Archive for the ‘antonio caronia’ tag
An interview with Davide Grassi (2005)
The central point of everything is not man, but rather the survival of the system. An interview with Davide Grassi
Published in I. Ivkovic, D. Grassi (eds), Demokino. Virtual Biopolitical Agora, Aksioma – Maska, 2006 [Transformacije Series, n° 19].
Dziga Vertov (the theoretician of kino-glazo) was certain that film could be used for political goals, that it can be changed into a means for a “communist decodification of the world”.
It’s hard to tell whether with the title of his last project – DemoKino – Davide Grassi wished to pay tribute to one of the fathers of film or to make fun of his unrealized ambitions.
The project is a narrative divided into 8 film clips based on a screenplay by Antonio Caronia. It unwinds live, with a streaming technique, allowing viewers to edit the film interactively. The main character is one Kolja, a Slovene youth with an average education and an average interest in current events, facing a serious of varied dilemmas through the day, a sort of contemporary Hamlet. For example, two Mormons ring his doorbell, and he begins to ponder sects, Raelites and cloning. Or: he’s surfing the net and suddenly begins to question copyright. In this manner, while engaging in every day activity, on the toilet or on the phone, Kolja starts thinking about abortion, euthanasia, genetically modified organisms, therapeutic cloning, homosexual marriage, water privatization. He discusses all the pros and contras and then tries to decide: which is where the user steps in, voting in his name; the majority vote then leads onto the next room, the next question. And the next dilemma. From one vote to the next, we come to the final clip of the film, followed by, without interaction by clicking, a final short clip. The now-familiar face of Kolja is substituted by a smiling clown: “What about if I tell you that everything was defined in advance?”. A silly melody and a sarcastic smile thereby destroy any illusions brought about by the “virtual parliament” of DemoKino. Concepts like (inter)active collaboration, direct democracy, a virtual agora and freedom of choice, collapse alongside the clown’s red nose, just as Italian democracy did alongside pianists’ musical performances. As with Kafka, the clarity of law is disfigured in the muddle of a process that remains invisible to the end. But the question of the virtuality of contemporary democracy is only one of the questions put forth by DemoKino: it also discusses the effectiveness of the much praised interactivity of the web and the transformation of politics into biopolitics, or rather, the recent tendency to try to make the private public, and transform life itself into a political question. This complexity is common to all works of Grassi, an Italian artist who moved to Ljubljana in 1995, where he founded the non-profit organization Aksioma, producing works which use new media to investigate social, political, ethical and aesthetic questions. Because life is politics, theatre is terrorism and problems produce profit…
RE:AKT!
Antonio Caronia, Janez Jansa, Domenico Quaranta (eds), RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting, FPEditions, March 2009. Euro 25,00, ISBN: 978-88-903308-6-5, English. With contributions by: Jennifer Allen, Antonio Caronia, Rod Dickinson, Domenico Quaranta, Jan Verwoert. Read the rest of this entry »
