Archive for the ‘2004’ Category
CURARE L’IMMATERIALE. Pratica curatoriale e new media art
UNIVERSITA’ DEGLI STUDI DI TORINO – DAMS
Master di Primo Livello “Sistemi e professionalità dei musei di arte contemporanea” – Anno Accademico 2003 – 2004
CURARE L’IMMATERIALE. Pratica curatoriale e new media art
Dott. Domenico Quaranta
Torino, aprile 2004
Premessa
“Nel 1839, la fotografia era il nuovo medium. Nel 1895, lo era il cinema. Nel 1906 la radio. Nel 1939, la televisione. Negli anni Settanta, la computer graphic. Negli Ottanta, l’animazione digitale. Nel 1994, il World Wide Web. Nel 1995, Mosaic. Quindi Quicktime, Shockwave, Real, Flash. Il 1999 è stato l’anno dei database. Il 2000, dell’arte transgenica. Il 2001 dei palmari. Nel 2002, il nuovo medium sarà la telepatia.” Steve Dietz [1]
Secondo il teorico dei media Lev Manovich (2001), “tutte le funzioni per cui [il computer] viene utilizzato hanno lo stesso potenziale di cambiamento sui linguaggi culturali preesistenti, e tutte, inoltre, potrebbero lasciare la cultura inalterata. Ma quest’ultimo scenario è francamente improbabile”[2]. Questa affermazione contiene almeno due fondamentali presupposti, che si possono esplicitare in questo modo: innanzitutto, l’espressione “nuovi media” viene a definire non solo le reti, i testi elettronici, la realtà virtuale e i cd-rom, ma anche tutto ciò che, prodotto con il computer, assume poi l’aspetto di un medium tradizionale: un libro impaginato al computer, una fotografia digitale stampata su carta fotografica, etc. In secondo luogo, Manovich sembra attribuire ai nuovi media un potenziale rivoluzionario di portata eccezionale, superiore, spiegherà più avanti, a quello dell’invenzione della stampa, in quanto in gradi di investire tutte le fasi della comunicazione e tutti i tipi di media. Un vero e proprio “cambio di paradigma”, per usare le parole di Thomas Kuhn (1962)[3], di cui quella che stiamo sperimentando è solo la fase aurorale.
SEMI-LIVING ART . Interview with Oron Catts
SEMI-LIVING ART . Interview with Oron Catts
Domenico Quaranta
Published in “Cluster. On Innovation”, n. 4 (Biotech), pp. 158 – 163. © Cluster 2004
Oron Catts, Finnish by origin, is one of the pioneers in the artistic application of biotechnologies. Majored in Product design, Catts founded in 1996 the Tissue Culture & Art Project, an artistic collective (of which both IONAT ZURR GUY BEN ARY are members) that engages tissue technologies as a means of artistic expression. In 2000 he was one of the founders of SymbioticA , where he is at present artistic director. Positioned in the school of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia (UWA), SymbioticA is a research laboratory lead by artists within a department of biological science, and it offers itself as a “porous membrane through which art and bio-medical sciences and technologies can mingle”.
Since its foundation SymbioticA has hosted and worked with artists such as Stelarc, Adam Zaretzki, Amy Young, Marta De Menezes and Andrè Brodyk, all of which are extremely interested in adopting the use of biotechnologies as a new medium of artistic expression. The Tissue Culture and Art Project adopted “biomedia” in a slightly more unusual way; instead of talking about the possible consequences of human gene and the genome mapping manipulation, it uses tissue technologies as a means of creating “semi living sculptures” through the grafting of organic and living materials on an artificial life support. It’s a dangerous choice because it involves life, that is then fragmented and manipulated, utilized as a medium and object of investigation in an artistic project. Examples of semi living are the worry dolls created during the project Tissue Culture and Art (ificial) Wombs, presented at Linz 2000: work that interprets the Guatemalan legend of the six anxiety dolls, that children tell their worries to before going to bed, in a series of seven (we’re not children anymore!) dolls created with biodegradable polymeric into which different tissue cells have been inserted; semi-living (enough to dance and grow faster with the help of music) are the Pig Wings that ironically make one of the most absurd promises of biotechnology come true, according to which in the near future we could make pigs fly, making at the same time the pink pigs probable “hosts” of our spare organs, a extra extension to grow in order to then offer to man. Semi- living, still, is a little ear (a fourth of real life size) made together with Stelarc, who intends to wear it as an organic prosthesis – completely useless and purely decorative- on his obsolete body.
A season in Hell. Interview with Ken Aronson
A SEASON IN HELL. Cluster meets Kenneth Aronson, conceptual strategist and founder of Hell.com
Domenico Quaranta
Published in “Cluster. On Innovation”, n. 4 (Biotech), pp. 26 – 29. © Cluster 2004
The case Hell.com explodes in 1999. The media start speaking about a strange website, as black as the Ace of Spades and without any visible contents. The Wanderer must digit his e-mail address: if he’s lucky and if the waiting list isn’t too long, some day after he’ll be invited to enter. Hell. According to the legend, the Founder registered a domain in August 1995. For a few months hell was empty, a black hole on the web. The Founder then rounds up a community of friends, artist friends, who decorate the domain with artwork that they want to keep “private” far from indiscreet eyes. The residents. Hell becomes a “private parallel web”, “an anti-web that sold and promoted nothing and was not accessible to the public”. However an address such as this couldn’t go unnoticed for long. The waiting list grew unbelievably long, creating serious organization problems for the Founder. He was surrounded by Business tycoons who dreamt of the Big Portal, with “Abandon your hope, you who enter“ written on the threshold. Then the unexpected happened: the Thieves arrive, they descend into Hell and copy the contents, republishing them on their website. The Thieves are in actual fact Guerrillas who are fighting for web freedom, the sharing of art and life. “Their” Hell.com is a free parallel web, accessible to everybody”. The war opposes two different life concepts and the wounds are still open.
Today Hell is still there, but it’s not talk anymore. Cluster sought out the Founder, to ask him what he thinks of it all now.
KINGS OF DISTURBANCE. Interview with Roberto Paci Dalò
KINGS OF DISTURBANCE. Interview with Roberto Paci Dalò, artistic director of Giardini Pensili
Domenico Quaranta
Published in “Cluster. On Innovation”, n. 4 (Biotech), pp. 46 – 49. © Cluster 2004
DQ. How do you relate to technology: how far can it be considered a tool or how far can it be considered a compromise? What role has it had in helping you overcome the barriers that bound the different art forms? Is there ever the risk that the tool takes up too much space and ends up becoming a rhetorical object?
RPD. First of all it must be said that theatre – and performance in general- is by its very nature a place of “high technology”. It is in the history itself of this art. We began working with digital technologies in 1987, back from our first long stay in the United States. In New York we bought a “lexicon lxp5″, that, among other things, enabled us to work on pitch and modify voices in real time, looking, at that time, at the work of an artist like Laurie Anderson who played specifically on this sexual ambiguity starting from the voice sound. The stage for us is the main meeting place of all arts, a meeting that goes through a consideration on sensoriality. Music – in particular electronic music – and its sound are one of the fundamental languages of all projects of Giardini Pensili.
Obviously, there is always the risk of a “technological rhetoric”, and also of a real technological fetishism. That is why we always work with “mixed” technologies, where, for example, the perfection of the digital meets the beauty of the “dirty” analogue… To us, these two worlds are like one and we try to transfer the qualities of both into the creation of works dynamically moving within these territories.
WHAT KIND OF INTERACTION? Interview with Lev Manovich
WHAT KIND OF INTERACTION? Interview with Lev Manovich
Published in “Cluster. On Innovation”, n. 3 (Interaction Design), Summer 2004, pp. 30 – 33. © Cluster 2004
«Today the interactive media asks us to click on an underlined phrase in order to pass to another one. We are asked to follow pre-programmed associations, that do and don’t exist, in other words [...] we exchange the mental structure of others with our own. [...] Interactive media asks us to identify ourselves with someone else’s mental structure.»
In 1999 with these words Lev Manovich closed the paragraph dedicated to the “myth of interactivity” in his book The Language of New Media. This affirmation purposely goes against a rather naive diffused enthusiasm regarding the potentials in digital media; however the questions brought up, aside from the controversy, are still now decisive: To what extent does the interactivity of new media limit as opposed to extend, our freedom of thought and action? To what extent does it contribute to forgetting the real interactive potentials of traditional media, that don’t perform by moving a joystick or clicking a link, but by writing text- that could be a book, film or a drawing- that we have before us? And how much does the unconditional exaltation of interactivity penalize the development of a true interaction between man and the machine, and between man and man through the machine?
