilizations in view of the Copenaghen COP15, an interesting coordination platform has been online for the movements that takes the name of Beyond Talk.
The platform, that in the homepage is named like this: “Tired of just hearing about climate change? Then do something. Now” is a simple data base for the promotion of civil disobedience statements. The authors of beyondtalk.net are Andy Bilchbaun and Mike Bonanno, the members of the famous culture jamming group The Yes Men that for 10 yeas have been raging on the scene with mediatic ambushes and ambuscades and over the last year have been focusing their deeds on theme connected to the climate change.
Without entering in the details of the single deeds carried out by Yes Men, I find it more interesting to stop and consider that sign of pragmatism expressed by the formula “Beyond Talk”. Indeed if we have a look...
read more...
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- top -----------
THE ACTIVIST EAST:
AMONG GUITARS AND GENTRIFICATION
Txt: Zoe Romano / Eng: Monica Fontana
Area: Hacktivism
 We had been staying in Japan for more than 10 days, as we had been invited to present the project by Serpica Naro in the Cream Festival (http://ifamy.jp/en/ ), even if our main purpose was to meet at last all the artists, militants, agitators and promoters of the Maydays with whom we only have virtual contacts.
Among many other things, one night we ran into the protest of some South Korean workers who came in the little coffee-bar and laundry of the Shinjuku borough where we were having a beer; they came in full of enthusiasm, holding pins and leaflets, and they immediately invaded the room. They grabbed hold the micro of the sound system and invited us to take part in the action day, which would take place on the following Saturday in different points of the city. We discovered that the mobilization was aided by our friends Freeters, the Japanese precarious workers union, who were there with us...
read more... |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
----------------------------------
GENERATIVE ART
//Pasquale Napolitano
|
|
AESTHETICS AND COMPUTATION:
THE ORIGINS OF GENERATIVE ART
Txt: Pasquale Napolitano
/ Eng: Monica Fontana
Area: Generative Art
 After some years of a qualified and creative activity, it is now known to most people that the images produced with a generative technique are more adjustable, as they are the result of the information flow being seized in a split second; then the information is adjusted through the interface, that is some kind of "design process" that gives life to real metadata rather than to images, videos or sounds. We're dealing with pictures, videos and sounds not yet real.
These images seem to arise from some recent process which is the direct result of the development of digital technology and production computational logics. In generative design, visual forms are images that come from a process of computation which is being run by formal systems of rules implemented by different programming languages and technological platforms.
In many generative works, that were produced during the last five years, the form is the result of a structuring process whose developments the designer knows only in part, because he simply produces a kind of "configurative hypothesis" and then lets the process develop its own computation and visualization. Every image, in its very details is a process: it is an image-processing, an image that is articulated as a process, not a process we see through images. From handling and configuration of visual form, the designer then shifts his attention from the mechanisms underlying to the modes of display. These forms are free to show their features in the electronic screen. But if the creation of systems and their implementation become the focus of the generated project, and give the picture the role of "result" in the educational process underlying the system, the visual plan is not downgraded and seen as a common material display of an nonmaterial process: indeed, it is the precise articulation of the system building plan with the management of certain visual effects that determines the field, in which what we define generative visual design works.
For, if generative designers are furthermore interested in products and solutions for the scientific (industrial and technological) research [2], in their projects they always tend to filter all with a specific attention to the visual output and its perceptual qualities.
read more... |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
----------------------------------
VIDEO ART
//Francesco Bertocco
VIDEO ART
//Silvia Bertolotti
| |
VIDEO LETTER:
WHEN THE VIDEO BECOMES CONSCIENCE
Txt: Francesco Bertocco / Eng: Francesca Lattanzi
Area: Video Art
 There is a story which is divided into two parts like two consciences which interlace with each other, fading into each other and embracing each other. Shuji Terayana, a person with close connections to the theatre, a poet and a person involved in the avant-garde film industry on the one hand; Shuntaro Tanikawa, a poet on the other.
Video Letter is a story about an exchange, about a passage between identity and image, between screen (the video caption in the title highlights it) and biography. Between 1982 and 1983 Tanikawa and Terayana decided to exchange some visual letters. They recorded some private video-tapes in which they compiled personal images, memories, words, newspaper cuttings, notes and small pictures (Polaroid photos and snapshots), both of them as sender and receiver at different times. There are no dramaturgical rules in this exchange. Their video-letters are part of their daily life like everyday gestures; these video-letters are extracted from their conscience; they are fragments of images and realities which, once joined together, form a pyramid of identities at whose peak is the fleeting, sovereign video.
The conclusion of this exchange coincides with Terayana’s death. From that moment onwards, Tanikawa started correcting the editing of these “letters”. He made some changes to the sound track and closed the circle which had begun with the sending of the very first video. When Video Letter was being created, video itself was in the middle of its own experimentation. American and European artists were transforming their actions into analogical sequences, into repeatable and diffusible instances. Diffusion and reproduction, in fact, are two of the passages which manage the interchange of information and they are channels within which communication is realised and can be developed. What Tanikawa and Terayana did, which seems to be something modestly narcissist, was to let art enter the interstice which precedes the intimate meeting of two people. The late French critic Raymond Bellour’s words left us the greatest exegesis (critical interpretation) of Terayana and Tanikawa’s work.
read more...
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
----------------------------------
//Matteo Milani
|
|
CHRISTIAN ZANESI,
THE ACT OF LISTENING
Txt: Matteo Milani / Eng: Giulia Tiddens
Area: Experimental
 Christian Zanesi is a French composer and the person responsible for the production of radio programs for France Musique and French Culture at the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) in Paris, an institution that last year celebrated the 50th anniversary and that is throughly integrated in the much bigger INA ( Institut National de l'Audiovisuel). Follower of Pierre Schaeffer, Zanesi has been recently awarded the Special Quartz at the 5th Quartz Electronic Music Awards edition. We interviewed him during the Présences Electronique 09, of which he is the artistic director, an event that explores the link between the Musique Concrète by Schaeffer and the new sound experiments (a co-production with Radio France).
GMR was and still is a unique place for the production and research in the field of electroacoustic music. The theorization of his founder Pierre Schaeffer is included in the reference book “Treaty of Musical Object - Traité des Objects Musicaux”, published in 1966, in which Schaeffer develops his personal and innovative musical thought on the Sound Object and on the concrete music ( a volume of 7 hundred pages n.d.r.). I also recommend to read the essay by Michel Chion “Guide To Sound Objects (now in English as well) a valid introduction to this voluminous work.
In the Scaefferian theory, the reduced hearing is the attitude which consists in listening a sound detaching oneself completely from its origin and from any preconceptions, so that it is possible to become aware of the musical material, referring only to what one can hear.
During the listening experience, each sound must have a shape, and each shape must have a sound content. Let's now discover together with Zanesi the musical potential of sounds.
read more... |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
----------------------------------
AUDIOVIDEO
//Silvia Scaravaggi
AUDIOVIDEO
//Lucrezia Cippitelli
|
|
JOOST REKVELD'S
STUDY AND RESEARCH LINES
Txt: Silvia Scaravaggi / Eng: Margherita Castelli
Area: Audiovideo
 At the beginning of 2009 for the first time the exceptional screens of IFFF - International Film Festival Rotterdam presented the film #37, the new experimental creation of the Dutch author Joost Rekveld (1970, Terneuzen, Netherlands), which achived a great success both from the public and the critics point of view thank to his poetic intensity and visual beauty. This work of art is not only a simple short for the visual and perceptive pleasure, but an experimental and research production which derives from a scientific and philosophical approach to nature and technology. Joost Rekveld’s great experience comes from its endless personal research – the fundament of all his productions, from experimental films to light installations – as well as from the high knowledge of the experimental cinema and audiovisual world acquired thank to many cooperations as editor inter alia with the Impakt Festival of Utrecht, De Balie, the ancient cinema...
read more...
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- top -----------
CIMATICS 2009: FESTIVAL AND CITY
Txt: Lucrezia Cippitelli / Eng: Margherita Castelli
Area: Audiovideo
 The seventh edition of the Cimatics Festival 2009 in Brussels has just ended up, after ten intense days of events which involved the whole city. This festival has been created as an event focussed on vjing as well as audiovisual and electronical culture. Nowadays it seems focussed on the “widespreaded event” model (as it happened for the last edition. See our report on Digimag 40 in December 2008-January 2009 titled “Cimatics 2008, not only vjing"), which involved most realities of Brussels acting in the field of the new media.
From 20th to 29th November, a series of screenings, performances, conferences, meetings, workshops and live music evenings animated the Museum of Bozar Modern Art, the Beursschouwburg (which hosted the 2007 edition), as well as the Imal centre, the concerts and performances venue Les Brigittines, the medialab MediaRuimte (managed by LAB[au]), the social centre Recyclart...
read more...
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
----------------------------------
TECHNOLOGY
//Teresa De Feo
|
|
MONSIEUR MORIN:
FOR A COMPLEX THOUGHT ETHIC
Txt: Teresa De Feo / Eng: Luisa Bertolatti
Area: Technology
 To meet Monsieur Morin is not something to be taken lightly. Even those who do not know him could not but be fascinated by his old Frenchman-like elegant ways and his ringed fingers. And I believe in his success. The husky voice with which the Monsieur expresses himself, never as an intellectual but more like the chief of a tribe who tells myths and stories, immediately creates empathy and takes you into an intellectual dimension with layered dimensions: that of complex thought. And it is immediately clear that complex thought, in the presence of the old philosopher, is not just a mix of methods, an intellectual practice, but the exercising of an existential operation, a human opening that has this objective: to give itself a new founding ethic, the ethic that a planetary consciousness needs.
On the 11th of November Edgar Morin sat in front of an audience of over 2.500 people, held in the Teatro Dal Verme, for the conclusive meeting of the Meet Media Guru 2009 event, directed by Maria Grazia Mattei. The event created much interest and was a unique occasion to get to know themes of a great adventure about knowledge directly from the horse’s mouth, that of complex epistemology.
Edgar Morin, now an 88 year old, is certainly one of the most interesting intellectuals of the last 100 years. Director of the Cnrs (Centre national de la recherche scientifique), president of the agency for the Culture of Unesco and an honorary academic in more than 15 Universities worldwide, his has dealt with sociology, ethnology, anthropology, cinema, TV, old and new cybernetics, system theories, pedagogy, the research of the method capable of taking apart the various disciplines and reaping the challenge of complexity. An anomalous intellectual that is difficult to categorise and is politically engaged, Morin has earned himself the nickname “Undisciplined”, also the title of his biography, a collection of his adventures, which was released in France this year and signed by Emmanuel Lemieux.
read more... |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
----------------------------------
INTERACTION DESIGN
//Donata Marletta
//Carla Langella
|
JONAH BRUCKER-COHEN:
NEW MEDIA, FROM WEB 2.0 TO WEB 4.0
Txt: Donata Marletta / Eng: Francesca Lattanzi
Area: Interaction Design
 Jonah Brucker-Cohen is a researcher, an artist and a writer who, in spite of his youth, has reached unquestionable fame and respect internationally in the field of new media and technologies applied to art. He has recently obtained a Ph d at the Disruptive Design Team of the Networking and Telecommunications Research Group (NTRG) at the prestigious Trinity College in Dublin.
His doctorate thesis, “Deconstructing Networks” is based on the theme of the deconstruction of networks. It includes projects which attempt to challenge and, from a critical point of view, to subvert the well-established perceptions regarding interaction and the level of involvement within the networks.
Jonah is also assistant professor of communication on the Interactive Telecommunication Program (ITP) and the department of Media, Culture and Communication at the Steinhardt School of Education and Human Development...
read more...
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- top -----------
FLUCTUATING INTELLIGENCES
Txt: Carla Langella
Area: Wearables
 In the “liquid society”, as Zygmunt Bauman defines it in: “Modus Vivendi. Hell and Utopia of the Liquid World”, the structures that create the boundaries of space of behaviour, habits and social and individual forms, are dissolved, creating a chaotic and dynamic context in continuous transformation where contemporary men and women find themselves having to continuously and frenetically pass from social one role to another. Family, work, social life, are alternated until they overlap, despite having different needs and necessities that are often distant from each other.
Every one of these roles requires a different image, and therefore different clothing, suitable to the needs and functions that emerge constantly over the course of the day and the week.
Fashionistas of the future will be new nomads, often travelling, who will have less time on their hands to take care of their look and change their image in relation to the...
read more...
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
----------------------------------
Techno Theatre
//Annamaria Monteverdi
Performing Art
//Massimo Schiavoni
|
THE SCREEN AND THE CITY
CONTINUOUS CITY BY MARIANNE WEEMS
Txt: Annamaria Monteverdi
Area: Techno Theatre
 Marianne Weems, a theatre director of the multidisciplinary company The Builders Association continues with extraordinary coherence and strength through her acute examination of technology and communication via computers, in reference to their influence in society and their effects on social interactions.
In Jet Lag she criticised the media system and the “construction of information”; in Alladeen she criticised the effects of the globalised economy, with the workers of an Indian call centre who were instructed to erase their identity and their language and take on the American accent and culture. In Supervision Weems brought the nightmare of surveillance to the theatre, after September 11th: the citizens whose bodies have become transparent, “data body” in a “data space”, are subject to an alienating control in a “port private” society where the means of surveillance have become increasingly invisible and have penetrated into...
read more...
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- top -----------
FRANCESCA PROIA:
THE BREATH OF THE SUBTLE BODY
Txt: Massimo Schiavoni / Eng: Monica Fontana
Area: Performing Art
 "My job is to find a suitable energy in order to create a precise composition . The philosophy of yoga comes across my project of creation as a philosophy that deals with the creation of time." These are Francesca Proia's paths, a young choreographer and dancer in Ravenna that has made the yoga a philosophy of life, making its mark in the theatrical solos danced in detail, where the subtle body imprisons and ponders a unique balance of energy and empathy contemporary dance.
After studying dance for years, Francesca graduated at the European Federation of Oriental Arts becoming a teacher of yoga, then she started in 2003 an artistic collaboration with the director and actor Danilo Conti, focusing the work on the body in relation to objects, space and perception. She danced in three episodes of Tragedy Endogonidia under the direction of Romeo Castellucci who said the following words about Francis's art...
read more...
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
----------------------------------
SOCIAL MEDIA
//Luigi Ghezzi
NEW MEDIA
//Simona Fiore
|
BABEL OF INNOVATION
Txt: Luigi Ghezzi / Eng: Margherita Castelli
Area: Social Media
 "A new innovation in medical software”, “Innovation is the hearth of everything we do”, “The House of Innovation”, “Our innovation is back”, these are the slogans that some multinational companies chose to draw attention to a key element in contemporary society: innovation. Umair Haque, director at Havas Media Lab, states that the word "innovation", if not supported through economic sustainability practices, “feels like a relic of the industrial era”, whereas Clayton Christensen (professor at Harvard Business School and founder of the consulting agency Innosight) in his latest text Seeing What’s Next – Using The Theories Of Innovation To Predict Industry Change offers a convincing synthesis of the main innovative theories, obviously starting from his own theory of Disruptive Innovation, which appeared in the influential text “The Innovation's Dilemma”, and also covering the innovation of the resources, of the processes, of the value chain...
read more...
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- top -----------
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM:
COMPARING MODELS
Txt: Simona Fiore / Eng: Francesca Lattanzi
Area: New Media
 Are journalism and publishers dying? Are we watching their decline? Even if these assessments seem true today, they are so only in part. Journalism and publishers are facing a serious period of crisis. The responsibility for this condition is probably to be attributed to an inadequate business model which paid little attention to the changes which have affected society and consumers in recent years. The Internet has surely played a significant role in this situation, having proposed a “long tail” offer able to satisfy more sectorial and niche demands.
We have seen the birth of “multitasking” users who do not use one medium rather than another but prefer to use them simultaneously in order to better satisfy their needs.The solution to the decline of journalism and publishing lies in the search of some new models which are able to satisfy on the one hand, the needs of the “new” consumers who are demanding and fickle...
read more... |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
 |
|
