Archive for the ‘2006’ Category
A GAME FOR PLEASURE. Interview with Michael Samyn & Auriea Harvey
A GAME FOR PLEASURE. Interview with Michael Samyn & Auriea Harvey
by Domenico Quaranta
© A Minima. All rights reserved
“We are trying to make a game that does not have any of the conventions that we dislike so much and which, in our opinion, ruin a lot of the joy that can be found in games.” With these words, Michael Samyn & Auriea Harvey are introducing 8, that should be published in January 2007. Samyn and Harvey, at first independently (as zuper! and entropy8), then together (as entropy8zuper) developed during the Nineties a double career of artists and multimedia designers. In 2002 they founded Tale of Tales, a games development studio. This name is the title of a famous collection of Italian fairy tales, Lo cunto de li cunti by Giambattista Basile (1634): but it gets also all the heritage of the frame stories (from The Arabian Nights to Boccaccio’s Decameron) and it links them to the open and non-linear narratives of the time of multimedia.
Serena Simoni interviews Domenico Quaranta (2006)
Interview published in Serena Simoni, Maria Rita Bentini (eds), no border # 5 > 2005/06, MAR (Museo d’arte della città di Ravenna) 2006.
Parlare di arte in rete sembra per certi aspetti lo stesso che avventurarsi in una giungla o in un deserto, ovvero in un territorio di cui abbiamo una conoscenza teorica magari molto precisa, un immaginario dettagliato ma un’esperienza di fatto del tutto limitata o – nel migliore dei casi – solo parziale.
Data la conoscenza di questo settore, quali sono, secondo te, le tendenze artistiche più interessanti che al momento attuale si possono trovare in rete, sempre che di “tendenze” si possa parlare? Puoi individuare già dei mutamenti rispetto al passato? una sorta di evoluzione delle modalità o del tipo di creatività?
Se escludiamo la preistoria della Net Art, ossia quel complesso nodo di esperienze che hanno sfruttato i protocolli di Internet, a fianco di altri media, per sviluppare progetti incentrati sulla comunicazione, la creazione collaborativa etc., l’arte in Rete ha poco più di dieci anni, il che rende un po’ arbitrario parlare di presente e passato. Tuttavia, è vero anche che la storia di Internet, e con lei quella della Net Art, ha avuto uno sviluppo molto rapido, e che i suoi primi giorni sembrano lontani anni luce. In questo lasso di tempo, la Net Art ha vissuto un itinerario completo, fatto di maturazione, di crisi e di rinascite; ha suscitato, con una rapidità che stupisce se pensiamo ai tempi lunghi di accettazione di un medium tanto meno radicale come il video, l’interesse di musei e gallerie: ma anche questo ha avuto un crollo improvviso, e se oggi continua, lo fa in una forma decisamente ridimensionata rispetto alle aspettative che aveva creato attorno al 2000.
Il risultato è che sono molti, oggi, a gridare alla morte della Net Art. Come spesso succede, si tratta in realtà di mettersi d’accordo sull’oggetto della conversazione. La Net Art nasce come nuova possibilità di azione creativa offerta da un mezzo nuovo. Fra i primi sperimentatori, un gruppo compatto e transnazionale – quello, in sostanza, che si riconosce nel termine net.art, e che trova in Nettime, in 7/11 e parzialmente in Rhizome la propria piattaforma di scambio – inizia a riconoscersi come avanguardia, e ad agire come tale. Un’avanguardia molto variegata, ma accomunata da alcune costanti: il rifiuto del sistema dell’arte, l’autoironia, il formalismo, l’autoreferenzialità, lo sviluppo di sistemi propri di sostentamento, la costruzione di una sovrastruttura leggendaria e di una narrazione in cui riconoscersi. La net.art porta avanti la propria ricerca, e in parallelo racconta la sua storia, e scrive il proprio certificato di morte. è stata una vicenda straordinaria, e se è vero che si è conclusa, è vero anche che i suoi principali rappresentanti sono ancora quasi tutti attivi, e che alcune delle tendenze più vitali della situazione presente – dalla Software Art al lavoro sulle interfacce alternative – nascono lì.
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Closer (2006). On Dani Marti
Dani Marti, Monika, 2008
Closer
by Domenico Quaranta
Published in Dani Marti: Dark Bones, exhibition catalogue, Brescia (Italy), Citric Gallery, 7 October – 11 November 2006
Among the many stories of violence and horror that characterise the late European Renaissance, that of Beatrice Cenci is possibly one of the most tragic and obscure. Even though historically proven to be true, the story is imbued with symbolic meaning that few narrations can express. This story has also been of great inspiration to the fantasy of many romantic writers, from Stendhal to Percy Bysshe Shelley. Beatrice Cenci is the ultimate symbol of female sensibility that rebels against patriarchal authority, at first against her father, who rapes her, and afterwards against the Pope, who has her decapitated.
Beatrice was the daughter of Francesco Cenci, a violent and perverted nobleman, recognized as such by the authorities and his family who try to isolate him without any success. She thus organizes his murder together with her mother and brothers. This brief liberation is really only the beginning of a higher level of violence she has to go through and which she would not survive. Though knowing the true nature of the father, the Papacy could not endorse a patricide: the social consequences of such a defeat to authorities would be devastating.
Even due to this, the torture and torment for patricides take the most spectacular shape that the seventeen centuries of Christian civilisation had ever witnessed and was able to devise. Beatrice was subject to rope pulling, hanging by her hair, and finally decapitation, together with her mother, in front of Castel Sant’Angelo; while her brother Giacomo is tortured with hot iron tongs before being crushed under the blow of a club. Bernardo, her twelve-year-old brother is spared his life, but only after being incarcerated for life and forced to follow every stage of the torment of his family. All the Cenci family possessions were confiscated by the Papacy.
Lilly controls my Foriginals
Courtesy HMKV, Dortmund
Critical text written for the exhibition UBERMORGEN.COM: ART FID [F]originals – Authentizität als konsensuelle Halluzination (May 27 – July 16, 2006, Curated by Inke Arns, Hartware MedienKunstVerein – PHOENIX Halle, Dortmund (Germany)
Lilly controls my Foriginals
Domenico Quaranta
In the projects series called Psych|OS, the Austrian artist duo UBERMORGEN.COM (lizvlx/Hans Bernhard) is working on the subtle membrane that connects the digital and the biological: a mix that UBERMORGEN.COM, an identity that lives and works on the Net, experienced on their own bodies. One of the best-known exponents of the net.art scene, UBERMORGEN.COM are the theorists of digital actionism, a radical practice of artistic action which experiments on the market of attention and takes place in mass media. The most astonishing result of this kind of practice so far has been Vote-Auction (2000), a web site that, during the American presidential elections 2000, helped people sell their vote in an auction. The legal prosecution against UBERMORGEN.COM, and the media hysteria it produced, are an integral part of the whole project. During this mass-media-performance, UBERMORGEN.COM were interviewed up to 30 times per day. CNN produced a 30 minutes show on the project in their legal format Burden of Proof. In this feature, UBERMORGEN.COM never comment on whether the project was a real threat to the integrity of the U.S. election or wheter it was a political satire.
Radical Software
Critical text written for the exhibition Radical Software, hosted by the Share Festival, Turin, 08.03.2006 – 12.03.2006.
If we leave aside its historical precedents, Software Art, in its classical definition formalized by the Jury Statement of “Transmediale 2001” [1] and extended by Florian Cramer [2], saw the light in 1997 with The Web Stalker of the English Group I/O/D and with the theoretical speculation started by one of the software authors, Matthew Fuller. Right from this first example and definitions, Software Art reveals its radical nature. The fact itself of transforming software from a mere instrument into “subject” and “contents” of a cultural and artistic reflection represents a Copernican revolution liable to be considered as heresy. Similarly heretic is the idea of adopting a language (HTML), a protocol of communication (HTTP) and the whole system of cultural objects (the web) and make them visible in a form that contrasts with their own original function. Software Art is radical even in its most harmless and politically neutral manifestations; when, in addition, it overturns the structure of the browser in controversy with the standardization of its interfaces, and when it adopts a slogan that sounds like: “software is mind control, get some”, then the controversy turns into poetics, the prime mover of a creative process.
RADICAL SOFTWARE is an exhibition including some recent examples of radical software. The name pays explicit homage to the magazine founded by Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot in 1970, that had the merit to combine, for the first time, political considerations and use of the media (in that case mainly video and television).
