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DIGICULT Digital Art, Design & Culture Founder & Editor-in-chief: Marco Mancuso Advisory Board: Marco Mancuso, Lucrezia Cippitelli, Claudia D'Alonzo Publisher: Associazione Culturale Digicult Largo Murani 4, 20133 Milan (Italy) http://www.digicult.it Editorial Press registered at Milan Court, number N°240 of 10/04/06. ISSN Code: 2037-2256 Licenses: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs - Creative Commons 2.5 Italy (CC BY- NC-ND 2.5) Printed and distributed by Lulu.com E-publishing development: Loretta Borrelli Cover design: Eva Scaini Digicult is part of the The Leonardo Organizational Member Program TABLE OF CONTENTS Giulia Simi Cristophe Bruno: From Dada To Google .................................................................. 3 Loretta Borrelli Art And Everyday Life In The After Future ............................................................... 8 Barbara Sansone The Influencers 2009: Analog Guerrillas ................................................................. 18 Teresa De Feo Generative Modules By Guido Smider .................................................................... 24 Francesco Bertocco Philippe Parreno: No Ghost Just A Shell ................................................................ 29 Matteo Milani Brian Eno: Synthesist ................................................................................................. 34 Lucrezia Cippitelli Dick Raaijmakers: A Monography ........................................................................... 40 Donata Marletta Jan Rohlf: Musical(mind) .......................................................................................... 46 Marco Mancuso Elektra 2009: 10 Pioneering Years ............................................................................ 51 Gigi Ghezzi The Future Of Scientific News ................................................................................. 54 Marco Mancuso Expanded Art, Expanded Box .................................................................................. 59 Cristophe Bruno: From Dada To Google Giulia Simi was censored by Google – he will explain why in this interview – and his advertisements remained online only for 24 hours. Nonetheless, 12.000 visitors saw them. Words are cloned, emptied, monetized. Words are controlled, induced, counterfeited. Welcome to “semantic capitalism”, last step of a society which seems to vampirize all of our thoughts, dreams, Christophe Bruno – whom I desires. previously interviewed in Digimag 25 “Dadameter” is the title of his last (http://www.digicult.it/digimag/artic great project, currently exposed in the le.asp?id=836), is one of most known virtual space of Jeu de Paume gallery net.artists worldwide. Lucid, ironic, in Paris desecrating, he has faced since a long ((http://www.jeudepaume.org/?page time issues related to language =article&sousmenu=107&idArt=788&lie commodification and control by late- u=9). It is a satyrical display of the capitalism, from “Society of the “decay of the aura of language” – as Spectacle” to “The Age of Access”. the subtitle recites, with a clear For the “Google Adwords Happening” , tribute to Walter Benjamin – online performance consisting in a elaborating a cartography of words poetry advertising campaign through stored in the Internet to measure our the renowned adwords system, he distance from Dada. It was indeed won a honorable mention at the 2003 Raymond Roussel , eccentric writer Ars Electronica. The project, whose much loved by dadaists and subtitle was “How to lose money with surrealists, who inspired Bruno. His your art” , tried to subvert the crux of theatrical works, entirely based on contemporary art, increasingly combinatory word games which market-oriented in the controversial reveal the ambiguous, evocative and “age of mechanical reproduction” playful side of language, seem to currently in its advanced stage. He precede somehow the mechanization 3 of language that would have acquired poetry remains in the pay-per-click different meanings after a century: language of our times? How much “from Dada to Google”. time do we have before being definitely swallowed up by the universal boredom that leaves no room for irony? We talked directly with Christophe Bruno about “Dadameter” and its conceptual and political aspects. This project stems from a six-years process and it required the elaboration of a complex software, realized by the mathematician and programmer Valeriu Lacatusu , . Bruno’s co-worker also for Logo.Hallucination. The engine scans Giulia Simi: Can you tell us how the entire database of Internet Dadameter was born? What was the language – only in English – and starting idea? analyzes it in terms of homophony, equivocation and semantic Christophe Bruno: The idea of the relatedness (this is also called Google project goes back in 2002 after I did a Similarity, because it measures how performance called the “Google many times a couple of words appear Adwords Happening” where I realized in the same webpages in Google that our ultimate atoms, words, had searches). become a commodity: any words of any language has a price fluctuating The result is a Dadamap that on the global market of “semantic visualizes and interpretes our capitalism”. It became clear to me language from a satyrical standpoint, that the economic dynamic of such trying to measure our distance from global corporate structures was to Dada. In other words: how much build cartographies of thought in energy, evocation, ambiguousness, order to be able to predict our 4 behaviour as consumers and optimize the Adwords system. I decided to try to see if it was Giulia Simi: As you well explain in possible for me to build such your video interview for Jeu de cartographies but that time it was too Paume gallery, the mechanisation of difficult an enterprise because it language (crucial concept in many of involved quite complex mathematical your works) has passed from a literary and computing tools. Later I met a production – in Dada – to monetary mathematician and programmer, one – in Google. What do you think Valeriu Lacatusu, thanks to whom the about the future of speech? project became feasible. Christophe Bruno: The “Dadameter” is But it’s only in 2006 that I had the idea subtitled “global index of the decay of of linking the concept to the birth of the aura of language” and indeed my Dada, through the key character of feeling is that there has been a Raymond Roussel. The mechanisation paradigm shift in late capitalism in of literary production developed by relation to the question of speech. Roussel in the fields of homophony The general picture seems to me as and equivocation, was echoing the follows: in the sixties there has been a enterprise of “taylorization of shift from the object to relations and discourse” that Google had started in flux, accordingly to the concept of the field of meaning. “transfiguration of the commonplace” as well as to the transition towards started to ask myself crazy questions the “age of access”. Language, as it is such as what is the density of dadaism stored on the web, is nothing but the in language? The size of the region of coding of all existing human relations language where homophony and and this panoptic structure has equivocation are important, would in become part of a dispositive of global a way provide a measurement of our surveillance and post-control. This distance from Dada. That was the decay of the aura of language, or starting point of the project. zombification of speech, may also be seen as a decay of the aura of the relational, and there is a paradoxical interplay between this “global text” and the performative aspect of speech. The future of speech has to be understood in this context of a global articulation between spectacle 5 and post-control, between an burst of the Internet bubble, before absolute fetichisation of the relational, the advent of Google. Google was one that counter-balance the decay of its of the most important actors in the aura. transition from web 1 to web 2 and what Google achieved is not the he paradoxical fact that I was death of the web utopia. Instead they censored in the “Google Adwords were born in the context of this utopia Happening”, not because my speech and tried to revive it ; because they was too meaningfull and outrageous, used and perverted this very utopia in but because I had nothing to say (the order to reach the ultimate stage of clickthrough rate of my Adwords commodification. Indeed the ecology poetry was too low and therefore of free speech promoted by Google is imperilled the market of language) is nothing but the core of their also worth to be noted here. economic dynamics. Giulia Simi: This project has required a long and complex elaborating process. At the end, thanks also to the mathematician Valeriu Lacatusu, Dadameter’s engine is an interesting tool scanning the huge database of language on the net. Have you ever thought to use it for other purposes – sociological/political for instance? . Christophe Bruno: Yes, and I’ve been contacted by companies working in Giulia Simi: Google is often directly or these fields. But the main purpose of inderectly present on your works, like the Dadameter was satirical. So I don’t in many net.artists’ projects. Maybe know what is going to happen in this we can state that nowadays Google is schizophrenic context. almost a synonym of web. But did Google kill the web utopia? What the web would be without Google? Christophe Bruno: The web utopia was killed quite soon, a bit before the www.iterature.com/dadameter/