DOMENICO QUARANTA

On August 21, the Belgian version of Playlist. Playing Games, Music, Art closed. In this Youtube video, iMAL’s Director Yves Bernard offers a short tour around the exhibition.

Made for the blog YGAW by Silicon Sentier, which also featured a long review about the show.

Here you can find my set on Flickr. And these are by Rosa Menkman, who did a really good job (thanks, Rosa!). Some nice shots can be also found here and here.

Yesterday Rhizome.org started publishing a series of beautiful posts on the demoscene, a widespread and long-time phenomenon still little known out of the underground niche that contributed to it. I wrote shortly about it in my text for the catalogue of Playlist. Playing Games, Music, Art, the show I curated for LABoral (Gijon) some months ago and that closed on May 15. Now I’m happy to announce that the show will travel  to the iMAL Center for digital cultures and technology in Bruxelles, where it will open on June 3 with some fresh new works. More will come soon. By now, here you can find the website iMAL designed for Playlist, featuring texts, short explanations of the works and links to most of them.

Above you can see one of the new works on show: the video Come Together, coded by Erik Nilsson on a C64 BBS, with music by Goto80. Enjoy!

Domenico Quaranta, “Troubles in Paradise. How happened that an artist was banned from the Odyssey Sim”. First published on Spawn of the Surreal, October 8, 2007.

Some days ago (namely on Saturday, October 06, 18:42 Second Life time), an artist was banned from Odyssey. No playing: Odyssey, well know in Second Life as the most free, open-minded context for artists and performers, the place where Gazira Babeli set her retrospective and where most of Second Front’s performances took place, for the first time seems to set a limit to the freedom of its own residents. Someone ate the forbidden apple, and was expelled from Paradise.
This is, at least, what we could understand reading a current thread on Rhizome. But what really happened that awful day? How can we explain it? Let’s start from the beginning.

Salvatore Iaconesi, alias xdxd, is an Italian new media artist, activist and open source coder who did an impressive amount of work in many fields, ranging from generative art to artificial intelligence, from performance to code poetry to interactive installations. Some months ago, he entered Second Life and he did some un-authorized installations at Ars Virtua and in other places. In many private and public discussions, he never made a mistery of his criticism against Second Life. As most of the best artists inside there, he is conscious to be in a technically limited environment, where most of the things pretending to be “art” are childish efforts, miles and miles away from what we currently call “contemporary art”. But the fact that he kept on working in Second Life demonstrates that he sees in it an interesting socio-cultural context, where he can play with its human (or inhuman) dynamics. Or, in his own words: “I really don’t even value Second Life so much. Want to know what i find interesting in it? the social-niche mindfucker that it became, and the way that it has been exploited from mass media, and the mechanisms behind mediocre people using it to gain attention, and a badly-recycled form of human nature struggling to come out over there, too.”
Read the rest of this entry »