The 10th edition of the Pixxelpoint festival will open tomorrow evening, at 8 PM. In the meantime, the online section of the main exhibition is up and running, thanks to Padiglioneinternet.com and Clubinternet.org. CHECK IT OUT HERE!!!

Tom Jennings, Alan Turing Made Flat, 2000

D. Quaranta, “Once Upon a Time in the West”, in Pixxelpoint – Once Upon a Time in the West, exhibition catalogue, Nova Gorica 2009.

I

Although the term “new media” is one of today’s great buzzwords, in actual fact these media are anything but new. The Net is twenty years old, if we start counting from the advent of the Web, forty if we start from Arpanet. Spacewar!, the first videogame ever, is more or less the same age. Virtual worlds are the updated, more streamlined versions of technology acclaimed as “the future” when Second Life programmers were still in diapers; social networks are the bastard sons of Fidonet. As for the computer, it is younger than Lord Byron, but certainly not than his daughter Ada.

Once upon a time there was the electronic frontier, an abandonware myth which drew life from the continuous advance of the frontier itself. Like in space, in technological progress there’s no ocean at the end of the trip. But, unlike the space race, the race to the next technology is endless, and endlessness is boring.

Yet while we have grown accustomed to innovation and the day-after rhetorics, we have never got used to the loss of the past. We look back to what was new yesterday and is trash today, and we feel a deep sense of nostalgia. Commodore 64 and 386dx. The first Apple Macintosh. Bulletin Board Systems. Animated gifs. Glittering images. Web buttons. Super Mario. Doom. Napster. Jennicam. Mosaic. ASCII art. MIDIs and MOOs. Not to mention VHS, vinyl, audio cassettes, cathode ray tubes, portable radios, faxes. It is the kind of nostalgia that we feel for a relative who died young, once the pain abates: you are left wondering what kind of man he would have been. Or for someone who, once grown up, does not live up to his or her promise. Sometimes nostalgia develops into historical research, and becomes media archeology. We don’t look for the technologies that we once loved, but those we have never seen in action.

But in both the cases, in the artistic field this sentimental look at the past is producing some brand new, interesting stuff. Reviving dead media and obsolete technologies, retrieving and rekindling their aesthetics, making them do things they were never expected to do, and telling stories about them with other means, is proving to be a sound artistic strategy – undoubtedly more so than “the exploration of the artistic potential of new media” which became the mantra of most New Media Art. This happens because, when you give up on the rhetorics of novelty, what is left on stage is the human element: the man of the past who domesticated the media, put his own life into them and was changed by them; and the man of the present, who looks back on that past with the same sentiment as the venerable Sergio Leone looked to the West.

On the occasion of its 10th Birthday, Pixxelpoint festival wants to explore this feeling. Clean out your attic, the folders you haven’t touched for years, GIF repositories, your university’s warehouse, and the dumps of Silicon Valley – or its small-town emulators. Get your hands on this stuff, and send us your finds. Any media is allowed, apart from new!

II

I wrote this call for artists around the end of April 2009. I had just become the happy father of a wonderful child, and I was about to become the happy father of a weighty PHD thesis. While the first was all about the new, the latter was an effort to understand what went wrong with so called “New Media Art” in the last fifty years or so. The answer, of course, is complicated and took about 300 pages to discuss and formulate academically. The bottom line is that “the exploration of the artistic potential of the new media” mantra and the very notion of “new media”, while not the only factors, seem to have a lot of responsibility for the problems that “New Media Art” experienced in its efforts to become something more than a niche for geeks.

This notion offers an insight into my call for artists and the thinking behind it. When you have to organize an event based on an open call, time is a key factor. Eight months is a really long time, both for a child and for a show. In eight months, my child went from about 3 kilos to almost 10, got sick once, cut his first two teeth and produced an incredible quantity of… well, you know what I’m talking about. As for the show, in eight months you send the call for artists, you get feedback from friends, you read new articles and books, you see new projects, you start working on another exhibition on a similar subject, and finally you get the applications in and start reviewing them. Some of them fit perfectly into the framework you set up, others don’t fit at all, and a few force it to develop in directions that you never envisaged. And when you finally go back to the project, you see that it has grown up, that it has teeth, and that it’s different from what you expected.

At that point, you start writing a text for the catalogue – it’s late and you have to hurry. You dig into your hard disk and find the call for artists you wrote eight months previously. Reading it, you see just how far you now are from that point, how much the project differs from that first draft. But it wasn’t just a first draft, something that you shared with just your team and a few other people. It is out there, published on web sites and magazines, and has been read by at least the one hundred and thirty eight artists who sent in applications. It’s part of the story, like it or not. It’s like the picture that shows how fat you were as a teenager, hidden for years in the family album until some so-called former friend you almost forgot about uploads it on Facebook and tags you in it.

III

Actually, I’m not that unhappy with that text, but I wanted to make this story longer because I have to fill up these pages and because – no matter how much you think you’ve changed – you always end up bumping into someone from the past who delights in telling you that you’re exactly like you always were. Nevertheless, there are a couple of points I’d like to clarify, disavow, atone for. The first one is the feeling of nostalgia, which was at the core of the call for artists and also inspired the title of the exhibition. Nostalgia is a good feeling, I like it. But in the field of art, nostalgia is often a synonym of mannerism, academism, and decadence. Artists are often nostalgic about another conception of art, or of another way of making art. The kind of nostalgia you can experience in art made with obsolete technologies is rather different: it looks back in a new way to the past of a medium which wasn’t perceived as an art medium at the time, or to a set of aesthetics which were developed outside of the art field. An artist trying to remake jodi today is a nouveau Bouguereau; an artist working with animated gifs today is an innovator working with an obsolete medium.

Moreover, nostalgia is not the only feeling that takes you back, for instance, to your old GameBoy, and rarely is it the main one. Yet I still think that feelings play an important role in the process. In a way, an obsolete technology is more “human” than its newer counterparts, in the same way as, in Terminator II, Arnold Schwarzenegger is more human than the liquid metal T-1000, the latest output of the same technology. It carries the memory of the great times shared, but also the memory of its “initial promise”, as Walter Benjamin put it, and of its final failure. For all these reasons, it elicits an emotional involvement that is very different from that related to newer, still surprising and still successful, technologies. And this is true for both the creator and the audience. Look at what is happening with 3D animation, for instance. When you go to see Ice Age III, you expect it to be not just as entertaining as the previous two, but also more spectacular, with more advanced special effects, animated in a sleeker, more natural way. The people working on it are aware of this and do their best to dazzle us with top-level technology.

On the contrary, when we go to see Kirikù or Persepolis, for example, we are not expecting to be surprised by technology. But this doesn’t mean that we are necessarily driven by nostalgic feeling – that we are looking for something old, reassuring, retro, done in the good old way and recalling our childhood cartoons. That is just one option. What most of us are looking for is something new made with old means. The implicit belief is that an old technology doesn’t stop having something to say because it has been replaced by new tools. Quite the contrary.

IV

Obsolescence is the other face of the race towards the new. Focusing on nostalgia, we implicitly accept planned obsolescence, the marketing strategy developed to force us to buy the last release of something we already have. Saying that we like the obsolete because it’s obsolete is like saying: “new is better, but we are old and prefer old things”. For many artists working with obsolete media, their art is not a nostalgic tribute to the past, but an act of cultural resistance against the present and this marketing strategy. Choosing lo-fi instead of wi-fi, lo-res instead of hi-res, the amateurish instead of the professional, the old instead of the new, can thus become a political act. The very fact that nobody will employ you today on the basis of being a GIF virtuoso, a great Assembly coder or a passionate manipulator of your old Commodore 64 is meaningful in itself. Working with obsolete technologies is necessarily an amateurish practice. And, as the Critical Art Ensemble wrote in Digital Resistance, «[…] tactical media practitioners support and value amateur practice – both their own and that of others. Amateurs have the ability to see through the dominant paradigms, are freer to recombine elements of paradigms thought long dead, and can apply everyday life experience to their deliberations. Most important, however, amateurs are not invested in institutionalized systems of knowledge production and policy construction, and hence do not have irresistible forces guiding the outcome of their process such as maintaining a place in the funding hierarchy, or maintaining prestige capital.»[1]

Moreover, dealing with obsolete media is political because it often entails a refusal to work with proprietary software and hardware. Writing about the current use of animated GIFs, Sally McCay explains that «their use is also somewhat political and can indicate a commitment to the long-standing open source, anti-copyright activism of online producers»[2]. Finally, we have to consider that the more complicated a computer is, the more we are delegating to those who are responsible for the software; and, as the collective I/O/D taught us, “software is mind control”: a cultural artifact which brings with it the culture and ideas of those who built it. Thus, working with older machines that can only be programmed in machine language enables you to dialogue directly with the machine itself, bypassing any attempt to take control of what you are doing. In this regard, Seb Franklin quotes Cory Arcangel, who wrote: «I tend to prefer assembly because it gives me control over the machine and assures me that the aesthetic choices are based on the hardware of the machine, and not, say, some dupe at Macromedia.»[3]

V

Furthermore, if we start viewing media obsolescence as a phase in the life of a medium and a vibrant stage in our cultural history, rather than the unhappy ending of the same story, we discover that we can make stunningly new things with obsolete media. Working with a medium that can’t evolve any further has tremendous potential: you can delve deeply into it, and gain increasing awareness of what you can and you can’t do; you can use it in ways that were never envisioned by those who created it, and lastly, being a child of your time (and not of the past, when the medium in question was new) you can use it in a pretty contemporary way. Both Chuck Close in his daguerreotypes and William Kentridge in his hand-drawing based animations are using old means in unprecedented ways, and doing so to effectively talk about their own time. Close uses the daguerrotype in a way that contains an awareness of the whole history of photography, of the digital shift of the last decade and the contemporary attitude toward the large format; but the precision, depth and energy of these images could never be achieved with a digital camera. When using a 386dx or playing with a Gameboy, nobody would ever have thought about turning the former into a rockstar, and the latter into a musical instrument; but this is exactly what happened to these devices at the end of the Nineties, with Alexei Shulgin and the chiptune community.

What’s more, working within a defined set of constraints can, paradoxically, be more exciting than working with a tool that seems to grant an apparently total freedom. The fathers of contemporary culture, such as Raymond Russell and Marcel Duchamp, knew this well, even though they did not manage to convey it to their descendents, who often got drunk on total freedom. When you work with a limited tool, such as an animated GIF, you know that there are some things you can do and some things you can’t; the idea of using these to get results that you would only think possible with later technologies is one of the reasons that drives many artists to use these instead of Shockwave or Flash.

VI

Lastly, the decision to use obsolete media reveals a complex attitude toward the past, which cannot be described only in terms of nostalgia. In some cases, it is the juicy fruit of a steampunk imagination, which attempts to rewrite the past according to a different evolution of its premises. In these terms Vinylvideo described its activity, based on the storage of video (moving image plus sound) on analog long-play records, as a “fake archeology of media”.[4] And, after talking about the era of the birth of the computer, this is how Tom Jennings talks about his project World Power Systems: «World Power Systems is an entity that produces artifacts and written ideas to create a sort of portal between the early Cold War era and today; to illuminate the beauty and horror, at once alien and familiar, and thereby reflect today’s beauty and horror back into visibility. […] Sleek futuristic technologies of the past; entire branches of science and industry utterly forgotten, whose once-experts are now cranks; solutions to problems impossible to recall; the solutions now problems themselves.»[5]

In other cases, looking back to the history of the media goes hand in hand with looking back to your own personal history. This is almost obvious, but it became clear to me when I discovered the project Childhood Games, by Eugenio Tisselli. In 1984, when he was 12 years old, Tisselli created some computer games without access to a computer, writing the code in a notebook. In 2008, the artist finally released these games on the Net. Yet the futuristic dream of a child did not translate into the nostalgic reminiscences of an adult white male: «I wanted to re-connect with the mind of my childhood, and try to understand its creative processes. This work is not about nostalgia; it is about remembering that imagination (that is, the act of creating images) can also be a central element of game play. Thus, the graphics are simple on purpose, to the point of being primitive. I didn’t want to re-create the then-current state of technology, but to dream again of other worlds, armed only with a handful of basic symbols.»[6]

VII

In the end, Once Upon a Time in the West, the title chosen for this Pixxelpoint festival, is not that bad. Indeed in spaghetti westerns, as in this show, nostalgia is just a minimal part of the whole thing. Firstly, Sergio Leone’s movies were one of the best things to come out of an age of political conflicts, which are often addressed in his work. Secondly, the spaghetti western was the unexpected development of a dead medium (western movies), which introduced some extraordinary variations into a highly codified genre, and enabled it to survive to the present day. And lastly, it turned that past into a literary place, breathing new life into it and giving it a bright future.

NOTES:

[1] Critical Art Ensemble, Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media, Autonomedia, New York 2001, pp. 8 – 9. Available online at the URL http://www.critical-art.net/books/digital/ (last retrieved 19.11.2009).

[2] Sally McCay, “The Affect of Animated GIFs (Tom Moody, Petra Cortright, Lorna Mills)”, in Art and Education, 2009, available online at the URL http://www.artandeducation.net/papers/view/14 (last retrieved 19.11.2009).

[3] Seb Franklin, “On Game Art, Circuit Bending and Speedrunning as Counter-Practice: ‘Hard’ and ‘Soft’ Nonexistence”, in Ctheory, June 2009, available online at the URL http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=609 (last retrieved 19.11.2009).

[4] [About Vinylvideo], available online at the URL http://www.vinylvideo.com/press/02_text/02_vv_about.html (last retrieved 19.11.2009).

[5] Tom Jennings, “World Power Systems”, available online at the URL http://wps.com/about-WPS/WPS/index.html (last retrieved 19.11.2009).

[6] Eugenio Tisselli, “Childhood Games”, available online at the URL http://www.motorhueso.net/childhoodgames/english/index.htm (last retrieved 19.11.2009).

Once Upon a Time in the West

December 4 – 11, 2009

Nova Gorica (SI) – Gorizia (IT)

Curator: Domenico Quaranta

Organization: Kulturni dom Nova Gorica

Kulturni Dom Nova Gorica (Slovenia) is proud to announce the 10th edition of the International New Media Art Festival Pixxelpoint, that will open at the Mestna galerija Nova Gorica on December 4, 2009, at 8.00 PM. The festival will take place from December 4 to December 11, 2009, and will have two venues: the Mestna Galerija Nova Gorica, every day from 9.00 AM to 7.00 PM; and the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Gorizia (Via Carducci 2, Gorizia), every day from 2.00 to 7.00 PM. Furthermore, Web based works have been collected in an online gallery designed in collaboration with Club Internet (www.clubinternet.org) and proudly hosted by Padiglione Internet (www.padiglioneinternet.com) – a project by Miltos Manetas for the Venice Biennale. The online exhibition, open every day, 24/24, will be screened in the two venues of the festival as well.
Pixxelpoint, now celebrating its 10th birthday, has become an internationally established New Media Art festival, well known in Slovenia and abroad. Its primary interest is to bring information technologies and New Media Art to a broader audience, and to help new generations in developing an alternative, more “mature” use of the computer.

THE FESTIVAL THEME
Once Upon a Time in the West

We keep on talking about “new media”, while in actually fact these media are anything but new. The Net is twenty years old, if we start counting from the advent of the Web, forty if we start from Arpanet. Spacewar!, the first videogame ever, is more or less the same age. Virtual worlds are the updated, lighter versions of a technology acclaimed as “the future” when Second Life programmers were still in diapers; social networks are the bastard sons of Fidonet. As for the computer, it is younger than Lord Byron, but certainly not than his daughter Ada.

Once upon a time there was the electronic frontier, an abandonware myth which was able to regenerate itself thanks to the continuous advance of the frontier itself. Like in space, in technological progress there’s no ocean at the end of the trip. But, unlike the space race, the race to the next technology is endless, and endlessness is boring.

Yet, while we got used to innovation and the day-after rhetorics, we have never got used to the loss of the past. We look back to what was new yesterday and is trash today, and we feel a deep sense of nostalgia. Commodore 64 and 386dx. The first Apple Macintosh. Bulletin Board Systems. Animated gifs. Glittering images. Web buttons. Super Mario. Doom. Napster. Jennicam. Mosaic. ASCII art. MIDIs and MOOs. Not to mention VHS, vinyl, audio cassettes, cathode tubes, portable radios, faxes. It is the kind of nostalgia that we feel for a relative who died young, once the pain abates: you are left wondering what kind of man he would have been. Or for someone that, once grown up, does not live up to his or her promise. Sometimes nostalgia develops into historical research, and becomes media archeology. We don’t look for the technologies that we once loved, but those we have never seen in action.

But in both the cases, in the artistic field this sentimental look at the past is producing some brand new, interesting stuff. Reviving dead media and obsolete technologies, retrieving and rekindling their aesthetics, making them do things they were never expected to do, and telling stories about them with other means is proving to be a sound artistic strategy – undoubtedly more so than “the exploration of the artistic potential of new media” which became the mantra of most New Media Art. This happens because, when you give up on the rhetorics of novelty, what is left on stage is the human element: the man of the past who domesticated the media, put his own life into them and was changed by them; and the man of the present, who looks back on that past with the same sentiment as the venerable Sergio Leone looked to the West.

Indeed in spaghetti westerns, as in this show, nostalgia is just a minimal part of the whole thing. The decision to use obsolete media reveals can be act of cultural resistance against the present and this marketing strategy, as well as proprietary software and hardware; a way to make something new with old means; the resiult of the choice to work withing a defined set of constraints. In some cases, it is the juicy fruit of a steampunk imagination; iIn other cases, looking back to the history of the media goes hand in hand with looking back to your own personal history.

Domenico Quaranta

EXHIBITING ARTISTS:

AIDS-3D (Germany): Forever Heath Death, 2009

Mats Andren & Anders Carlsson (Sweden): HT Gold, 2008

Michael Bell Smith (USA): Grid Panic, 2006

David Blackmore (UK): Cracked LCDs, 2009

Ian Bogost (USA): Guru meditation, 2009

BridA / Tom Kerševan, Sendi Mango, Jurij Pavlica (Slovenia): Nanoplot, 2009

Wayne Clements (UK): The Best and Worst of Possible Worlds, 2009

Vuk Ćosić (Slovenia): ASCII sculpture, 2009

Chris Coy (USA): Chariots of Mortal Combat Fire, 2007

Florian Cramer (The Netherlands): Floppy Films, 2009

Olle Essvik (Sweden): Devices, 2007 – 2008

Vladimir Frelih (Croatia): Katalogue, 1998 – 2000

Darko Fritz (Croatia): Home, 2002 – 2009

James Houston (UK): Big Ideas (Don’t Get Any), 2008

IOcose (Italy): Floppytrip, 2009

Tom Jennings (USA): Alan Turing made flat, 2000

Oliver Larić (Germany): 787 Cliparts, 2006

Les Liens Invisibles (Italy): Never Ending Happy End, 2008

Olia Lialina (Germany): Animated Gif Model, 2005

Paul Matosic (UK): Deconstructed New Technology, 1995 – ongoing

Eilis McDonald (Ireland): Lo-fi Wi-fi, 2008

Rosa Menkman (The Netherlands): Happy Birthday Goto80, 2009

Rafael Rozendaal (The Netherlands): RGB, 2002

Thatisaworkaround (Greece): The Enemy Agent and You II, 2009

Thisgasthing (Italy): CABOTRONIUM, 2009

Eugenio Tisselli (Spain): Childhood Games, 1984 – 2009

Tonylight (Italy): Space LED, 2009

UBERMORGEN.COM (Austria): Black ‘n white, 2000 – 2009

Harm Van Den Dorpel (The Netherlands): Bison.gif, 2008

Windows Media Players (UK): Graphic Interchange Series: Victorian Device, 2009

Math Wrath: While Playing Astro Grover in 1989

FOR THE FULL PROGRAM, CHECK OUT:

http://www.pixxelpoint.org

MORE INFOS:

http://www.pixxelmusic.com

http://domenicoquaranta.com

PRESS:

IMAGES 1 (zip, 8.1 MB) – http://domenicoquaranta.com/public/PRESS/PX09_press_pack1.zip

IMAGES 2 (zip, 8.2 MB) – http://domenicoquaranta.com/public/PRESS/PX09_press_pack2.zip

PRESS RELEASE (pdf) – http://domenicoquaranta.com/public/PRESS/Pixxelpoint09_PR_ENG.pdf

PIXXELPOINT 2008 / FOR GOD’S SAKE!
Kulturni Dom Nova Gorica (Slovenia) is pleased to announce the 9th International New Media Art Festival Pixxelpoint, that will open at the Nova Gorica City Gallery (Mestna galerija Nova Gorica)
on December 5, 2008, at 8.00 PM. The festival will run from December 5 to December 12, 2008.
Pixxelpoint is one of the most successful and renowned festivals of new media art in Slovenia and also abroad. Its purpose is firstly, to bring the information technology and new media art closer to
the general public, and secondly, to raise awareness about a different potential to use computer among the young.

FOR GOD’S SAKE!

This year’s edition of the festival focus on the theme “FOR GOD’S SAKE! How the media change the way we imagine / represent / honour / curse the divinity”, suggested by the Italian art critic, teacher and curator Domenico Quaranta. In his words, “contemporary artistic projects have often raised such issues as technological fetishism, the oracular nature of the internet, the fideistic attitude we have towards the media and the evangelizing bent of those who produce them. This art often takes a critical approach, but also looks for an authentic vehicle of spirituality in the media. Taking this as its theme, Pixxelpoint 2008 addresses saints and heretics alike, showing projects which explore the relationship between media and spirituality at a key point in human history, a time of civilization clashes and neocon upsurges, apocalyptic nightmares and hopes for a new enlightenment.”
Among the works, distributed between the two spaces of Mestna Galerija Nova Gorica and Galerija Tir in Mostovna, the ones selected through the international call for artists are presented together with the ones proposed by internationally renown artists invited to take part in the exhibition. As in the previous editions, the festival program involves panels, workshops, musical events and the screening of a movie. The events will take place on both the sides of the border between Italy and Slovenia: together with Mostovna, Associazione Lucide and Dams – Università di Udine, located in Gorizia, have been involved. They will produce Pixxelmusic, a parallel festival that will run from December 10 to 12, 2008.

THE EXHIBITION

The exhibition, distributed between Nova Gorica and Mostovna, is the result of a difficult process of selection of the more than 110 applications arrived this year; a selection that should take into account not just the quality of the proposals, but also their ability to embody the suggested theme in a different way, and to integrate effectively the projects shown by the invited artists. The exhibition consists of 30 works by 30 different artists. Among them, etoy‘s Mission Eternity project, described as a “digital cult of the dead”; the network of meditating computers set up by the German artists Ute Hörner & Mathias Antlfinger; the Empathy Box by the Italian collective Io/cose, which helps building a spiritual community based on the sharing of pain; the antiinstitutional, new media rituality suggested by Otherehto; Martin Conrads and Ingo Gerken‘s conceptual work, an interrogation on the ritual use of communication technologies; and then Gazira Babeli and Patrick Lichty‘s video-installation 7UP, a research on the meaning of an avatar life, and Janez Janša‘s remake of Koyaanisqatsi, which uses Google Earth as a source. The video screening, situated in the Galerija Tir in Mostovna, collects all the videos on show at the festival, putting together some brand new works with recent “classics” such as Negativland‘s The Mashin’ of the Christ (2004) and Eddo Stern‘s Deathstar (2004) , an exploration of the relationship between religion and violence.

Below, the complete list of all the participating artists:

ALTERAZIONI VIDEO (Italy); GAZIRA BABELI & PATRICK LICHTY (Italy / USA); BridA / JURIJ PAVLICA, TOM KERŠEVAN, SENDI MANGO (Slovenia); MARTIN BUTLER (Netherlands); MARTIN CONRADS & INGO GERKEN (Germany); BRYANT DAMERON (USA); ETOY (Switzerland / International); UTE HÖRNER & MATHIAS ANTLFINGER (Germany); IO/COSE (Italia); JANEZ JANŠA (Slovenia); JAŠA (Slovenia); MARKUS KISON (Germany); CLEMENS KOGLER & KARO SZMIT (Austria); OLIVER LARIC (Germany); LES LIENS INVISIBLES (Italy); KEVIN LOGAN (USA); MANU LUKSCH (UK); MOLLEINDUSTRIA (Italy); PETROS MORIS (Greece); NEGATIVLAND (USA); OTHEREHTO (Cyberspace); PASH* (Germany); CRISTIANO POIAN & PAOLO TONON (Italy); SECOND FRONT (Second Life / International); DANA SEDEROWSKY (Sweden); GULI SILBERSTEIN (Israel); ALAN SONDHEIM (USA); EDDO STERN (USA).

PIXXELMUSIC

On December 10, 2008, at 6.30 PM Pixxelmusic, a related festival, will open in the restaurant “Al Falegname” in Gorizia, Italy. The festival will run until December 12, and includes many different events. Pixxeldinner, a dinner / panel (coordinated by Marco Mancuso, director of the editorial project Digicult) that will take place after the opening mixing pleasure, conviviality and culture, will involve the following speakers: Claudio Sinatti, filmaker, vj and video artist; Antonio Riello, artist and teacher; Peter Mlakar, head of the Department of Pure and Applied Philosophy of the NSK; Jurij Krpan, director and curator of the Galerija Kapelica in Ljubliana; and Claudia D’Alonzo, indipendent curator. Pixxellab (December 11), a vj session with the Dutch artist EBOMAN and the Italian duo Mylicon/EN, and Pixxelnite (December 12), with the group Useless Wooden Toys, will close the festival.

MORE INFOS:

www.pixxelpoint.org
www.pixxelmusic.com

PASH*, Moonwalk, 2008, Youtube video, 2:20 min

FOR GOD’S SAKE!

[Text written for the catalogue of the exhibition Pixxelpoint 2008 - For God's Sake!, Nova Gorica, Mestna Galerija Nova Gorica, December 5 - 12, 2008. Downloadable catalogue here. ]

“God Always Uses the Latest Technology.”

In the little town in northern Italy where I live, which is economically prosperous, culturally sleepy, religiously bigotted and politically conservative, there is a small but interesting “Museum of Art and Spirituality”. It presents part of the collection of contemporary art that belonged to Giovanni Battista Montini, a.k.a. Pope Paul VI, an illustrious local man and possibly the last Catholic pope to believe that contemporary art could convey a religious message. After a brief look at the collection, it is easy to agree that Pope Paul’s faith in art, was, as they say, blind. While alongside a few daubs, he managed to collect a number of undisputed masterpieces, by artists including Sironi, Morandi, De Chirico, Chagall, Kokoschka, Dalì, Matisse, Manzù and Giacometti, in this art it is difficult to find the populace-educating power of Medieval and Renaissance art, or the astounding emotional impact of Baroque art. None of these works has the catalyzing power of an icon. Contemporary art alters the rhetoric of religious art, learns its stylistic approaches and tackles it from a secular point of view. At times it conveys a private form of spirituality, not necessarily linked to any religion. And often, when it tackles official religions, it does so in a provocative, iconoclastic way: take Martin Kippenberger’s crucified frog, for instance, or the cross submerged in the urine of Andres Serrano, or Maurizio Cattelan’s Nona ora, or the Virgin Mary blackened with elephant dung by Chris Ofili, or Vanessa Beecroft’s recent Madonnas. All of these works are undoubtedly imbued with their own form of “sacredness”, yet they would hardly be hung in a church.

Even post-colonial art, which takes account of local traditions and therefore often deals with the powerful influence of religion, seems more intent on critiquing this influence than exploring its depths. In the contemporary art world, only video – in some instances – seems to have taken up the legacy of great religious art: take Bill Viola, for example, whose works have also been shown in cathedrals. We could explore the extent to which this is connected to the fluid magic of the electronic image, and more in general the ability demonstrated by the mass media in conveying the religious message, and recuperating the role of “biblia pauperum” once played by the great fresco cycles.

While sects and religions have had a hold over radio and television frequencies for some time, the film industry, from The Ten Commandments (1956) to The Passion of The Christ (2004), has accomplished what art has no longer been able to for around two centuries. But it has been above all with the appearance of the phenomenon euphemistically dubbed “the clash of civilizations” that we have become aware of the extraordinary readiness and skill shown by religions of all kinds in exploiting the media. The papal decree declaring the validity of a blessing received during a live radio programme (1967) came around the same time as Nam June Paik’s first legendary video (Café Gogo, Blecker Street, 1965, featuring the Pope), and the same recognition was accorded to blessings on the internet in 1995, when most of the political world had not yet even acknowledged its existence. On another front, the videos of Palestinian kamikazes have done much more for the development of “tactical media” than the Seattle movement. “God Always Uses the Latest Technology”, I once read on a Christian website. Holy wars are now waged as much in virtual worlds as real ones, and in video games such as Under Ash and Kuma War as much as with car bombs and air raids. We look to technology to confirm myth and miracle, from the Turin Shroud, to the blood of St. Gennaro, to the tears of the Virgin Mary; while the Catholic backing for Mel Gibson’s blockbuster is common knowledge, as is the way in which Opus Dei adroitly used the media to turn The Da Vinci Code’s bumbling but best-selling attack to its own advantage.

As I write there is an exhibition regarding this very theme – the skilful use of the media made by sects and religions – being staged. Entitled “Medium Religion”, it is hosted by the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe (curated by Boris Groys and Peter Weibel). The press release goes as follows:

“Video has become the chosen media for religious propaganda as it can be produced and distributed particularly fast thanks to today’s technology. [...] The exhibition “Media Religion” aims to demonstrate the medial aspect of religion based on current examples of religious propaganda and individual works by contemporary artists. Shown, among others, will be confession videos by religiously inspired terrorists, religious propaganda television series, and documentaries about current sects and religious groups. The artistic works juxtaposing the documentary material arise for the most part from the same context as the religious movements that they refer to. The relationship of most of the artists to religious rituals, images, and texts from their own culture is neither affirmative nor critical but instead, blasphemous. In this way, a critical analysis of the respective religious iconography is possible, as well as its crossover into modern culture.”

If the religious – when not cultural – use of the media has had a hand in bringing religion to the centre of artists’ attention, the ramifications of religion in the information society are, if possible, even more complex and fascinating. Whether we like it or not, spirituality has shaped the evolution of the media, and has in turn been greatly influenced by it.

Two of the most effective technological era brands – the Big Brother symbol and the Second Life logo – are patently inspired by the divine eye, and more generally, religious iconography appears to be almost an obligatory reference for many communications and media companies, especially stateside. High tech gadgets are increasingly aspiring, with undisputed success, to the status of fetish object. Without any great qualms we have replaced rosary beads and holy images with iPods and iPhones, and prayer books (even in the form of Mao Tse Tung’s little red book) with Notebooks. Total immersion in videogame playing, even from the postural point of view, resembles a new form of prayer or religious ecstasy, and search engines have acquired the status of oracles. “It’s true – I read it on Google”, is an often-heard mantra that sounds like an act of faith. If religion is (or was) the opium of the people, in the 90s it was banal to say the same of television, and now of Youtube.

“God games” are one of the most successful videogame genres, and together with the satellite vision made popular by GPS systems and Google Earth, they show how much we enjoy having an omniscient, commanding view of the world. What the Greeks regarded as the sin of hubris is commonplace for us, almost mundane, as is another divine prerogative man has granted himself: that of taking on different forms and using these to operate in different worlds. Like in the past, this projection of the divine ego is known as an avatar, but unlike in the past, it is now a possibility open to any acne-ridden adolescent. For today’s teenagers, “virtual life” is a fact of life, but often it is also, like in the film eXsistenZ (1999) by David Cronenberg (also present at Pixxelpoint) a collective cult, a religion. The fact that it is not yet possible to risk one’s ‘real’ life (unlike in the film), is a mere detail. Technology also violates our privacy like only God used to be able to; thus while we are increasingly unwilling to attend confession, we find it easier and easier to lay our souls bare on social networks. While our computers are not yet as powerful as HAL 9000, the arrogant superbrain in 2001 A Space Odyssey, we get the impression that this is not far off. In any case, a few years back we were sufficiently advanced to direct our millennial angst at an improbable “millennium bug”, and more recently, at a highly technological particle accelerator, which ended up getting jammed on its first run.

I am writing this article on my Macbook, on a slow, clunky train which was probably last renovated at the beginning of the 90s. It is called Freccia della Versilia – Arrow of Versilia. Opposite me there is a girl in pointed shoes and ripped jeans painting her nails and replying to sporadic messages on her Blackberry. When this secular ritual is interrupted, she takes a tiny pamphlet out of her bag – about 5 cm across, and with few pages. On the cover there is a Madonna and child image, but a few details reveal that this prayer book is not the stuff of Catholic orthodoxy. To the side of me there are two other girls. One has an open copy of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace by Arthur C. Danto, while the other, who is wearing Timberlands and a Palestinian kefiah, is holding a sheaf of notes. But instead of reading, the girls are talking about nirvana, The Celestine Prophecy and finalism, mixing philosophy, mysticism and new age. Then they stop, and the one reading Danto gets out an iPod. I swear. May god strike me down if I am not speaking the truth. If I had looked around the train earlier, I might not have written what I have. But the fact that the bag of a 20-something can contain a Blackberry, a prayer book, The Celestine Prophecy and an iPod is not really a contradiction, when it comes down to it. The future is here, and at least in this part of the world it is distributed pretty well, but it coexists with a past which is unwilling to bow out. The strange times we live in are the children of both syncretisms and synchronies.

Contemporary art often raises these issues – technological fetishism, the oracular nature of the internet, the fideistic attitude with which we use the media, and the “evangelizing” approach of those who produce them. It often adopts a critical stance, but also looks to the media as an authentic vehicle for spirituality. When I began working on For God’s Sake!, the show was basically a tag cloud, a cluster of key words: hi-tech fetishism, technology mysticism, Millennium Bug, HAL 9000, Brainstorm, Big Brother, Truman Show, surveillance, dataveillance, privacy, oracle, rituality, avatar, community, social networks etc. I had a few phrases and a few works in mind, but I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do. On the other hand I knew exactly what I didn’t want to do: I didn’t want to stage an exhibition which attributed one single meaning to the term “religion”; I didn’t want to put on an exhibition of religious art, or profanity, but rather mix saints and heretics, worshippers and blasphemers. I wanted to move away from cyberpunk mysticism, techno-hippies, data-gloves and virtual reality gurus, but also the lavish effects of audio visual work, the facile attraction of electromagnetism and the other tricks much beloved by Teslans. What I was particularly interested in was exploring the relationship that develops between our spiritual lives, both individual and collective, and the gadgets we use on a daily basis; understanding how these worm their way into our imaginations, and how they exploit and enrich our symbols and metaphors, and also understanding where faith takes shelter in a world where nothing seems private, a world which has transferred the “style” of the sacred to consumer goods, and which has submerged silence under an unprecedented information overload.

The works gradually fleshed out the framework I had sketched, enriching it and often surprising me. The power of some of the images astounded me: the evocative Via Crucis of shadows imagined by Markus Kison, the dance of satellites orchestrated by Janez Janša, or Briant Dameron’s traveller, who seeks confirmation of his existence in an empty screen. I was surprised to witness the appearance of various issues I had not considered, like the exploration of the prescriptive, authoritarian nature of certain artistic languages and styles: from the tutorials collected and examined by Petros Moris to the Powerpoint style parodied by Clemens Kogler. I was even more surprised to discover, in some works, how needs, rituals, and even the sacraments of faith can find support and mediation in the community aspects of digital technologies, and that this in no way undermines their original purity. The fact that a few of these works adopt an ironic approach does not make this new dimension of rituality less interesting.

One project with an extremely serious theoretical premise is Mission Eternity, an ambitious work in progress by the Swiss collective etoy. Mission Eternity describes itself as “a digital cult of the dead”, and entails digital archiving and data conservation, and the social dimension of peer to peer networks; it blends technology and ancient rites, with a modernized version of the Chinese joss paper tradition which bestows shares in the etoy.corporation, rather than money, on the deceased.

Meditation for Avatars, by the German artists Ute Hoerner and Mathias Antlfinger, involves a series of networked client – computers with the work installed on them, to give rise to a kind of collective meditation. Participants perform a mantra then send it to the other users online. This creates a community of computers in meditation, generating a field of positive energy that the artists reckon is transferred to the users. Vice versa, the Empathy Box by the Italian collective Io/cose establishes a community of users united by empathy through their shared perception of pain – pain caused by an electric shock generated by the device and transmitted through the human chain. Lastly, Confession 2.0 by Cristiano Poian and Paolo Tonon explores the connection between the drastic drop in confession attendance and the digital soul-baring typical of social networks, by means of a high-tech confessional that makes our confessions public, transforming us into “successful sinners”.

All of these works deploy the rites, sacraments, idols and fetishes of a spirituality currently renewing itself in line with the anthropological mutation in progress. As has always happened, for the greater glory of God.

ENTRY FORM (PDF): http://www.pixxelpoint.org/entryform2009.pdf
DEADLINE: September 30th 2009, arrival date.
WEBSITE: WWW.PIXXELPOINT.ORG

We keep on talking about “new media”, while in actually fact these media are anything but new. The Net is twenty years old, if we start counting from the advent of the Web, forty if we start from Arpanet. Spacewar!, the first videogame ever, is more or less the same age. Virtual worlds are the updated, lighter versions of a technology acclaimed as “the future” when Second Life programmers were still in diapers; social networks are the bastard sons of Fidonet. As for the computer, it is younger than Lord Byron, but certainly not than his daughter Ada.

Once upon a time there was the electronic frontier, an abandonware myth which was able to regenerate itself thanks to the continuous advance of the frontier itself. Like in space, in technological progress there’s no ocean at the end of the trip. But, unlike the space race, the race to the next technology is endless, and endlessness is boring.

Yet, while we got used to innovation and the day-after rhetorics, we have never got used to the loss of the past. We look back to what was new yesterday and is trash today, and we feel a deep sense of nostalgia. Commodore 64 and 386dx. The first Apple Macintosh. Bulletin Board Systems. Animated gifs. Glittering images. Web buttons. Super Mario. Doom. Napster. Jennicam. Mosaic. ASCII art. MIDIs and MOOs. Not to mention VHS, vinyl, audio cassettes, cathode tubes, portable radios, faxes. It is the kind of nostalgia that we feel for a relative who died young, once the pain abates: you are left wondering what kind of man he would have been. Or for someone that, once grown up, does not live up to his or her promise. Sometimes nostalgia develops into historical research, and becomes media archeology. We don’t look for the technologies that we once loved, but those we have never seen in action.

But in both the cases, in the artistic field this sentimental look at the past is producing some brand new, interesting stuff. Reviving dead media and obsolete technologies, retrieving and rekindling their aesthetics, making them do things they were never expected to do, and telling stories about them with other means is proving to be a sound artistic strategy – undoubtedly more so than “the exploration of the artistic potential of new media” which became the mantra of most New Media Art. This happens because, when you give up on the rhetorics of novelty, what is left on stage is the human element: the man of the past who domesticated the media, put his own life into them and was changed by them; and the man of the present, who looks back on that past with the same sentiment as the venerable Sergio Leone looked to the West.

On the occasion of its 10th Birthday, Pixxelpoint festival wants to explore this feeling. Clean out your attic, the folders you haven’t touched for years, GIF repositories, your university’s warehouse, and the dumps of Silicon Valley – or its small-town emulators. Get your hands on this stuff, and send us your finds. Any media is allowed, apart from new!

Domenico Quaranta, curator

*** *** ***

Rules and conditions

1.
Pixxelpoint 2009 International New Media Art Festival will begin on December 4th 2009 in Nova Gorica, Slovenia in Nova Gorica City Gallery (Mestna galerija Nova Gorica) and it will last for eight days, until December 11th 2009.

2.
Competitors can choose between categories:
- New media installation (new media work that is exhibited in spatial arrangements)
- Computer based art (new media work that doesn’t require physical space, for example, programs, computer games, internet art, etc.)
- Digital print
- Video
- Other (work in traditional media – ie drawing, painting, sculpture, embroidery and so on – that may fit thematically or conceptually in the exhibition)

3.
Submissions must be sent free of charge to:
Pixxelpoint
Kulturni dom Nova Gorica
Bevkov trg 4
SI 5000 Nova Gorica
Slovenia

(Att. Blaz Erzetic)
E-mail: pixxelpoint2009@gmail.com

Deadline is September 30th 2009, arrival date.

4.
Works can be sent on:
- CD-ROM
- DVD-ROM
- e-mail (pixxelpoint2009@gmail.com)

Label on the media must contain the name of the author and the work. Every single work must be accompanied by entry form. Works submitted without this entry form will not be valid. In case of sending by email, attach scanned filled form or send it by fax to 00386 33 540 19. Media will not be returned.

5.
There are no software and hardware limitations.

6.
Competitors agree that their work can be used for promotional purposes for the festival Pixxelpoint and catalogue for Pixxelpoint festival.

7.
Submitted works will be selected by the curator on the basis of artistic achievement. Autors whose works are admitted to the contest will be contacted by the oragnizers.

8.
Author guarantees the authenticity of his/her work. In case that work is partially or completely not competitor’s property, he/she assures that he has all the rights and permissions to use this work.
With this statement the author frees the festival of any misunderstandings regarding copyrights.

9.
Pixxelpoint will not sell artworks or copyrights of the submitted works. The festival is meant only as exhibition and promotion for the artists.

10.
All submitted works must match the given theme ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ as described on this page.

PIXXELPOINT 2008 – FOR GOD’S SAKE!

9TH INTERNATIONAL NEW MEDIA ART FESTIVAL
DECEMBER 5TH – 12TH, 2008
NOVA GORICA (SLOVENIA)
OFFICIAL WEBSITE: http://www.pixxelpoint.org/2008/

Contemporary artistic projects have often raised such issues as technological fetishism, the oracular nature of the internet, the fideistic attitude we have towards the media and the evangelizing bent of those who produce them. This art often takes a critical approach, but also looks for an authentic vehicle of spirituality in the media. Taking this as its theme, Pixxelpoint 2008 addressed saints and heretics alike, showing projects which explore the relationship between media and spirituality at a key point in human history, a time of civilization clashes and neocon upsurges, apocalyptic nightmares and hopes for a new enlightenment.

Press Materials:

Catalogue (eng / slo)

Catalogue text (ita)

Catalogue text (eng)

Flyer (ita / slo)

Press Release (ita)

Press Release (eng)

Press & Media (selected):

Rhizome.org (Marisa Olson)

RTVSLO

VEST.SI (video interview with Mateja Poljšak-Furlan, Mestna Galerija Nova Gorica)

Exhibition Images:

Pixxelpoint 2008