Archive for the ‘2007’ Category
Media digitali e pratica del disegno
John F. Simon
Domenico Quaranta, “Media digitali e pratica del disegno”, first published in Titolo, N° 54, Autumn 2007, pp. 11 – 13
“Smart artists make the machine do the work!”1
Personale, intimo, istintivo. Da sempre, il disegno è la forma più diretta e immediata di comunicazione visiva, quella a cui gli artisti affidano le loro idee ancor prima che prendano forma. È la prima che impariamo, e quella di più lunga tradizione, tanto nella storia personale quanto in quella collettiva dell’uomo. Può richiedere strumenti molto evoluti, ma continua a esistere anche nella sua forma più elementare; e anche nella sua forma più elementare – lo scarabocchio tracciato distrattamente con la penna a sfera su un Post-it, continua a rivelare, del suo autore, più di quanto egli stesso non voglia dire.
Tutti questi, è ovvio, sono stereotipi. Proprio per la sua versatilità, il disegno è stato – e continua ad essere – molte cose: tecnica e improvvisazione, linea e chiaroscuro, segno e traccia, culmine della razionalità e registrazione dell’inconscio. “Il disegno è l’onestà dell’arte”, ha detto Ingres; “Il disegno è inganno”, ha detto Escher. Basterebbero queste due citazioni a dimostrare che stiamo semplificando troppo. D’altronde, è proprio a uno stereotipo che vogliamo fare riferimento; a un concetto diffuso di disegno, ben riassunto dalle parole di Matisse: “il disegno è, prima di tutto, uno strumento di espressione di sentimenti e sensazioni personali.” Uno stereotipo che l’utilizzo dei media digitali e della Rete sembrano sovvertire sotto vari punti di vista.
Critics and enthusiasts
Domenico Quaranta, “Critics and enthusiasts”, first published in Spawn of the Surreal, July 27, 2007.
Strange enough, if I always get angry when I find a Second Life enthusiast, I usually disagree with commonplace criticism of Second Life. What am I, in the end? A wannabe critic or a shameful enthusiast?
The fact is that bot enthusiasts and censors always seem to miss the point. Take, for example, the article published by Helen Stoilas in The Art Newspaper on July 04. It is quite a good review, but it fails in applying the same attention – and the same, uncritical enthusiasm – to the galleries which sell traditional – and, usually, artistically irrelevant – artifacts to the residents; to the traditional – and, usually, artistically irrelevant – artists who re-invented themselves as avatar artists; and to those who try to experiment with art in this virtual world in not always convincing, but always interesting ways. That’s how to say that in 1996 the Internet was a great place for art because you could see that little gallery from Michigan, the photos of an insignificant Lithuanian amateur and Vuk Cosic’s CNN Interactive spoof page. Or that TV in the Sixties was enhancing art not only thanks to Gerry Schum’s Video Gallery (1969) or the Spatialist Manifesto for Television (1952), but also to the first TV auctions…
In my opinion, Second Life will become an interesting place for the art market when you’ll sell a piece not just for an handful of Linden $, but for a lot of real $. But it’s already an interesting place for experimenting with art, even if many people don’t seem to know that…
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Semiotic phantoms
Domenico Quaranta, “Semiotic phantoms”, first published in Spawn of the Surreal, July 30, 2007.
In my very first post, I said that the aim of this blog should be to understand what’s the meaning of the word “art” in Second Life. However, in the beginning, could be simpler – and even helpful, in order to reach that target – to understand why Second Life can be attractive for an artist operating in real life. Cao Fei is a well known and highly esteemed Chinese artist. In her curriculum she lists a lot of Biennials, and important art centers and museums such as De Appel and Migros Museum in Zurich; she was featured in magazines such as Artforum, Art Review, Flash Art and Modern Painters, and art critics such as Hou Hanru, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Barbara Pollack wrote about her work. For the last Venice Biennale, she was invited by Hou Hanru to make a project for the China Pavillion, under the exhibition title Everyday Miracles. She built up a large, multi-chambered inflatable white installation, where the visitor can see i.Mirror (2007), her documentary trilogy about Second Life, and visit the virtual replica of the pavilion in Second Life (or is the real world installation a replica of the China Tracy Pavilion in Second Life? No matter…).
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Re-enact! Or, Just Like the Real World, only Different
Brody Condon - Performance Modification (Nauman), Machine Project, Los Angeles, Saturday February 9th, 2008.
Domenico Quaranta, “Re-enact! Or, Just Like the Real World, only Different”, first published in Spawn of the Surreal in 2 parts,August 22 and August 23, 2007
“The difference between what is evoked and what is real can even be sensible: I always happen to take no account of it.”
I started thinking to post on reenactment some time ago. That’s why when I read on -empyre- Patrick Lichty’s “missive” on The Issue of Remediation, I was happy and disappointed at the same time: disappointed because he came first, and happy because he showed the way, giving me some points of departure to enter this complicated issue. Let me sum up Lichty’s points:
- “ironic tension between the physical and the virtual” vs “affective connection [of the user] to online identity”;
- history and memory vs ephemerality and ahistoricity in virtual worlds;
- reenactment of performance-based works as “a way to preserve their degree of affect in space and time” vs reenactment as a way to challange/criticize Performance art.
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Displaced Familiarity. Interview with Scott Kildall
Scott Kildall, Void (2006). Recreation of "Leap Into the Void »" by Yves Klein
Domenico Quaranta, “Displaced Familiarity. Interview with Scott Kildall”, first published in Spawn of the Surreal, August 31, 2007.
Scott Kildall is a visual artist currently living in San Francisco, where he is working as a fellowship artist with the Kala Art Institute. In 2006 he received an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Starting in 2001, he put together a huge body of work in a variety of media including video installation, sound architecture, electromechanical sculpture and single-channel video projection.
Being interested in issues such as “dislocation, transition and emotional upheaval” and in the “exploration of anticipatory moments”, it’s no surprise that he was attracted by Second Life, where he become Great Escape, the purple-faced member of the Second Front performance group, that he co-founded in 2006. There he anticipated the re-enactment trend with his print series Paradise Ahead, and there he is developing (together with artist Victoria Scott) his last project, No Matter, one of the winners of the Mixed Realities Commissions organized by Turbulence.org and Ars Virtua (see the end of this interview for more details on the project). By the way, No Matter is not the first fruit of this collaboration: in 2006 they made, for a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, 2×2, an interactive (that doesn’t mean digital) installation about the psychology of online social networks: basically, a message board with a grid of holes where people can put their messages (written on rolled-up post-its), read and take away messages left by other people in an evolving, “anonymous and public information system”.
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