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)

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Digicult is part of the The Leonardo Organizational Member Program TABLE OF CONTENTS

Claudia D'Alonzo Otolab Method ...... 3

Carla Langella Biological Strategies At The Service Of Design ...... 19

Silvia Bianchi Graphic Design With Momomaker ...... 27

Matteo Milani Trevor Wishart: Chemistry Of Sound ...... 33

Marco Mancuso Generative Nature ...... 43

Tatiana Bazzichelli Anna Adamolo: Practical Critique Of Ideology ...... 51

Bertram Niessen Milano 2009: Where Are You Culture? ...... 62

Lucrezia Cippitelli Eduardo Navas: Track Me Not, Please! ...... 71

Donata Marletta Transmediale 09: The Berlin’s Paradoxes ...... 80

Gigi Ghezzi To Give Shape To Social Networks ...... 83

Marco Mancuso Cada: Did You Say You Wanted An Evolution? ...... 87 Francesco Bertocco Matthew Barney: Contemporary Mythologies ...... 95

Monica Ponzini You Tube And The Accidental Videoart ...... 100 Otolab Method

Claudia D'Alonzo

worlds and generate them. An open and complex system, in which the mutual relationship of every element causes something unexpected and unpredictable. A spontaneous and changeable complexity, made up with the members’s different experiences and attitudes, that otolab transformed into a method: a relational and creative method, a laboratory audiovisual-experience method, an The interview to Otolab is a result of approach to technological tools and the event that was organised on to an interaction with the audience. January 16 th by the O’ Gallery of Milan, in collaboration with Marco An audience which is the reflexion of Mancuso, Digicult curator. During that otolab, an aggregation and mixture of evening, some members of the origins and contexts. A composite Milanese collective (which has come audience, as well as the one that was at its eighth year of life) could meet, at the soirée in the Galleria O’, a varied have talks and watched the national crowd that converged there for the exclusive preview of some of their same interest in the collective. The recent creations, such as “Circo purpose of this meeting was to keep ipnotico”(Hypnotic circus) and two completely different live “Giardini neri” (Black Gardens). together, Circo Ipnotico and Giardini Neri, to produce the heterogeneous A few hours together transported the product of the group, compare two otolab phenomenon into the gallery absolutely different poetics and event room: not only an artistic entity, experiences of audiovisual live yet also and above all a means to performance. The analogical – digital improve interpersonal relationships improvisation, the audiovisual trip and sharing. That is the heart of the violence of Circo Ipnotico, as well as collective, which has been configuring the almost cinematographic inner trip itself as a rhizomatic core that can tag of Giardini Neri. along and connect, cross different

3 fathom to desert landscapes commuted by sounds. Till the final implosion given by water. The vision of the liquid element, from 3D synthetic realism, suddenly breaks into its graphic structure, a breach made into the mind and the shape, towards an optical tunnel, a perceptive unconsciousness. An initiation to a new lie for the image, a . perceptive resurrection which marks a double limit, a transformation walking “Giardini Neri” is a new component in concurrently on two levels: the formal otolab production, and not only from one related to the image, from the the chronological point of view; it is figurative to the optical side, and the an experience that moves away from symbolic one that goes past into an a style whose main topic is to reduce inner and individual state. The 3D visual patterns. The last live image of the water, a realistic kind, performance leads one’s eyes through suddenly opens towards its frame. All a tridimensional journey, and lets the this can be read as a revelation of the spectator find vegetal elements image’s nature, of what looks like real where the scene is plunged in but that heeds a synthetic structure, atmospheric evanescences, filtered and at the same time as lights mirrored on water. An abandonment familiar perceptive immersion into darkness, which both environments; the real frame moved environmental and internal. Otolab to pure vision, broken and arranged hasn’t explored this aspect of into an elementary geometry of black narration as story, of the environment and white. born to reflect an inner life. So, “Giardini Neri” is the starting point Many works by otolab act through for an interview to otolab for Digicult, audiovisual stimulation inside the because a meeting between these observer, and they lead him to two realities is needed, as both otolab experience the perception of his self. and Digicult have run after common The trip of “Giardini Neri” is instead an directions over the years, have emotional emanation, the senses are collaborated, have come across the transported through suspended as professional and personal spheres. well as obscure suggestions, images

4 following a common fully detailed project. The means of particles and fluids wasn’t only used for a technological or algorithmic purpose, but it was needed for the development of some elements during the final touch. Most of the project was by that time completed, but some forms of expression of the situation were missing. . Mud: As far as I worked alone, Giardini Claudia D’Alonzo: Let’s start from Neri was still a series of audiovisual “Giardini Neri”: could you tell me how images, yet without a structure, a it was born, how did the production of complete narrative pressure. It was this project develop? rather a series of rooms, that is a series of successive areas. The Xo00: It originated from Mud’s mental upheaval came by the time I had disease, which kept expressing itself dropped the project for some months. during our tour in Mexico: he shut I put it on the table again to prepare a himself into his house for a week, in new live performance and I asked the sunniest place in the world. He Dies_ to give me a hand to take could do anything, and instead he decisions on the audio. Dies_’s stayed inside the house for a week contribution was very important for just to depict the idea he had in his the story. mind. In fact, the project comes from Mud both for the audio and for the Xo00: However there was a basic video. It was later integrated by other idea, that was a journey into the otolab members. Androsyn, Dies_ and gardens of the soul. The rooms me needed a connection, a unique trip that went through them. . Mud: Androsyn has enormously contributed to the 3D creation in all the most complex parts. The fluids, the particle systems, were possible thanks to him, because he had very specific competencies absolutely unusual in otolab.

Androsyn: My intervention was

5 . less clear in some others. What is the difference between the narrative Claudia D’Alonzo: Did the other otolab structure in Giardini Neri and other step in at that moment? creations? For instance I’m thinking about Op7, where the construction of Mud: Exactly. In the audio I used some the different phases in the live of Dies, Scrub and Chiara Frantini (a performance is still reachable by the trainee of mine) audio samples, by observer, or other works like Circo giving them a frame. From the Ipnotico, where the narration is less audiovisual point of view, apart from clear… the musical structure the point was to yield a valid story in a dramaturgical Xo00: Between “Op7″ and “Giardini sense. We felt that this sequence of Neri” I don’t see much difference, rooms, be they beautiful or apart from the creation procedures. In subjectively interesting, needed a “Op7″ we worked all together from the breach. That was an opportunity for very first moment, the entire further considerations: through the collective took part into the concept water, we thought we glimpsed an and to the structural building as well, element giving access to the endless which was divided into very precise world. The optical drift of the end chapters. “Giardini Neri” comes represents the gateway towards the instead from a project that Mud had absolute, from a figurative and already been developing on his own, contextual world to an unlimited so there was a storyboard on his dimension. mind, and the following work we completed together was no more Xo00: From this dark atmosphere, at than add the required elements to times somewhat threatening, there’s complete it. the access to a dimension other than the real one.

Claudia D’Alonzo: “Giardini Neri” is a very narrative creation, of course not in absolute terms but in relation to otolab’s work. You already told me how did the storyboard come into existence. Nonetheless, I think that in every otolab creation there’s a storyboard and that this is more explicit in some of them, while it is .

6 Img: courtesy by Otolab through extremely abstract subjects as for instance hypnosis, which cannot be applied as an objective picture but as an individual one and Claudia D’Alonzo: And so you worked an experience. While in “Giardini Neri” in both projects following a structure there is a familiar context, even to made of “panels”? depict plants. The branches are a Mud: Yes, the idea of the narrative recall, a familiarization with an already structure is interesting. “Op7″ is based familiar place. That’s in everyone’s on a symbolic structure, Kiefer’s seven dream memory exactly for an towers, that is the essence of the environmental confirmation, with fog, concept. All the seven towers have rarefied lights and nightly wood the same importance, no one is more crossing. I supported the idea of those relevant than he other ones, they all silhouettes moving backlight and hold the same degree of plainness. creating shadings that directly recall a Each one has its own characteristics natural habitat, the one we have in but they all have the same kinetic our DNA. importance. In Giardini Neri there is a different line, which was what I had been searching for, from a beginning to an end. As a result, it isn’t an homogeneous track divided in chapters, as it is in Op7, with a structure such as the one of “tunnel – break – new tunnel “.

Xo00: Yes, in “Op7″ there are seven different travels, while “Giardini Neri”, . as well as “Circo Ipnotico”, are just one trip, one passage Claudia D’Alonzo: Natural beauty, but at the same time its abstraction, in Mud: Indeed, in “Circo Ipnotico” fact the form of those plants is there’s a deeper storyboard and it is naturally closer to a pattern or to influenced by the mask changing of fractals … the psychoscope, by lighter changing: the theme is always the same, Androsyn: Yes indeed, inside there’s a therefore it is more balanced. . very fractal element, which remembers algorithmic models. That’s Androsyn: In “Circo Ipnotico” you go

7 beautiful, because it gives a sense of . double sense of belonging to the Claudia D’Alonzo: Do you think to re- world of Giardini Neri, the one of elaborate or develop again this sort of logical conception and the other one creation? of almost genetic memory. Xo00: By now the object is to create a Claudia D’Alonzo: What was the kind DVD, look for a production. During all of work on the audio? Is there the these years, otolab’s need to produce purpose to blend the synthetic and a DVD has arisen. For sure, the live the natural domains? performance has its own characteristics, but we need to freeze Mud: We had to decide on the audio: these projects after the first proposals, I added sound-tracks to the videos. They were Claudia D’Alonzo: Do you think about a kind of dream sound-scape, Giardini Neri because according to searching for an emotional you it satisfies a unique nature that is synesthesia, not pointing at precise most appropriate for a video , aspects. The audio phase is not a compared to other works in which the particularly radical task, I’m absolutely space component and the live set up conscious of that. The audio’s are more important? intention that goes with the images is not to upset further on. I looked for Xo00: Yes, “Giardini Neri” is very some audiovisual matching that could cinematic and it has a layout that allow a sweeter observation of the doesn’t lose anything when it shifts images, balance the video’s haziness, from two monitors to one. It is make the anxiety of the image more different from other lives, in which the attractive. use of several monitors is crucial.

Mud: It is even more suitable to try the singularities of DVD creations, to work on synesthesias which are managed with limited estimation possibilities, as a live is shown real- time. Time rendering doesn’t cause this sort of problems. This production would be different from a live work, because some synesthetic elements can be pushed to the extreme.

8 “Quartetto.swf” at Netmage 03: the live was much expected, but we were completely unknown and the audience greatly participated. That probably happened because the news spread and a few words were written about us. Some time before we had won the Italian Live Media Contest, probably our participation was well communicated … I know that there . were great expectations at that moment. And obviously, time after Claudia D’Alonzo: A question about time we did several things, that even the general state of otolab, from had few audience, in some occasions. inside and after the soirée at O’ But I think that it is from the Netmage gallery, which I think was very 2004 that an Italian audience began to successful. How do you perceive this follow us. moment in otolab, give a consideration about the audience. I think that during these years some audience that follow you, caring for your work. Do you perceive anything?

Xo00: Yes, the evening in O’ was very strong, also because we don’t organise many evenings of that kind in Milan . My impression was that our fans were there, as well as people who come from the gallery or Digicult . circuit. Claudia D’Alonzo: As you started from Claudia D’Alonzo: Beyond the O’ the underground and you took part soirée, could you take stock of the last into festivals, rather than galleries or years, of how you managed to be international spaces, do you have an known by the audience? idea of the kind of fans you have and how it changed through time? Xo00: Indeed, in the last years there was a progression but I wouldn’t have Mud: otolab audience is rather been able to define it at that time. I’m heterogeneous, we go from flashings thinking about when we created the

9 to designers or simply to the experts funny to see the traditional audience of digital imaging, audio-video of contemporary music in Milan , even interaction, live interaction. It is more elderly people mixed with our mostly a wide audience of art and younger underground audience, with entertainment. piercing and tattoos. I think it was a peculiar experience for everyone . Claudia D’Alonzo: However is it inside the electronic world?

Mud: Yes, but very wide-ranging, from raves to cultured sectors, because we work in the contemporary music sector as for raves or non-institutional spaces. I think that the audience well reflects the heterogeneity of our projects and of the areas in which we propose them.

. Claudia D’Alonzo: I think this is one of the most interesting aspects in otolab Photo courtesy by Otolab and not expected at all: it is not expected that, starting from counter- Claudia D’Alonzo: How did each field culture and going towards of deal with influence your work? How contemporary art and institutional did they condition some positive or culture, this heterogeneity can negative choices over the years, as assemble inside your audience and well as some limitations and arouse some attention. The soirée in possibilities? O’ seems to exemplify perfectly Xo00: I think we travelled along otolab’s particular ability. several spheres and that we Orgone: The soirée of Sincronie 2004 maintained the same state of at the PAC was a fantastic example in versatility all over the years, because that sense. Sinfonie is a contemporary we have in our group people coming music Festival which sets every year from different worlds. Maybe at the in Milan , maybe it is the most beginning we were more pop. But I interesting festival in the town. For remember that when at the beginning that event we developed several we organised events in social centres projects for Sincronie. It was very well (for example the Bulk in Milan, a very received by the public. But it was very devastated place), without means , we tried to give a research style, even

10 in the exhibitions, without endorsing Xo00: Less? According to me they to the audio or video stereotypes that don’t exist. I didn’t hear about them in circulated in that sphere. We even Italy . Once there was the Link, but organised a mini audiovisual festival then it became a haunt. We at Bulk, and we invited some artists experienced V_, the festival we were experiencing new music rather than talking about at Bulk, but after that I the same dance soirée. I remember don’t generally see much attention. that even at that time there were radical choices that people didn’t Mud: Festival … yes the first edition of accept. We showed our projects in the Netmage was inside the Link. sectors that were away from that sort Claudia D’Alonzo: Yes, the Netmage is of things, that would have probably another example of an important worked well in a gallery or in a reality in the electronic music which different set. was born into the community centres. Claudia D’Alonzo: What’s your Therefore, according to you, the working principle to present your underground areas are a fertile field to material in so different fields arise some electronic testing experiences, and paradoxically the Xo00: First of all there are some same areas aren’t open towards the creations that have a precise evolutions of these testings? storyboard, a defined time and that fully insert into the format of the Xo00: Not at its better level compared festival. In the community centres to its possibilities. There’s no planning more often there are dance situations, in these spaces. I don’t know any entertainment, soirées that last community centre interested in it. six/seven hours. The requests are Claudia D’Alonzo: Do you think this is varied. due to the absence of mediums?

Mud: According to me a

. consciousness and a true interest don’t exist yet . Claudia D’Alonzo: Do you think that the counterculture circuits, the Orgone: According to me, indeed, the community centres, that is your community centres have been for a original world, care less your live long time a fertile breeding medium production, performance, and for loads of technological structured works? experimentations. In Milan it worked with Leoncavallo and Conchetta to

11 begin with, there were ECN and Mud: Staging needs are different from Decoder, Breda and Bulk, the the live performance ones. Anyway, electronic music began to reveal itself every choice, during the staging and the Hacklab came to existence. phase, is planned to realise a live Many people coming from our circles performance. As for the live itself, we ow much to the movement sectors, as are trying to become the more regards cultural growth. That’s why interchangeable. In fact I wouldn’t cut we were angry for the Cox18 off the possibility that otolab evacuation these days. What a shame members may perform Giardini Neri. for the city! Unexpectedly the community centres weren’t able to Xo00: It depends on the creation. For make the grade in their event instance, in Circo ipnotico we are five management planning capacity. As a and there is much live, more than in consequence, the artists who had other performances. Here the explored more professional outcome is readily altered, the live is international domains gradually drew different if different otolab members away. That doesn’t inhibit the event work on machines. Other lives are organisation in sites suited for dance more well organised, they planning of music, as for instance the Natale stuffs is more elaborated and the live Anticlericale in Torchiera. . issue isn’t much different, it is consequently easier to alternate.

Mud: This comes very spontaneously, as everyone shared this method from the start; it means working with the purpose to make the best choices for the live performance. In the first live our experience wasn’t well distributed and didn’t share it to express our pliability. This way now it is easy to face every kind of craft, as we have

. set our method.

Claudia D’Alonzo: Otolab mostly identified with live media, and performance. Do live creations someway reproduce the group planning stage, or are they absolutely different?

12 . couldn’t have achieved alone in their experience of the audio-video. It is Claudia D’Alonzo: Compared to the not a rational retrospection, yet it is collective’s constitution, that has an emotional. open structure which has been changing over the years, some Orgone: During a long summit, some members were admitted, some others months ago, in which we tried to went away. This openness is a examine these transformations, a potentiality, but I think it was also fundamental aspect was emerged: on difficult to manage. How did you the one hand, the many changes, meet the consensus of a continuously conflicts and transformations during growing group and the exit of some such a long period are a natural fact; representatives? on the other hand it is true that many of the critic phases are connected to Mud: That’s the routine group the fact that after 8 years we still find dynamics, there are different duty it difficult to break the barrier with quantity and capacity. Enthusiasm cultural institutions, which should and mutual aims are the most help us administer our work. This is important thing. If there are true for us as well as for any other interesting projects, that can create a person dealing with electronic art in good humus for new creations, things Italy , where there is not culture and go. Anyway, otolab is not a nonprofit consciousness at all in front of the production studio, and we produce argument. Therefore there were some just what we like. moments of great potential projects to run in the laboratory, but not much Claudia D’Alonzo: How did you keep occasions to present them. And this mutual intentions? can engender some tension. Although Xo00: According to me it is almost a not all of the cloud has a silver lining: miracle, I’m surprised too. Some staying on the sidelines raises your people went away because they self-consciousness, your awareness of disagreed with some choices by what you do and how you do it. otolab, as well as with personal life preferences. There are also people who approach otolab and endure, and other people who stay with us for a short time. But probably otolab is in the black because a number of people always found anyhow something they

13 . creativity, in otolab. All this falls into otolab’s point of view. Claudia D’Alonzo: How did these changes in the collective influence the Xo00: this method is not so far from numerous projects? the one we use inside otolab. As a fact, we generally teach to people Xo00: I think Circo Ipnotico is a good that know less than us, but we often example, because it originates from experience together things that we people who have quite recently consider useful. approached otolab and have taken part to the realization by encouraging with new stimuli. It is a non-studied project, it is a work in progress that has slowly modified and has grown by the collection of different contributions.

Orgone: form this point of view, I’m particularly enthusiast about the studies that are being done in the laboratory on auto-produced . software for live performances. There are people relatively “new” who Img: courtesy by Otolab plunged with enthusiasm in the exploration of these worlds. And I’m sure that something interesting will Claudia D’Alonzo: Is there a difference come out. between the didactics in schools and workshops? Claudia D’Alonzo: Sharing knowledge is one of the main elements in otolab. Xo00: Much easier that the sharing It materialises even in the workshop atmosphere in otolab proliferates. The activities and in the didactics, bringing ones we have been organising until this knowledge outside the collective. now lasted five days, during which we Do you think these kinds of activities dedicated night and day to the changed through time, as methods, production together with all the guys. contents or objectives? The benefit of the teaching courses is that we have much more people to Mud: the idea is to try to spread confront with and have a feedback. As acquired knowledge, culture, a regards the contents, I don’t believe interest for particular forms of

14 they have changed over the years. We Orgone: Actually, the whole life in the don’t attempt to communicate the laboratory is surrounded by tens of use of a technology rather than projects that can’t rightly be another one, or to teach great unattended. We rather see them as philosophies. We aim to communicate frozen. And the funny thing is that a working method, our method. maybe after many years someone studies the stuff again, upsets it and Orgone: The most interesting thing is extrapolates a completely different that during the workshops there is a project. I believe that is one of the very strong feedback process. The most beautiful aspects of otolab’s life. guys are often hyperexcited because they want to draw everything from that experience. And this leads us towards fields we had not explored yet. For example, at the Summer School in 2008 students presented some lives with projections on architectonic spaces, the complex live electronic augmented architectures, or as you wish to call them … it was something we have been interested in for long, but that we didn’t have the . opportunity to study in deep. We did Img: courtesy by Otolab it for the first time with the students, and the results were very satisfying for everyone. Mud: Among them there is certainly Claudia D’Alonzo: One aspect of this “Punto Zero”, which we would like to method, that came out of the meeting undertake more determinably. in O’, was the experimentation of new projects, new live, hardware that can Xo00: We consider it as a incomplete be produced in otolab, left aside and project. We presented it once at a then reopened after some time. The festival in Trentino, in Porto Besseno, development of some works can and we created it specially for that follow an even longer and event. They asked us a live for an fragmentary period of time. Do you external area, a lawn. We produced have some works you wish to reopen Punto Zero as a performance for lights by now? and multichannel sounds. There are six sonorous fonts, twelve strobe

15 lamps and twelve headlights disposed strong symbolic strength originates, in circle, quite a complex hybrid the live is quite a sign of landscape- system of lights, planned by Tonylight art. and Peppolasagna. This circle lightens the area outside the circumference, Xo00: In Porto Beseno there were the environment. While the sonorous some elements of the landscape, part is directed to the interior. The mountains, trees, high-voltage wires, observers are at the centre. that were illuminated by the circle, and the show was done by the Mud: this project is in hexaphony, with landscape itself. linked strongly to the landscape, a sign on environment. Punto Zero is a Mud: Besides, the live was very source point: during the performance amazing, a hexaphonic projection we want to give the sensation to be at submerged by the landscape. It is the hub of the earth. The ideal astonishing to see how your conditions would be of absolute endurance threshold is higher in an darkness. We saw, for example, that open space, because you can linger the effects of light on the wood. A on sounds.

16 works but it could be complicated: it’s a kind of site specific projects involving a series of production problems. The projection we presented at Dissonanze festival included this sort of research. We were asked a vjset for the terrace of the Palazzo dei Congressi in Rome . It wasn’t neither an installation nor a live, yet we managed to use that . space. We decided to give the projection a horizontal perspective by Photo by Arianna D’Angelica using two screens and trying to Suddenly the bell rings and Marco enhance the front of the palace. Mancuso introduces himself into the Thanks to our architect Dies_ , we lab. The studio has always been a changed the architecture of the meeting point for friends and artists building with graphic shapes. As the passing by the city. He waits for the video goes, the marble tables that end of the interview, and then he is compose the wall seem to open and looking forward to make otolab a rotate. This work entitled Shadow Play question. emphasized the gaps between the lives during the soirée. This created Marco Mancuso: I think the creation of some sort of interaction between the architectural and audiovisual observer and the architecture, some atmospheres in space , starting from installations as the vjset went on. At the architects’ experience in otolab, is last, we would like to create new still one of the collective’s audiovisual or interactive scenography potentialities partially expressed. for the theatre. We would like to Could the change from the pure live contribute to the planning of a media to the two-dimensional theatrical project. projection and mere work in relation to a space, innovate otolab in order to interact and confront in a tridimensional perspective?

www.otolab.net Xo00: Yes, we wish to develop such

17 18 Biological Strategies At The Service Of Design

Carla Langella

through theoretical and planned research.

The current biological knowledge has revealed that biological systems don’t always function in an “exact” way, but rather it is their complexity that allows them to survive despite changes in external or internal conditions. These complexities are borrowed by Hybrid Design through the transferral of With the definition of “hybrid design”, biological strategies into design itself, a project planning approach is in order to “un-reveal” new fields of intended so that it may borrow the conceptual and operative complexities embedded in the logic, experimentation. in the codes and the principles of the biological world and insert these into the culture of the project itself. In hybrid design the complex qualities drawn from the biological world are transferred to the design of products and innovative services as if it were a sort of “new genetic code”.

To obtain this objective the most recent achievements in biological science and their correlated . theoretical speculations are taken as a reference point, with the will to Cycles of Nature overcome the common basis of To adopt codes, principles and logic aesthetical and formal metaphors and drawn from biology into design face a more difficult path of scientific means not only to be inspired by how substance, based on a specific nature creates its products, but most methodology put into use and verified

19 of all how it develops them, makes terminated, become waste, mostly them grow and keeps them alive. In unusable waste that accumulates in this way there is an evolution of the the environment and damages it. bio-inspired planned paradigm that is no longer based on the question: “how does nature develop biological systems” but adds: “how does nature make them grow and keep them alive?”.

From the answer to these questions the main principles targeted at the closure of the cycles of useful resources for the design and the development of artefacts compatible . with biological cycles can be drawn, Nature, on the other hand, takes which regulate the lives of men and primary materials, transforms them the natural environment in a zero and creates its own products that emission or cradle to cradle view. The grow, reproduce and at the end of concept of a cycle is actually their life return to biological cycles connected to that of a biological time and are integrated into them. In cycle. Natural processes happen in nature everything is reused and cycles, the refusals of certain systems recycled. According to the biological become resources for others. The metaphors used by bio-inspired durability of materials must be in design, every product, or system of proportion to the durability of the life products, can be compared to an of the products where they are used. organism where every part, even if To learn to design projects in nature with different life cycles, is connected also means to learn how to apply to each other through complex cycle patterns that are closed and relationships. Often the different belong to biological processes. components of a product are There is a substantial difference characterised by their different between the way man produces and durability and different obsolescence the way nature produces. Man times. The choice of materials to be develops his own artefacts, takes used and the eventual ad hoc design primary materials from nature and of some of these must, therefore, transforms them in order to obtain keep in mind the necessity to prepare products that, when their function has for the different technical elements

20 connected to different life cycles. . In prefiguring these cycles it is necessary to dedicate the utmost Autonomy attention to their environmental In design the concept of autonomy impact and their durability, which can be interpreted and transferred as must be compatible with the an autonomy from maintenance estimate, in relation to their specificity operations, from cleaning, restoration in their appliance. In particular, it is and substitution, which are precious indispensable to pre-evaluate the qualities as they avoid the environmental performance of all the environmental impacts connected to materials and components in the them. Main principles targeted phases that come straight after their toward the autonomy of artefacts can dismissal, such as re-usage, recycling be drawn from biological systems and new possible cycles of life. throughout their life cycle in energy The attention toward temporal cycles terms, and at the end of the cycles of material induces the use of and resources. Environmentally- recyclable materials, which come friendly design can learn from nature: from renewable primary materials or for example, the most adapt biodegradable materials that can be strategies in order to use renewable composted, for products that have energy resources, or to recycle un- very short life cycles, like packaging renewable energy resources, to reuse systems or so-called “disposable” waste products, up until the most products, like the “moscardino” complex strategies such as those developed by Matteo Ragni and Giulio based on the capacity of self- Iachetti for Pandora Design. In these monitoring or self-healing. cases the capacity that the material Many biological systems are capable has in being disposed into the of modifying their own characteristics environment avoids increasing in function of the change in external volumes of solid deposited waste. factors, so that they may survive despite such changes. This is what happens in the phenomenon of self- healing many plants and animals posses. In living organisms, for example, a wound generates a self- healing mechanism.

In the human body, when a wound is

21 inflicted, there is an immediate flux of avoid the entire substitution or liquids corresponding to the direct dismissal of the whole damaged area of the body involved, that object. Microcapsules are integrated activates a series of physical reactions into these composites that open and capable of closing up the wound. By release a resin that instantly using analogous strategies, some polymerises the rupture and closes researchers from the Beckman the fracture in the matrix (2). The Institute for Advanced Science and research in the field of new materials Technology from the University of and the evolution of new production Illinois, coordinated by Scott White, technologies offer increasing have developed “self-healing opportunities in terms of energy polymers”, composite polymers autonomy like photovoltaic capable of repairing themselves (1), technologies in very fine and flexible that could be used, wherever there is films, that allow for the autonomy of a small rupture, in the design of electrical appliances of all shapes and various types or products in order to sizes.

22 In design, the transferral of concepts of self-organisation and adaptability onto artefacts means to intervene and make the relationship between the essence of the material and its performance more complex. The adaptability of a product can be intended as the capacity to modify its own characteristics according to the mutation of external conditions, so it . could be translated as a flexibility of performance or multi-functionality. Self-organization and adaptation. The French designer Mathieu The concept of self-organisation has Lehanneur, who obtained the Carte crossed many disciplines and so has Blanche VIA 2006 by designing the adopted various definitions. “Elements” collection, made up of According to complexity theorists, elements for the home, capable of self-organisation seems to be one of self-adapting dynamically to the the most important principles in the variations of external conditions, in capacity for evolution, as it is order to create comfortable translated into a capacity to generate conditions. Objects that modify their potentially successful structures in the performance in relation to stimuli natural selection. The systems from their use or from the capable of organising themselves environment. spontaneously increase their own The concept of self-organisation is probability of further evolution. The important from the point of view of self-organised characteristics are also being eco-friendly in terms of saving more easily remodelled, and so are material and energy resources. A more flexible. In order to survive the system is made to be adaptable by change in external or internal forecasting possible changes that it conditions, organisms tend to modify must adapt to, even if this regards a themselves and evolve over time, so mere part of it. In this way it is that they may use their own resources possible to extend the useful life of a in the most efficient way possible. The product considerably. Design concept of self-organisation has been products must therefore be adaptable transferred onto various disciplinary and upgradable in relation to the fields. variations of the technological scenarios, of the economical

23 environment and the conditions and artefacts can be interpreted as user requirements. The planned and organisms, where each part, each developed objects must be flexible, element, participates in a global modular and reconfigurable be it from planning strategy extended to infinite a performance point of view to a levels that go from nanometres to dimensional and aesthetical point of macro-metres. view; these are more likely to last longer and therefore can be used for a Hybrid design adopts a bio-mimetic longer period of time and so gain a metaphor, where in the design of considerable environmental artefacts these are considered as advantage connected to saving organisms, where each element, material and energy resources according to the holographic necessary for its maintenance or principle, to all the scales, from those substitution for the longest time of the materials to the macroscopic possible. ones, participate in a common global concept. In the design field for eco- friendly products, this approach can offer a methodological structure where eco-friendly and bio-inspired strategies are reflected in all the dimensions and all the phases of the life cycle of the product, as a sort of “genetic code” capable of creating a system coherence for the project which can be very useful in obtaining the best possible result in terms of . minimisation of environmental impact. The Holographic Principle

The holographic principle of complexity, which living organisms are based on, foresees that: not only is a part a fraction of the whole, but the whole is included in that part (3). The cell, for example, is part of the organism, which also contains the genetic information of the whole.

Based on the biological metaphor, the

24 . biological systems must be ready to respond with one of their possible Redundancy and Multi-functionality functions. Some insects, for example, have different pairs of legs; each one Biological systems posses a quality has a different function. Multi- defined as “redundancy”, which allows functionality is a consolidated them to survive despite the most tendency in contemporary design, life unpredictable and dangerous events, rhythms are increasingly frenetic and responding to these through the use their constant changes require that of elements or characteristics that are products for daily use be apparently “superfluous”, whose transformable, mutable, capable of existence proves vital only when there adapting to changes in necessities is a necessity for them. Often design and external conditions. strategies oriented toward environmentally friendly products Multi-functional or redundant objects tend toward a certain minimisation. and components can adapt more The concept of redundancy seems easily to different applications from therefore to be the antithesis of this the point of view of performance, and kind of approach. But in some cases, therefore are capable of “surviving” for redundancy constitutes an efficient longer. solution in order to avoid wasting resources. For example, the use of protective films applied to highly perishable surfaces or surfaces that are in constant use, like flooring in places where there is the frequent passage of people or equipment, make the conservation of components or parts of buildings last longer, which would otherwise require continuous replacement with consequential environmental . relapses. Devices that incorporate different Redundancy can also be functional. In functions like electro-chromic glass, nature the majority of elements are that combine glass and sun screen in multifunctional because the one unique object, or environmental conditions change electroluminescent and photo from moment to moment and the luminescent materials that combine

25 different elements necessary to (1) S.R. White, N.R. Sottos, P.H. create a lamp such as a light source, Geubelle, J.S. Moore, M.R. Kessler, electrical cables, switches, stand and S.R. Sriram, E.N. Brown, S. diffusers in one material system. Viswanathan: “Autonomic healing of polymer composites”, Nature. 2001 To integrate functions into one unique 409, 794-797. product means to save, in economical terms as well as environmental terms, (2) Brown, E.N., White, S.R. and Sottos, material and energy resources N.R. “Retardation and repair of fatigue necessary to create the different cracks in a microcapsule toughened products that are to e substituted. epoxy composite-Part II: In situ self- healing”. Composite Science and Technology, Special Anniversary Issue. 2005: 65, 2474-2480.

(3) Morin E., Le Moigne J.L. (1999). Notes

L’Intelligence de la Complexité . L’Harmattan. Paris.

26 Graphic Design With Momomaker

Silvia Bianchi

writing in poster art to realistic picturing in digital art. In 2006, he has tagged the entire length of Manhattan by a MOMO label of two miles and with Eltono installed a series of mechanic sculptures on the beaches and water of Manhattan, filled the city with the covers of New Yorker, constructed a sculpture of spandex for the Spring Street Show and coloured the streets of many MOMO is an artist whose work is not world cities with his collages. Momo easy to catalogue. Defining it as a has exhibited his work in New York, street artist would be boring and Seoul, Cologne, Manchester, New reduced. His life and his adventures Orleans and collaborates in a stable are surprising as his experiments and manner with artists such as Melissa they don’t deserve being limited Brown, Jimmy Debuffet and Eltono within no definition. and which affirms his inspirational Disembarked from Brooklyn after source as Sam3, Influenza, Zosen, several years of wandering, they’ve Sonik and Blu. seen him moving in Jamaica, Spain, A strong tie connects him to Madrid, New Orleans, Key West, Taos, Georgia where we have interviewed him in the and North Carolina, living in tents, occasion of his Underwater exposition caverns and barracks. MOMO is a in which he presented the latest Californian artist, for this reason the evolution of the MOMOMAKER, a web labels are useless. His essential and at page which is also a mini software the same time original and coloristic that plays with graphics, randomly style makes his works recognizable at binding a series of geometric forms first sight. together and giving light to a series of Curious and relentless, he has experiments which take absolutely experimented all in its path, from unconventional form in serigraphy.

27 MOMO: It began as a joke, just to say a computer was making my artwork, and I can relax. But it became true, I’d discovered a tool, and I’m still interested in it a year and a half later. The MOMO Maker combines elements randomly and they look good or they don’t. Generally a design is exciting when there are dynamic contrasts between elements. There becomes a . little story of what happens when, for example; hard enters soft, lite covers Silvia Bianchi: First of all where and heavy, heavy rests uneasily on sharp, when was born MOMO? etc. MOMO: In the San Francisco Bay, One day I recognized that graffiti over California, in the mid 70′s. graffiti has this special need to make Silvia Bianchi: Your style is so clear dynamic contrast, to be seen at all. that in the same time it’s so complete, That idea really blew me away. You it seems as a result of coloristic see it best in scratchiti because its all balancing and plastic rhythm. Is it a transparent (on glass). Thick lines result of a stylistic progress starting might overcome thin, Straight over from realism? graceful, jagged over straight, etc. So the the same thing is at work- and MOMO: Progress! sure. I spent the what is that? Vandalism is only first 15 years of my life learning to vandalism, when its different than draw and paint well. I some of that what was there (you can’t vandalize seems like a waste, except its great to anything with more of the same). practice looking and studying. Now This appears to be everywhere really. I’m chasing experiments that I believe In a spiritual sense I’m taking on faith continue to look farther. that its natural and beautiful.

Silvia Bianchi: How the metropolitan context and support influence your work? I’ve read that in order to realize the MOMOMAKER you’ve started from observation of the scratchings. Can you explain exactly how the idea was born?

28 . test of possibilities, before ink hit the paper. In the past there are so many Silvia Bianchi: I am very interested in handmade variations in the printing, the type of technique, which you use that you could only say the “Maker to print your designs. Are your was inspiration. printings, serigraphy? or do you use an overhead projector aren’t you? So the squeegee leaves an unpredictable part to the result? For MOMO: When printing very large this latest project there’s 3 shapes per posters I cut black paper for the design, and 27 shapes: 19,683 shapes. The seriograph comes possibilities. I printed just 1000 of directly from the shadow of the them (well 1300, to discard the worst scissor cut paper. For the latest series and doubles). So there was I printed the forms from photoshop randomness of “1000 within 19683″. I onto transparency to make the certainly had not seen most of the shadow (that’s the normal seriograph artwork I was going to create before it process). I wanted it directly from the happened. I didn’t think of it, it was computer files so we can say the discovered (!). ‘Maker animation performed a real

29 I very much want to work with someone that writes code for real, to write the easiest cleanest version of the online ‘Maker. There’s three or four scripts that I’ve used, but none do it all.

Silvia Bianchi: You’ve approached various means of expression in your work: from sculpture to drawing until . aerosol. The MOMO maker is the first Silvia Bianchi: Would you describe us of u’re works to involve the use of the various phases of your work? computer in your art?

MOMO: Pretty basic – catalogue MOMO: That’s true. I use photoshop favorite shapes and colors. Use like a sketch pad all the time. Edit several java script random slide shows videos, create clunky caveman-skil- on top of each other (on -level html pages for my website. But I guess everyone does that, I don’t layers) to combine your favorites. have a special skill for it. But I do have Watch. Change things that don’t an appetite; when I created work, like the order on layers, http://momoshowpalace.com/EMPM position, proportions of large to small, 3.html I felt it was the best work of filled to half filled. Now make your art I’d ever made. Or maybe seriograph. I have my own interests http://momoshowpalace.com/EM1.ht and rules for what I’m looking for – ml was well, such as; each shape should try to be http://momoshowpalace.com/emtry as much itself as possible. Once I find 5.html definitely try too. them, the shapes don’t change like swirling 80′s patterns (of floating geometric bits & triangles) only the contrasts change. Colors, positions, orientations, and sizes for each shape is pursued seriously, so I find it and keep it. But that’s just me. I think this multi-slide show MOMO Maker could have other applications for other users.

30 . Silvia Bianchi: At Subaquatica you have exhibited 1000-printed Silvia Bianchi: I am very fascinated by serigraphy made by the seeing that the use of computer in MOMOMAKER, underwater. Do you your work is very instrumental and not have any ideas of how to present the substantial. Your work is very project in the future? analogical and seems like organic but at the same time it has something MOMO: Yeah, every time I try to finish digital. It’s as if you had organisized a the MOMO Maker project, I end up graphics of digital origin valuing the with more questions. I’d like to part of unexpected result, which we experiment one more time, with 3-d graphic designers are not used to looking shapes and shadows. That seeing. Can we say that for you’re the will have to wait, until maybe next computer is an aid? year, I’m booked already for a while.

MOMO: I actually went to college for “computer art” – isn’t that funny? I was extremely interested but then turned off at the same time. I dropped out after a year. I guessed I could spend 3 years learning something that would become obsolete, or I could lean core art stuff, and apply it when computers became easier to use. Of course that was 95, and immediately I missed the internet . bubble that was forming, and all the Silvia Bianchi: What are the next money and rock and roll (I really projects, which you will work on? fucked up haha). In the fine art sense artists occasionally receive attention MOMO: I can’t mention most of these for demonstrating new technology, things. Some are not 100% certain, but of course its better to chase but I hope to travel to a handful of something substantive. You don’t countries this year, making video want to loose the forest in the trees. I based street experiments, I’ll have a think the MOMO Maker is a really fun show with Rojo in Barcelona in June, invention, but like most tech, I’m half Something with Paper Monster in in, half out. You could do these April, I’m really into zines (if I can find experiments other ways, its just faster anytime). I hope to work with some and reliable and accessible like this friends of mine on things, some

31 experiments and jokes in NYC. Right maker.html now I’m working my day job in Hawaii while it snows in NY. That’s a project http://momoshowpalace.com/TheNe called survival (!), I hope to do some 5 wYorker.htm day sailing off Key West Florida with a http://blog.anonymousgallery.com/u friend who built his own sailboat!. nderground/

http://momoshowpalace.com/+BigVI DEO.htm

www.subaquatica.com http://momoshowpalace.com/momo

32 Trevor Wishart: Chemistry Of Sound

Matteo Milani

through the Composers Desktop Project . These are utilised to the full in Tongues of Fire (1993-4: Golden Nica, Ars Electronica, 1995). All these processes are described in the book Audible Design and made available on the Sound Loom

In the book On Sonic Art, Trevor Wishart discussed new musical possibilities offered by these tools, Trevor Wishart, born 1946 in Leeds, is a and developed notion of a composer and performer who sophisticated art of sound, or Sonic developed (not only) sound Art. He writes: “In the past, the quality transformation tools in his Sound or nature of sounds used in music was Loom – Composers’ Desktop Project set by the technology of instrument software package. He’s the author of design, and conventions about the worldwide-known books ‘On performance and musical ‘expression’. Sonic Art’ and ‘Audible Design’, where In the 19th century, european he shares his extensive research on composers became increasingly extended human voice and computer concerned with ‘sonority’, through music techniques for sound development of new orchestration morphing. He is currently ‘Arts Council techniques, and new instruments. Composer Fellow’ in the Department However, a systematic approach to of Music at Durham University, sound itself had to wait for the England. invention of sound recording and the accurate computer analysis of sounds. Developed computer sound morphing Studios, and then computers, also techniques for IRCAM commission provided powerful new tools for Vox 5, for ‘supervoice’ in sound- musicians to work directly with surround, proposed in 1979, made in sound.” ’86. Subsequently developed large numbers of sound transformation U.S.O. Project had the pleasure of software instruments working interviewing Trevor Wishart, whom

33 work has been recently awarded at working class household, with no real the ‘Giga-Hertz-Award for electronic connection with the world of music 2008′. The ‘Grand Prize’ concerts, or theatres, but there was a honored his artistic and technical piano in the house, a family heirloom, achievements along his career. which no-one ever played. I became fascinated by it, and so my parents agreed to let me have piano lessons. A little later, when I was 7, I was looking in the window of the only classical music shop in town when I noticed a strange book, a musical score with no notes on it (it was a manuscript book). I immediately bought one and began to write my own music.

.

USO: You’ve been awarded at the Bourges Festival, at Ars Electronica and now at Giga-Hertz, three prestigious prizes for electronic music. How are your feelings now for all these tributes about your life work as composer?

. Trevor Wishart: It’s very gratifying to receive this kind of recognition from USO: Did you choose the electronic the musical community, especially as medium and how has this affected the type of music I make is almost your way of composing? invisible in the cultural press in the UK, where electro-acoustic Trevor Wishart: I went to university to composition is squeezed out between study Chemistry (my parents could classical instrumental music and not imagine music as a real job my popular music. school advised me against pursuing this ‘dilettantism’) but soon changed USO: How did you begin being to music. After being thrown into the interested in music composition? deep end of Darmstadt by my college tutor at Oxford, I was writing complex Trevor Wishart: I was brought up in a

34 instrumental music (7 tone rows with kind of metaphor for his structural different intervallic structures + anthropological approach to myth. My random number tables) when my idea was to turn this on its head and father died. He worked in a factory in create a contemporary myth (about Leeds, and I suddenly felt my sense of industrialism, determinism, ‘freedom’ disconnectedness from his world. So I and creativity) using sound and bought the only tape-recorder I could musical structure. The sound- afford (it ran at 3+3/4 inches per transformation approach (very second and had a built in poor-quality difficult to achieve in the analogue mike) and went around factories and studio) was thus partly inspired by a power-stations in Nottingham and political idea the possibility of Leeds, recording the sounds of changing the social world. With the industrial machinery, with some advent of computers, very precise vague notion of making a piece for control of sound structure made it him. In the studio I discovered that possible to adopt sound- many of my presumptions about transformation as a general approach composition were challenged in this to musical materials. I think of this as new medium. Sounds had a life of a generalization of the classical ideas their own which had to be respected. of variation and development, Preconceived absolute notions of extended into the entire spectral musical proportions and musical domain. relationships were challenged by the concrete reality of the sounds themselves. After two large early projects (‘Machine’ and ‘Journey-int- -Space’) I settled on a way of working with complex materials based on the idea of sound-transformation, in the work ‘Red Bird’.

‘Red Bird’ treats its real-world sounds (birds, animals, voices, machines) as metaphors in a mythical landscape, . one sound type transforming into USO: You prefer using samples another to create a form somewhere generated from vocal sources between music and mythic narrative. performed by you with extended In fact the approach was suggested techniques. Could you describe the by reading Levi Strauss’s ‘The Raw and creation process? the Cooked’, where he uses music as a

35 Trevor Wishart: Not strictly. I very production system? often use the human voice (sometimes my own, sometimes live Trevor Wishart: My musical creation performers like ‘Electric Phoenix’ or process depends on the particular ‘Singcircle’, sometimes voices from work. Normally I have a general idea the media, or from the local (a ‘poetic’) for the work. For example, community), for two reasons. On the ‘Imago’ has the idea of surprising one hand the voice is much more than events arising from unlikely origins a musical instrument. Through speech (just like the imago stage of insect it connects us to the social world, and metamorphosis, the butterfly, thence to the traditions of poetry , emerges from the unprepossessing drama, comedy, etc. It reveals much pupa). For ‘Globalalia’ the idea is to about the speaker, from gender, age express the connectedness of human and health to attitude, mood and beings by exploring the fundamental intention, and it also connects us with elements of all languages, the our Primate relatives. The listener syllables. I also have some general recognizes a voice even when it is notions of how musical forms work minimally indicated, or vastly clearly stating the principal materials transformed, just as we recognize is important for the listener in a faces from very few cues. And the context where a traditional musical average listener will be affected by language is not being used; e.g. a vocal multiphonic, an establishing key moments or climaxes immediate empathic or guttural link, in the work; repetition and in a way which they will not be development, and recapitulation of affected by a clarinet multiphonic materials, especially leading towards (appreciate more in the sphere of and away from these foci, and so on. contemporary music afficionados). At Repetition and (possibly transformed) the same time, apart from the recapitulation are especially computer itself, the voice is the important to the listener to chart a richest sound-producing ‘instrument’ path through an extended musical that we have, generating a vast form. But all sound materials are variety of sounds from the stably different, and it is not possible to pitched, to the entirely noisy, to predict, except in the most obvious complex rapidly-changing ways, what will arise when one begins multiphonics or textures of grit and so to transform the sounds. So I spend a on. This is a rich seam to mine for lot of time, exploring, playing with, musical exploration. the sources, transforming them, and transforming the transformations, and USO: Could you describe your musical gradually a formal scheme

36 appropriate to what I discover, and to science background at school meant those particulars materials, that programming came naturally to crystallizes in the studio. me), and I soon discovered the Phase Vocoder, taking apart the data files to discover what was in them, and using this knowledge to begin designing sound-morphing tools based on the transformation of that data.

USO: You have been involved in software developing for several years. Why did you choose to shape your own tools? Can you tell us about the genesis and the actual development . of the Composer Desktop Project?

USO: How was your experience Trevor Wishart: There are two main working at IRCAM for “Vox 5″? reasons. The first is poverty (!). Most of my life I’ve been a freelance Trevor Wishart: My first visit to IRCAM composer, and being a freelance was the most exciting learning experimental composer in England is experience of my life. Discovering the seriously difficult! When I first worked possibilities opened up by the analysis with electronics you were dependent and transformation of sounds using on custom-built black boxes like the software, learning about psycho- SPX90. The problem for me was, even acoustics in Steve McAdams inspiring if I could afford to buy one of these, I lectures, and mingling with high- could not afford to upgrade every powered researchers bursting with other year, as University music new ideas. As you probably know, I departments could. It became clear was offered the opportunity to make that the solution to this would be to a piece during my 1981 visit, but then have IRCAM-like software running on the entire hardware base of IRCAM a desktop computer. A group of like- changed and it was not until 1986 that minded composers and engineers in I could actually begin work on ‘VOX- 5′ York got together (in 1985-6) as the , a piece growing out of the Composers’ Desktop Project, and experience of ‘Red Bird’. I was began porting some of the assigned a mentor (Thierry Lancino), IRCAM/Stanford software to the Atari but he soon realized that I could ST (The MAC was, then, too slow for probably manage on my own (my professional audio). We then began to

37 design our own software. The second graduated onto the PC (MACs were to reason is that creating one’s own expensive for freelancers!) and the instruments means you can follow software gradually got faster than your sonic imagination wherever it realtime. The CDP has always been a leads, rather than being restricted by listening-based system, and I was the limitations of commercially- resistant for a long time to creating focused software. You can develop or any graphic interface – much extend an instrument when you feel commercial software had a the need to (not when the commercial glamorous-looking interface hiding producer decides it’s profitable to do limited musical possibilities. However, so), and you can fix it if it goes wrong! in the mid-90s I eventually developed the ‘Sound Loom’ in TK/Tcl. (This language was particularly helpful as it meant the interface could be developed without changing the underlying sound-processing programs). The advantages of the interface soon became apparent, particularly its ability to store an endless history of musical activities, save parameter patches, and create multi-processes (called ‘Instruments’). . More recently I’ve added tools to USO: Can you tell us the Composers’ manage large numbers of files. ‘Bulk Desktop Project genesis? Processing’ allows hundreds of files to be submitted to the same process, Trevor Wishart: The original ports onto while ‘Property Files’ allow user- the Atari ran very slowly: e.g. doing a defined properties and values to be spectral transformation of a 4 second assigned to sounds, and sounds can stereo sound might take 4 minutes at then be selected on the basis of those IRCAM, but took 2 days on the Atari. properties. There are more and more However, on your own system at high level functions which combine home, you could afford to wait various CDP processes to achieve certainly easier than attempting to higher-level functionality. gain access to the big institutions every time you wanted to make a USO: How did you develop your skills piece. Gradually PCs got faster – even in programming algorhythms for the IRCAM moved onto MACs. The CDP spectral domain?

38 Trevor Wishart: I studied science and USO: Could you explain us your maths at school, and did one term of preference for offline processing university maths (for chemists). software instead of real-time Mathematics has always been one of environments? my hobbies – it’s beautiful, like music. When I was 15, my school organized a Trevor Wishart: Offline and realtime visit to the local (Leeds) university work are different both from a computer, a vast and mysterious programming and from a musical beast hidden in an air-conditioned perspective. The principal thing you room from where it was fed by don’t have to deal with in offline work, punched-card readers. I wrote my is getting the processing done in a first Algol programs then. I only took specific time. The program must be up programming later, as a student at efficient and fast, and understand York, when Clive Sinclair brought out timing issues. Offline all this is simply his first ultra-cheap home computer. I irrelevant. Offline also, you can take taught myself Basic, graduated to the your time to produce a sound-result other Sinclair machines, up to the final e.g. a process might consult the entire ‘QL’ which I used to control the sound and make some decisions sound-spatialisation used in VOX-1. about what to do, run a 2nd process, Later I graduated to C. Martin Atkins, and on the basis of this run a third and who designed the CDP’s sound- so on. As machines get faster and system, and Miller Puckette at IRCAM, programmers get cleverer (and if from whom I picked up some useful composers are happy for sounds to be advice but I’m still only a gifted processed off-line and re-injected amateur when it comes to into the system later) then you can programming! probably get round most of these problems.

But the main difference is aesthetic. If you’re processing a live-event, you have to accept whatever comes in the mike or input device. However precise the score, the sounds coming in will always be subtlety different on each performance. So the processes you use have to work with a range of potential inputs. The main problem

. with live music, is you have to be the sort of person who likes going to

39 concerts, or is happy in the social performance unique, an interaction milieu of the concert. And many with the audience, the concert people are not. This can be changed situation and the acoustics of the through, on the one hand, education, space. Divorcing the music from the but, more significantly, by making the immediacy of a concert stage allows concert world more friendly to more us to explore imaginary worlds, groups of people, and e.g. taking conjured in sound, beyond the social performances to unusual venues (I’ve conventions of the concert hall. performed in working mens’ clubs, schools, and so on).

Working offline you can work with the unique characteristics of a particular sound – it may be a multiphonic you managed to generate in an improvising session but is not simply ‘reproducible’ at will, or it may be the recording of a transient event, or a specific individual, that cannot be reproduced at will in a performance. . Moreover, the absence of performers USO: What are your thoughts about on stage might seem like a weakness, the spatialisation issue? but it has its own rewards. Compare theatre and film. A live performance Trevor Wishart: In the 70′s I worked in has obvious strengths – a contact with an analogue 4-track. But then the 4- living musicians, the theatre of the track technology died. Since then I stage etc, but you’re always definitely have been cautious about using any there in the concert-hall. In the pure spatialisation procedure beyond electro-acoustic event we can create stereo, as I don’t want my work to be a dream-world which might be dependent on a technology which realistic, abstract, surreal or all these might not last. I’m also concerned things at different times – a theatre of with the average listener, who will not the ears where we can be transported go to a concert, or a special institution away from the here and now into a with complex spatialisation facilities. world of dreams. Electro-acoustic Most people will listen to music on music is no different to cinema in the headphones or domestic hifis. So the respect of its repeatability, except music must work in this context. With that sound-diffusion, in the hands of a diffusion, however, I can expand the skilled diffuser, can make each

40 stereo work, using the diffusion process to reinforce and expand the . gestures within the music. My current USO: What do you think about the piece will probably be in 8-tracks, structural approach in music partly for aesthetic reasons, – it is composition? Do you think it could be based on recognizable human speech, helpful to shape tools for computer and I would like the speech aided composition in order to speed ‘community’ to surround the audience up the composer’s work? – and partly because 8-track is, perhaps, future-proof, being Trevor Wishart: Absolutely essential, essentially 4 times stereo! I’m excited there is no music without structure. by the multichannel spatialisation But computer-aided composition is systems being developed at the something for commercial music and moment, but I would like to see the film, where we don’t want to stray development of very cheap, high from known pathways, so we’re quality loudspeakers, to make these happy to encapsulate those in an technologies accessible to smaller algorithm. For art music, I want to (normal) venues, and to composers hear how another person shapes like me, who work at home. materials in order to bring me a musical experience. I’m not interested USO: How should your music be in hearing the output of an algorithm, performed (by you or any other sound though, of course, algorithms might artist) in live context? be used on a small scale to help shape Trevor Wishart: With the pure electro- particular events. acoustic works, the (stereo) pieces USO: Is your academic career helped should be diffused over many stereo you to expand your knowledge about pairs. I provide basic diffusion scores your way of composing? if I am not diffusing the pieces myself. Trevor Wishart: Yes. Because I was studying Chemistry at Oxford, when I changed subject to Music it was into one of the most conservative music departments in the UK, But I’m glad I was therefore brought into contact with music from the middle ages to the early 1900s and taught about the many different approaches composers have taken to organizing

41 their materials, over hundreds of years and homes. I wish to capture people speaking naturally, and to collect USO: In your music is there any together a diverse range of vocal technical or inspirational reference to types – different ages, from 4 to 93, composers of the past? gender, and sheer vocal quality. My intention is to make an electro- Trevor Wishart: I don’t think so. OS, acoustic piece of about one hour, in 4 should I say, not yet . ‘acts’, which plays on both the uniqueness of each speaker, and on the common features of the voice we all share. The piece must be comprehensible to the local community, particularly to those people whose voices I recorded (few of whom have any special interest in experimental music!), but also to an international concert audience, where I cannot assume that the listeners will

. understand English.

USO: What are your near future projects? www.trevorwishart.co.uk Trevor Wishart: My present project, a 3 year residency, involves recording www.giga-hertz.de the speaking voices of many people www.dur.ac.uk/music across the community in the North East of England. I have recorded in www.composersdesktop.com schools, old peoples’ centres, pubs

42 Generative Nature

Marco Mancuso

that makes the art. – Sol Le Witt

.

Modern ecology began with Charles Darwin’s studies; in his “theory of In his De Rerum Natura, Lucretius evolution”, published in 1859 in On the denies any kind of creation, Origin of Species, he underlined the providence and original bliss and adaptation of the different organisms maintains that people freed to the various kinds of environment, themselves from their condition of which are subjected to the age-long need thanks to the production of examination of natural selection. techniques, which are transpositions of nature. A god and some gods exist, However, the word was coined by but they did not create the universe, Ernst Heinrich Haeckel in 1869 and nor they deal with people’s actions. comes from the Greek óikos meaning Lucretius maintains that the rational “house” and logos meaning knowledge of nature shows us an “discourse”: it is therefore a biological infinite universe that is made up of science that studies environment and complex forms and constituted by the relationships that the different atoms; it follows natural laws, it is living organisms establish between indifferent to people’s needs and can each other and with the environment be explained without gods. itself. For some time, Haeckel was a strong supporter and popularizer of When an artist uses a conceptual form Darwin’s theories, but he soon of art, it means that all of the planning became one of his most bitter and decisions are made beforehand enemies; he firmly refuted the and the execution is a perfunctory process of natural selection as the affair. The idea becomes a machine basis of the evolutionary mechanism,

43 in favour of a thought that was more focused on the environment as a . direct agent on natural organisms, Nature as an art which is able to produce new species and generate diversity. “Kunstformen der Natur” literally means “artistic forms of nature”: this is Ernst Heinrich Haeckel’s thought and the title of biologist Ernst Haeckel’s work represent the starting point of 1898 most important text, his most this critical reflection: first of all, complex and fascinating research. because it was the theoretical and Moreover, this is the text from which practical cue suggested by Bruce Bruce Sterling took, for those Sterling during his workshop for participating in his workshop, some Fabrica, to which the text refers; primary images that could be the secondly, because it allows me a graphic material and starting point for philosophical and critical reflection an aesthetic and methodological aspiring to find a possible point of reflection on the practices of contact between nature, theories of generative repetitiveness. By evolution and programmatic and watching the richly decorated plates generative art. Is it impossible? Well, I in Haeckel’s text, it is undeniable that would say no, on the contrary. Above nature is able not only to create all if we try to compare and spontaneously real “art forms”, but amalgamate, like the colours on a also to produce a direct canvas, the German biologist’s correspondence between a certain research on one side with some works generative aesthetics, starting from a of conceptual and minimalist artist Sol fundamental unit/nucleus to come to Le Witt and the possible relationship a complex entity, and a consequent between mathematics and nature on adaptive and evolutionary practice. the other, and what is known today as art and generative design. In other words, if the stages of the embryological development of a species actually trace the evolution phases that led it to its position in the natural order, the survival of each species basically depends on its interaction with the environment. According to Haeckel, the mechanism thanks to which new species and a new diversity have origin is that of a

44 gradual addition of a certain Idea/human-creative-act makes an development trajectory starting from unpredictable, amazing and endless an initial unit, which is determined by expansion of human creativity. imposed external (environmental) Computers are simply the tools for its parameters, which are able to storage in memory and execution. influence the gradual direction of the This approach opens a new era in Art, trajectory itself. Design and Communication: the challenge of a new naturalness of the artificial event as a mirror of Nature. Once more man emulates Nature, as in the act of making Art [ ].”

lthough, over the centuries, biologists and morphologists have widely denied a so close correspondence between ontogenesis and phylogeny, and so between unity and complexity, the germ of thought is interesting and . I think it is worth continuing to nourish it . At this point, a first important reference to the theoretic and methodological bases of Generative Art seems evident, as one of the pioneers of this discipline, Italian architect Celestino Soddu, suggests: “Generative Art is the idea realized as genetic code of artificial events, as construction of dynamic complex systems able to generate endless variations. Each Generative Project is a concept-software that works . producing unique and non-repeatable events, as possible and manifold Forms, colours, line and instructions expressions of the generating idea As everybody knows, US conceptual strongly recognizable as a vision and minimalist artist Sol Le Witt, who belonging to an died not long ago, is one of the artist/designer/musician/architect/m spiritual fathers of modern artists and athematician. This generative generative designers. By reducing art

45 to a series of instructions thanks to identifies himself/herself with the which everybody is able to draw author of a series of mathematical forms, colours and lines in the two- instructions that can be suggested to dimensional and three-dimensional a computer, the resulting work of art space, creating geometric elements will be the sum of the operations that that are repeated and modulated the computer has carried out according to standard space autonomously. Therefore, as for Sol Le proportions, Le Witt loved reminding Witt the emotional elements of the that “all the people are able to authors, their joy at a moment, their participate in the creative process, to frustration, their apathy were become artists themselves”. It is well- constituent elements of a free known that the artist tended to interpretation of the instructions that separate the planning stage from the had been suggested to them and so realization of the work; he devoted of the resulting work of art, in the himself to the former, whereas his universe of digital software as well assistants devoted themselves to the (from Processing to VVVV to Open latter: if the artistic process thus lies in Frameworks , to mention the most the conceptual planning of the work, widespread) we can hazard the the (basic, elementary and geometric) thought that the instructions given by execution can be carried out by the artist/designer can be freely everybody, thanks to a series of interpreted by a kind of “emotiveness” detailed instructions that are of the “thinking” computer. suggested by a thinking unit with a procedural approach. He also claimed: ” There are several ways of constructing a work of art. One is by making decisions at each step, another by making a system to make decisions. “

In this kind of approach the work of the last years of some of the most important generative artists and designers in the world ( Casey Reas, . Ben Fry, Jared Tarbell, Theodore Le Witt’s conceptual indifference to Watson, Lia, Toxi, Andreas Schlegel , any kind of aesthetic judgement, the Marius Watz, Robert Hodgin, to aversion to prearranged aesthetic mention only some of them) is conventions that are assimilated by reflected: if the human being

46 the public, a general indifference to time, it is fascinating even to think any kind of distinction between old that as the artist/designer does not and new are perfectly reflected in the know the final effects of the words of one of the most important instructions, giving the computer the generative artists in Italy, Fabio freedom to interpret them, similarly Franchino: “In the evening I give some nature does not care about the effects instructions to the computer, which it produces on the organisms living in processes data and autonomously it, giving them evolutionary freedom generates lines, forms and colours of forms and elements that we, during the night; in the morning, human beings, only afterwards could when I wake up, I judge the results. If I maybe consider as “works of art”. like the product I will keep it, if it is not satisfying I will throw it.”

Well, I do not know what these things suggest to you: I think that also in this case we can make a comparison with the natural universe. If we assimilate the environment, nature in its widest meaning, as the entity that is able to cause a series of changes, evolutions and dynamics, then the organisms living in contact with it (again, the . concept of “ecology”) are able to Numbers in evolution interpret these vital codes, to assimilate them, in order to react to Today, one of the most fascinating them and autonomously generate a mathematical theories is undoubtedly series of forms, colours and systems that of fractals: according to the that can be seen as the result of their definition of their discoverer, Polish evolutionary process, which comes to mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot, a complex final system from a starting they are geometric shapes, unit. The difference maybe lies in the characterised by the endless “spontaneity” with which this process repetition of the same pattern at ever begins: if an artist/designer decides, smaller scales. This is the most in advance, a series of instructions intuitive definition that can be given that will be given to the computer, it to shapes that exist in nature in an is difficult not to think that nature impressive number but do not still operates by following only its have a precise mathematical evolutionary spontaneity. At the same

47 definition. The natural universe is rich casualness, of spontaneity, as the in forms that are very similar to distinctive (or unifying) element fractals, forms that do not follow the between computer and nature, norms of the Euclidean geometry: a according to which evolutionary stretch of coast, the branches or the mechanisms cannot be predicted roots of a tree, a cloud, the from their constituent elements and it snowflakes, the ramifications of a is often impossible to reconstruct lightning and the dentation of a leaf them, starting from their visible are example of fractal forms manifestations. originating spontaneously in nature. Among these, the fractal form par excellence is the spiral, the constituent element of the shell of many annelids and conches, which is one of the main objects of study of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel’s theories and one of the most beautiful and fascinating geometric forms.

If we shift the field of analysis to mathematics, to numbers, to . equations and algorithms, the level of At this point of the text, the intersection between science, procedural, generative, iterative and technology, art and nature does not evolutionary element may be change. And if the procedural and considered as the pillar of the thought generative method is that we have underpinning a modern chosen as the guiding element of this “computational ecology”: between treatise, it is not surprising to think Turing’s revolutionary theories on that the construction of fractals “morphogenesis” (every living follows a reiterated process, that is, organism is able to develop complex the repetition of a starting element for bodies, starting from extremely a theoretically infinite number of simple elements and basing on times until, after a while, the human processes of self-assembly, without eye cannot distinguish the changes in the aid of a guide following a the starting element any longer. We prearranged plan) and the most must not forget the fact that, as it is recent studies that have been carried acknowledged, fractals are influenced out on “genetic algorithms” (a by certain controlled casualness. particular class of evolutionary There is thus again the element of

48 algorithms using techniques of natural rules of variation and mutation, selection and selection. The definition of fitness can recombination, so that a certain even be altered as the programmer population of abstract representations desires.” of possible solutions to an optimization problem evolves into better solutions) almost 50 years of studies, analyses and research passed; they aimed at underlining the nearly computational properties of Mother Nature on one side, and the ability of digital machines to simulate and repeat complex natural phenomena. Frankly, I do not wonder any longer what is the most fascinating form of . art or the most difficult process I think that what is interesting in Moreover, I think that the most Genetic Images is the fact that this interesting answers to these themes work was presented as an interactive can be found in the studies and installation: in other words, it was the theories of Karl Sims, the famous public who could choose and select artist and researcher from Mit Media the most interesting images and Lab; in particular, we can find them in forms from an aesthetic point of view, his 1993 work, Genetic Images , which among those generated by a drew inspiration from his paper computer simulating a process of Artificial Evolution of Computer artificial evolution. The selected Graphics , where he described the images were then recombined by the application of the “genetic algorithms” computer to create new ones, basing for the generation of 2D abstract on alteration and mutation methods, images, starting from complex similar to those of natural species mathematical formulas. Therefore during their evolutionary process. Karl according to Sims, Darwin ‘s Sims thus wonders whether these evolutionary theories can be interactive evolutions can be simulated by means of a generative considered a creative process. If yes, software or appropriate mathematical is it the public who develop an algorithms; in this way, “populations independent creative attitude or is of virtual entities specified by coded the presence of a designer making the descriptions in the computer can be computer follow precise creative evolved by applying these same

49 paths necessary? Or is it maybe the through the codes of a natural computer that develops autonomous evolution”, concludes Sims. Maybe creative tendencies? true art lies exactly in all these things.

In his treatise, Sims duly mentions biologist Richard Dawkins who, in his book The Blind Watchmaker, talks about the ability of natural http://caliban.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de/st evolutionary processes to create ueber/haeckel/kunstformen/natur.ht complex forms without the external ml presence of any designer or programmer: “It is thus possible that http://www.celestinosoddu.com/ these generative techniques challenge an important aspect of our http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beno%C3 anthropocentric tendencies, %AEt_Mandelbrot according to which it is difficult for us to believe that we are planned not by http://www.karlsims.com/genetic-im a God but by casualness showing ages.html

50 Anna Adamolo: Practical Critique Of Ideology

Tatiana Bazzichelli

and secondary school, precarious teachers and researchers of the university. This last component shows that bases are being set for a generalized rebellion against the new indecent ways of working in the so- called “cognitive” or “immaterial” capitalism. It is of course an open question if a massive movement of the temporary workers will rise, in Italy and in the whole Western world. Social crisis, movements, ideologies But at least the bases and the The “Onda Anomala” (Anomalous premises, with the explosion of the Wave) is the more important social Onda, have been placed. phenomenon seen in Italy in the last The movement starts from the school years. It started from the school’s because schools, in the Western ground, from the protests against the world, have almost remained the only so-called “Gelmini reform”, but its places of socialization, in which value doesn’t seem to be limited to people get in contact outside of the that: it looks like the manifestation of TV control on the Imaginary. But it a new process of global social grows because we are seeing the mobilization. The material, cultural and moral uneasiness that starts from failure of thirty years of neo-liberal the problems of the school, is politics, of privatization of whatever beginning to concern wider thematic: can be privatized. The strength and work, redistribution of wealth, the cleverness of the Capitalism are lifestyle, democracy and equality . impressive , but also the movements that it produces against itself are The movement crosses different strong. What caused the beginning of social and generational layers: the ’68 movement is back, after 40 university and college students (surely years, in a different shape but with until now the majority of the people) the same substance. And with a still teachers and parents of the primary bigger capacity, it seems, to escape

51 the traps of ideology and cleverly public opinion with extreme facility, move in the terrains of imaginary, and they have often become the focal language, use of technology. point of different debates. This can be a surprise only to whom considers ideology as a superficial misrepresentation of the facts, that would be relatively simple to fight and to dismantle only by re-establishing a mythical truth. Things, alas, are not so simple. If the public opinion so easily falls prey of a grotesque and superficial explanation of complex social movements (“there are violent people that cause trouble . and feed discontent”), it is because “To many demonstrations organized ideology has structural, and not only by the Extreme Left and by the Social super-structural rooting and strength Centres, as the Minister of the Interior (to use a “Marxian” terminology) has confirmed, take part violent This has already been clearly people”. Thus the present premier explained by Guy Debord in the 1960s: Silvio Berlusconi commented the first “Ideology is the intellectual basis of demonstrations against the Gelmini class societies within the conflictual reform of the beginning of October course of history. Ideological 2008. What should make us wonder expressions have never been pure (and ponder) of those early reactions, fictions; they represent a distorted is not so much the light-hearted consciousness of realities, and as such declarations of intervention of the they have been real factors that have military, but rather the readiness with in turn produced real distorting which the public (television, but not effects. This interconnection is only) has moved the attention from intensified with the advent of the the real reasons that have brought spectacle – the materialization of hundreds of thousand of people to ideology brought about by the take to the streets, to an “ideological” concrete success of an autonomized explanation, based on the spotting of system of economic production – reassuring categories in which to which virtually identifies social reality enclose the demonstrators. with an ideology that has remoulded These definitions have caught on the all reality in its own image.” [The society of the show, 212].

52 economic mechanisms, political instruments, military structures – that of course have a primary role – it is a linguistic device that guarantees the citizens’ compliance of to the “leading values” of a society. With the – much ideological – presumption that language faithfully describes and represents the reality without any margin. . Surely, when the situation grows The ability of the capitalism of tense, when reality claims its own “remould all reality in an ideology’s autonomy taking non anticipated image”, that Debord calls roads (when the economic crisis gets “materialization of the ideology”, is real, for example), then also the even more evident if we see it from linguistic device hampers, then the the point of view of the biopolitics, statement that language faithfully namely of the direct management of represents reality appears deceptive life by the political powers, that and groundless: the declarations of therefore become a biopower. From politicians, newspapers, televisions, this perspective, the practice to the intellectuals’ stories and regime identify different groups of people comedians’ shows, appear all of a through objectifying categories sudden pale and out of focus. becomes necessary, in order to keep a Possibilities are born of different check on productive and social linguistic games, of different processes. In the political field, the behaviours, of nonconformist presence of various subjectivities is practices. An Anomalous Wave useless, so it doesn’t have any appears, and inside it like bubbling importance that a wide variety of foam, characters are born that are people has been demonstrating. A capable to speak different words, to shear character is built that doesn’t use languages and technologies for have anything in common with the different purposes from those for various singularities, but is instead a which they were conceived. For dull generalization of the crowd. What example, Anna Adamolo appears. do we mean by this? That further to

53 Anomala, recommended herself as a collective name through which tell one’s own story or to claim protesting actions against the measures of the Government.

In that same period, newspapers and televisions had shown a particular interest for the social network Facebook in relation to the

. intervention of different political groups on that medium. Particularly, Anna Adamolo: history of a new the presence of numerous groups collective identity against the decree or against Gelmini herself, and of fewer groups instead Anna Adamolo first appeared on the supporting them. A number of days pages of the social network Facebook, before the appearance of Anna in which she presented herself as an Adamolo, the first account named for alternative to the Law 133 of the Mariastella Gelmini had been created, Gelmini reform. The images, similar to one among many named after famous those of an any political campaign, or political characters, but the first represented a woman in her fifties one to bear the name of the – by then with violet-rimmed glasses. At first – famous minister. look it could seem just another candidate, but the users contacted by Easy to imagine, all users who joined her received a particular request: “If the account (“friends” in Facebook you become a friend of Anna slang) mostly shared the political Adamolo, we ask you to change your positions of the minister. The different name, your profile or your current messages appeared more or less state by showing her name and her similar to this: “Unfortunately, once logo instead of yours”. In the mean more, it is as President Berlusconi has time, a blog was founded said: students get manipulated!”: (http://annaadamolo.noblogs.org/) users, in short, reintroduced the same where it was possible to download kinds of categorization promoted by various materials and to get more the government. It was evident that information about the objectives of the definitions given by the ideology, this operation. Anna Adamolo, had become reality for all subjects actually an anagram of Onda linked to that political credo.

54 during the protests of Milan ‘s Onda Anomala, in order to obtain special trains for Rome ‘s demonstration. In that circumstance, false discounts had been issued to reach the Capital.

In the morning of the 14th, the most important Italian newspapers received hundreds of very peculiar emails. They arrived from the web domain

. ministeroistruzione.net and were graphically arranged like an official Anna Adamolo was born as an answer press release from the Ministry office. to those mechanisms, it proposed as a This was the text of the e-mail: “I am not normalized imaginary able to Anna Adamolo [...] Today students, express the different subjectivities teachers, parents, workers and beyond the instruments of citizens occupy side by side with me materialization of the ideology used the website of the University and by the institutional and economic Research Ministry”. Just a few hours authorities. The project’s objectives later, the websites of La Repubblica , were made clearer on November 14, of AGI (Italian Journalistic Agency) 2008, when “more than 300.000 and of other newspapers headlined: students arrived to Rome with trains “SCHOOL: HACKER IN THE WEBSITE and buses from all over Italy , started OF THE DEPARTMENT OF a march from the Sapienza, for the EDUCATION”, linking the hacked national demonstration organized by website the Universities. The objective had www.ministeroistruzione.net. publicly been announced more than a Probably they did not catch the sense week earlier: to surround Palazzo of a sentence written at the bottom of Chigi, to shout ‘in the face’ of the the e-mail: “Today, we symbolically illegitimate government those weeks’ build on the Net a new Ministry, the slogan: ‘We won’t pay your crisis’ ” Ministry that we all would want to (from the site www.uniriot.org). have in Italy , where the voices of the temporary workers, of the students, In the previous days, Anna Adamolo of the teachers, of all the citizens, are showed up in the Milan train station finally heard.”

55 from whomever feels to be Anna Adamolo. Some of these emails were recently published in the book “I am Anna Adamolo. Voices and stories from the Onda Anomala”, of the editions NdA.

At the same time of the emails to the newspapers, a message was released online in which the internet users

. were requested to contribute to an action of googlebombing by linking in Not a “Shadow Ministry”, therefore, their own site or blog the address but a “Wave Ministry”. Of course, it www.ministeroistruzione.net with the wasn’t an action of defacement of the words “Department of Education.” A official website, but instead an action couple of weeks later, the objective of hacking of the informatic systems. was reached, and the “new” website The official website had on purpose of the Ministry got at first place in the been cloned on another selected searches on Google, overcoming the domain so that it could be confused official website. with the official one. After a few seconds on the website, a full screen The same day of the demonstration in video started with images of Rome , while declaring a symbolic demonstrations of the days before. occupation of the Onda Anomala, the With an unexpectedly calm musical Facebook account of Mariastella background, a female voice began to Gelmini was changed by replacing the speak saying: “I am Anna Adamolo. I name of the Minister with that of want to bring all these voices inside Anna Adamolo (which demonstrated this Building.” That same voice that the account had not been multiplied told the different created by Gelmini herself, but it was experiences of the demonstrators and a fake). This happened while tens of finally stated: “Now, we are in people paraded toward Palazzo Chigi politics.” The users were rerouted wearing violet-rimmed glasses then on another website in which it is downloaded from the blog, and still now possible to listen to the spraying the logo of the new Wave phone calls and read the emails sent Minister on the walls of Rome .

56 firstly the collective Aut Art of the Accademia di Brera, but also the collective of Political Sciences in Milan, the self-formation collective from Bologna, Chainworkers, Diversamentestrutturati from Milan, the students’ coordination of the university of Ferrara, the student collectives of Trento and many others. It was a dense net of collaborations in . which were shared experiences and competences, in order to accomplish A movement that since the beginning a national-scale project. refused any outside representative, ironically struck the various politic parts, and played with the mechanisms of representation transforming each and every demonstrator into Minister.

In the following weeks the initiatives branded Anna Adamolo multiplied. The Wave Minister showed up in flesh and blood storming on the stage of

Piccolo Teatro Studio in Milan to . replace Minister Gelmini by now absent from any official circumstance. Anna Adamolo between hacking, artivism and linguistic guerrilla In this complex operation have also been involved arts groups like Les Lien The experience of Anna Adamolo Invisibiles and I/o cose and the brings new life to the Italian activism graphic duo ParcoDiYellowstone. The scene and, at the same time, it project AHA: Activism-Hackin- converts in actions those pulses of the -Artivism has supported the operation dissent that had been consolidated by in all different phases, directly decades of hacktivist practices. Anna involving different members of the Adamolo plays with language, but mailing-list [email protected]. Besides this, also with the concept of collective the different groups and student identity, becoming an icon for those collectives have been fundamental, who try to rewrite the codes of the

57 reality through the détournement of objective. Anna Adamolo interprets the symbols. A tradition that in Italy Monty Cantsin and Luther Blissett by was born in the nineties with the playing with language and with the multi-individual Luther Blissett and, labyrinths of politics, and by making ten years before, worldwide with the the state bureaucracy open and open-pop-star Monty Cantsin, possible. Its answer is the creation of multiple entity of the neoist an “intimate bureaucracy” (Craig J. (anti)movement. Unlike Monty Saper 2001) creatively re-interpreting Cantsin, an individuality used as a the structural elements of the nickname by the Neoism exponents everyday life, like years before did the and therefore connected more to Mail Art and other avant-gardes. The specific subjects than to a wide institutional symbols are overturned – collective, Anna Adamolo is the voice official websites, stamps of the of a network. A network of people Department of Education – in order to that involves young students and make them something shareable and researchers, temporary workers and creative. Signs and marks of a net of teachers, all those people who want subjects that changes and determines to be Anna Adamolo to make real its own rules, that wants to activity of a political, cultural and autonomously build its own education social Utopia. and its own future.

The networking component is Anna Adamolo becomes the symbolic therefore central in Anna Adamolo, kernel of a precarious movement that and its net is inspired by the in the past had already showed its anonymous one created by the Luther radical appearance through visual Blissett, but with different objectives. messages, and turned the heaviness Although they represented a plurality of the traditional politics into a spiral of individuals, the Luther Blissett of ironic activism: St. Precarious, the operated independently from any Saint of the precarious workers, and political movement, insinuating like a Serpica Naro, the stylist of the virus in the bugs of the media system imaginary are other examples. The and in the drifts of the urban legends. message has finally reached a Instead Anna Adamolo was born community of varied subjects, not within the movement of the Onda only belonging to the hacker, activist Anomala, it has no face but at the and guerrilla marketing movements, same time has many faces, deeply and is directed to all people who want rooted in political and social battles. to transform our present. In this Faces that bear manifold aspects, sense, Anna Adamolo was the true while fighting for a common semiotic revolution, because it

58 successfully tried to reach those who, communicate is for a man being for the first time, decided to measure linguistic. This means that the Marxian against the possible alternatives by analysis must be integrated, demonstrating and actively operating capitalism (.) was not only the on the internet. expropriation of the productive activity, but also – and above all – the alienation of the language itself, of the linguistic nature and communicativeness of the man itself, of the “logos” in which a fragment by Eraclito identifies the Common. The extreme form of this expropriation of the Common is the show, that is the politics in which we live. [George Agamben, " Glosse in margine ai Commentari sulla società dello . spettacolo ", SugarCo, Milan 1990, pp. Conclusioni: for a new language and a 242-243] new politics The strength of Anna Adamolo, same It seems evident, from everything as that of every collective name, of written above, that the operation every aware operation of net art, is in Anna Adamolo is a meaningful the ability to reset the bond between episode of a not-new tendency (it was language and world as operated by already evident, during the 1900s, tradition and by power, and to create from the Berliner Dada to the slogans the conditions for the creation of a of the Parisian 1968), but proposed new world. Every time a person, a with new strength and new human being, visits the website awareness by the Onda Anomala. We www.ministeroistruzione.net and can synthesize it this way: no leaves a message that begins with “I revolution or change is ever possible am Anna Adamolo…”, it acts on the in any level of the human activity, if most difficult linguistic ground, but the revolution or the change don’t also on the more powerful. Enunciates start with language. The main reason like “I am XY”, “my name is XY”, are the for this affirmation has been exposed clearest and most dangerous form of as clearly as possible by Giorgo the so-called “performative Agamben: “Since it is clear that the enunciates”, that is of those show is the language, the ability to affirmations that complete an action in the moment they are uttered, and

59 that the 1900 linguistics has studied with the various “linguistic actions” theories (from Wittgenstein to Austin to Searle).

This is exactly why the “denomination” operations (from the registry office to the baptism) are reserved in our societies to the official powers, i.e.

State and Church. It is again Agamben . that clarifies the linguistic challenge that the society of the show-business, It is the complexity of the linguistic the society of global and Omni- fact, its new tangling with the pervasive capitalism: “What prevents economic, productive and mediatic the communication, is the same mechanisms, that gives us the chance communicability, the men are to radically re-discuss the devices of separated by what unites them (…). In domination that capitalism shows us the show-business society (…) not only as natural and obvious, first of all the language is constituted linguistic mechanisms. To regain one’s autonomously, but it doesn’t even own “language capacity” means reveal anything of all things (…). The therefore to escape the alienation of times in which we are living, are also the language that perpetuates and those where it becomes possible to makes those devices possible. men, for the first time, to experience That’s why Anna Adamolo is not only their own linguistic essence – not an interesting and useful container for some content of the language, but all the proposals made by the the language itself, not some true movements (from self-education in proposition, but the fact itself that we the schools and in the universities, to speak. [Giorgio Agamben, op. cit., pp. a guaranteed social income), but it is 245-246] also an attempt to build a new language of the collective action, of politics, starting from its softer and deeper ground, that is the mechanisms of communication. It is a long and complex job, that however the Onda Anomala (and Anna Adamolo with it) has already started.

60 61 Milano 2009: Where Are You Culture?

Bertram Niessen

cosmopolitan city, open to new trends and able to radically innovate in fashion and design. According to many people, it was at that moment that Milan lost its soul, in the vortex of fashion, cocaine and corruption started in the Eighties.

t is difficult to judge and understand if something true that was then destroyed really existed. On the Bertram Niessen contrary, what is easy to see is that at a certain point Milan came into Milan is a mean city. People know and collision with itself, blinded by the have always known it. It is the capital culture of image and television. In a of industry, money and productivity. sadder and sadder cultural panorama, However, for a long time, Milan was where every place of resistance linked also something else. to the traditions of the old districts Like all big industrial cities, for a long has been programmatically time it cultivated, in its working-class demolished and replaced by fast-food neighbourhood, the immigrants’ restaurants or shops of important street culture with all their conflicts. international brands, Milan has lost At the same time, it was the city of the awareness of itself and the image the cultured middle class, of the that was created by few people for publishing houses, of the daily few people’s benefit prevailed on all newspapers, of graphics and, for the urban area, as if the few hundreds some time, of art. Then, at a certain of square meters of Via point, something broke. In the vortical Montenapoleone and of the fashion processes of social reorganization districts represented the whole city after the end of Ford’s economic with its million and three hundred ideas, Milan tried to become a thousand inhabitants, its contradictions and paradoxes.

62 monthly deals with in these pages. In the process of impoverishment that hit the city in the last few decades, three aspects have grown particularly: ignorance, monotony and intolerance.

First of all, the attention of the cultural institutions towards lower and alternative forms of culture has constantly reduced; some of them

. were able to achieve good results thanks to the efforts and the The element that is maybe the most resolution of single professionals, but harrowing is that this process of there were not the will and the ability systematic impoverishment of the to give a course and a coordination to quality of life has been celebrated these activities. The pernicious effect many times by Milanese people. More of this laxity is the annulment, on a and more lost in a city, in a country long term, of the good things that and in a world whose dynamics they these few people have done. do not understand, the inhabitants of this disheartening cement expanse have competed to sell pieces of their individual and collective freedoms in exchange for security. Security. The magic word, what everybody seems to look for; but it is exactly the search for security that kills. More and more urban spaces are empty, less frequented and Milanese people are more and more alone. And more and more insecure. The effects of these . dynamics are countless and, Secondly, we have witnessed a unfortunately, often long-term. constant appeal for traditional values What I would like to share with and for the sense of homogeneity and Digicult’s readers, instead, is a brief belonging; it is as if the older and reflection on the relationship between older inhabitants of this older and the obsession for security and the older city have forgotten that the practices and disciplines Digicult results they saw in their youth were

63 very often linked to the mixture and the dominating ones has become the combination of enthusiasms and criminal. The flag that is waved by the differences coming from different champions of security is that of areas of Italy. legality: “Illegal practices cannot be tolerated”, thundered Milan mayor Finally, Milan ‘s community is less and Letizia Moratti. Every student less able to manage conflicts, attending the second year of the forgetting that a community without faculty of sociology could explain to conflicts is not possible at all. In this the mayor that a society cannot exist way, each smallest form of departure without spaces of liminality, dark from standards and average has areas and ambiguous codes made up become an affront to the integrity of of dim lights. the city and everything that was labelled as “uncivilized” is now a Because, and this is the most serious “crime”. And, above all, to show the thing, a city managing its social, and rest of the city the necessity for an thus cultural policies, basing on the otherness, the need (which is first of equation between deviance and all existential and not political) for criminality is a city that is bound to cultural codes that are different from die.

64 always been easy. They are short stories of enthusiasm, conflicts, illusions and disillusions. However, if in the other big European cities, maybe suffering, the funds for festivals and exhibition spaces were placed at disposal by the local administration, Milan has lived a story made up of collaborations in occupied places. In illegal places. In places of . experimentation and social innovation. Milan wants to be a creative city. And its administration is convinced that to To remove these places means to be a creative city it is enough to have remove one of the few cultural an adequate number of workers in institutions working well in a city. And certain professional fields. This is not the consequences of this nth sufficient and everybody can see it. impoverishment of the collective There is not creativity without social heritage will fall upon all the Milanese, innovation and there is not social for such a long period that is too innovation without experimentation. painful to imagine it. Milan has a vital need for informal spaces. Milan needs illegal practices.

The relationship between new media and the centri sociali in Italy and in Milan has always been very close, much more than in other countries. Starting from the world of BBS and of the cyberpunk in the Eighties, passing through the experience of ECN and of the Hacklabs and coming to the countless artistic experimentations . linked to music, the centri sociali have often been the only places that Marco Mancuso were open enough to let those who I am taking my cue from one of the wanted a different relationship with first protest letters I wrote in the technology try, succeed or fail. I do pages of Digicult on the same day of not mean that this relationship has the eviction of Cox18 in Milan, as

65 evidence for what has happened in last people that really loved it and Milan in the last few days and as a with Calusca collected texts and warning to myself against landing in videos, whose possible confiscation boredom and in the pietistic would be one of the heaviest loss of resignation of an emergency cultural audiovisual material that the and social situation. countercultural movements of this country could ever experience. For those who live in Milan , who love and hate this city and everywhere in Italy identify Cox18 and Primo Moroni Calusca Archive as an important political and cultural heritage for any form of counterculture and activism in Italy , Thursday 22 January was an extremely sad day. At dawn, in a devious, forced and mean way and without being informed, against the law, according to which an official legal amendment after the current . eviction case had to be waited for, the The eviction of Conchetta, because of police entered the occupied and self- the ways in which it was carried out managed centro sociale Cox18 and and for its political and social reasons, the rooms of Calusca City Lights and is maybe the last definite theft and of Moroni Archive, taking possession offence act not only against the of the rooms of the centre that, at young people of Milan counterculture, that time in the morning, were but against all the people that in Italy completely empty. want to have freedom of speech and Unlike other historical countercultural expression, to identify themselves situations in Milan and surroundings, with a place, with a series of Conchetta has been and still is, initiatives, against all the people who together with few other experiences, do not want to run away from their a place of memory, a testimony of a history but to resist, against all the period that maybe ended, a place people who, from Rome to Turin, from where to freely suggest ideas and Venice to Palermo, are experiencing – I cultural events, a place of personal am certain of that – the repression, the memories and friendships, the seat of loss of their identity, the groundless the very rich Moroni Archive, the last and arrogant insults by institutions, by true antihero of this city, one of the any kind of institution, the aggressive

66 ones that repress and the indecent However, we must acknowledge ones that say nothing. something: the Moratti government has succeeded in what no political The days after the eviction were, from movement and no social utopia had a certain point of view, an important succeeded in the last twenty years. historical moment in Milan , a place The eviction, the repression by the where to be to really sense the police and deputy mayor Riccardo De discontent of a whole generation of Corato’s arrogant words, his threats to young people, students, professionals, close all the occupied centri sociali creative people, artists and that are properties of Milan intellectuals. For those who saw it and (Conchetta, Pergola, Torchiera and for those who were not there. From Cantiere), mayor Moratti’s lack of the first still sleepy and upset 30 respect because she wanted to people who came to Via Conchetta 18, arrogate to herself the right to the number of young and old people manage the cultural heritage which wanting to protest gradually grew: I was collected by Moroni, whose witnessed the first defence actions, daughter reacted with a desperate the block of Viale Tibaldi, one of the appeal, united everyone under the main roads in the city, the march of same banner of protest, of demonstrators in the district streets indignation, of rage, which are from Porta Genova to the Darsena determined by tiredness. (dock); these are all historical places of Milan counterculture, read La luna sotto casa by Primo Moroni, that Primo Moroni who is certainly screaming from his grave because of what is happening, and you will understand what I mean. And also demonstrations near Palazzo Marino, solid interventions by the intellectuals of the city (among them, Paolo Rossi and his protest cry against Palazzo Marino during the meeting of the city . government on the Conchetta case), Yes, tiredness. Because when you talk concerts in XXIV Maggio square and with those I like defining “non- the great demonstration on Saturday protected minorities”, tiredness is the 24 January, in which many people prevailing feeling. Tiredness because took part. of a situation of cultural and urban

67 degeneration, which seems my generation of culture people is irreparable: the closing of Conchetta suffering in this city, which does not seems a warning, it is the nth symbol offer opportunities, jobs, which has of which this city has been deprived, a been emptied of energy and lifeblood city that is living a social and cultural and is forced to survive clinging, tooth impoverishment and is not able to and nail, to the hope of a revival we find the key to the problem among cannot yet see. The city of Marinetti superstar councillors for culture, petty and the Futurism, of Gianni Colombo’s politicians, shrewd and dishonest Gruppo T and of Bruno Munari, of people, lobbies of politicized Luigi Russolo and of the RAI studio of intellectuals and laxists who cannot phonology, of the magazine “Re see beyond their small gardens, which Nudo” and of the experience of were created after years of esteemed Lambro Park, of Shake and Primo activity, who are incapable of sharing Moroni, of Memphis Group and of knowledge, who are not interested in Ettore Sottsass, of the Virus and the growth of the new generation of Deposito Bulk centres, of Studio artists and producers of culture, to Azzurro new media group and of which I belong; on the contrary, they Otolab, and of many other are more guilty than other people of experiences of artistic, literary and their silence, their indifference, their social avant-garde. class-conscious attitude. And this is not my opinion, it is a shared opinion: I am not the only one who thinks that, as a journalist I try to put down on paper a general feeling, which I think must be listened to and everyone must sense! inally, tiredness is not a physical or mental condition, but it involves our souls. And this does not mean to pity ourselves, to speak always ill of this . city, but it means to understand In a city that has already begun to where discontent lies and from where, propagandize its future projects for on day or another, the germ of social the Expo 2015, its cultural DNA open disorder will come, because there will to diversity and sharing, in a racist and be that day, it is now inevitable. It intolerant city, indifferent to the means to understand well the ethnic minorities living in it, incapable difficulties in economy and life that

68 of being concerned about nothing but are many doubts and questions about profit and culture with small “c”, that what it is better to do and the way in of great exhibitions, of great events, which it is better to do it: in the last the so-called mainstream culture, the few days there have been many eviction of Cox18 seems not to discussions with friends and concern those who continue to acquaintances. I do not know what complain, who do not identify strategy will be successful, but as for themselves with this city but do not my natural professional bias I think take sides, who run away without that the mixture between “real” and taking responsibilities, who do not “virtual” action is maybe the best practise what they preach and take solution or at least the only one that offence when you point that out to we can practise, until Morpheus has them. found a new Neo that will take all of us to Zion . I am also convinced that The occupation of Cox18 by the police until we have attracted the attention concerns those who are generally of mass media, until it has been talked called “movements” by mass media, about you and your discontent have but whom I prefer to identify with a been deeply perceived, we will be formless and colourless area of faces bound to tilt at windmills. and experiences, of artists and intellectuals, often linked to alternative art expressions, those with which Digicult deals in its specific field of electronic and digital culture, of the good and bad use of old and new technologies, of its applications and expressions, both in the well-known areas of festivals and art exhibitions and in the areas of centri sociali that only few people know and from which these cultures come (as other social . and cultural experiences at a My appeal is not so much to the most European level witness in Germany, famous artists at this moment who, Spain, Holland, England and in the according to precise codes of false North European countries). provocation, typical of the world of The past days and the coming ones contemporary art, condemn the will thus be full of initiatives, both in short-sightedness of the institutions the streets and on the Internet. There that then invite them and pay them a

69 lot of money, as to the intellectuals me during an interview some years and artists who really love this city, ago: “You have a weapon that is more understand the emergency situation, effective than many others. Word. Use know it very well and can represent a it.” There is a sentence of De Andrè voice that otherwise, for the that continuously comes to my mind, umpteenth time, will be alone in still today after the first text to which fighting for what it considers as its this refers, and I am sure that many of right: culture, the cultural work that you remember it: “And if in your can derive from it and the free spaces neighbourhoods everything’s the without any political, economic and same as yesterday, without barricades lobby logic, where to practise it! without wounded people, without grenades, if you believe the “truth” of s far as I am concerned, I want to be a television, although at that moment nemesis, a worm, and use the only you have forgiven yourself you are all weapon I have. As Ettore Sottsass told the same involved.”

70 Eduardo Navas: Track Me Not, Please!

Lucrezia Cippitelli

voices on Network cultures and use/abuse of its tools. As Eduardo asserts in this long chat, referring to “Traceblog” but it could be related with his art practice at large: ‘I aim to explore the implications of the growing pervasiveness of information flow and its manipulation. From this point of view, I see it in direct relation to my ongoing investment in blogging

Three years ago I had a long interview culture». with Eduardo Navas about his In line with his early net art projects as editorial project, “NewmediaFix”, the “Goobalization” and “Diary of a Star”, online platform that republishes and and in the same time following redistributes texts and interviews Eduardo’s theoretical researches on from the most influential international blogging and remix, “Traceblog” is an magazines focused on art and media online artwork that appropriates the (between them Digicult) and which I free Firefox plugin (Track me not), collaborated with as editor for almost created by the same developers of one year. I met again by email the web browser in order to obfuscate Eduardo for another interview about the transparency of the online his last online project, “Traceblog, activities of Internet users. As result, launched on October 2008″ “Traceblog” publishes the logs of The artist, theorician, curator and Eduardo’s daily online researches and scholar from Us works on software activities on a web site. The same and web-resources for blogging, website contains links to the reflecting also upon the dynamics of explanation of the project, links to the the Internet, the concept of Remix Firefox plugin and some tools that and distribution of culture and make users aware on how to hide concepts, information, thoughts, since search trails. “Traceblog” make visible the beginning of his artistic career. He how our daily browsing Internet is now one of the most influential activity is tracked by the browser we

71 use and produces an archive of all our but I’m glad that you ask me this data and information that could be question because there are some used for commercial and control things that I left unexplained, partly purposes. A fact, the data mining, because I want the user to figure out totally out of control if we consider all some of the implications behind the web 2.0 platforms, that stimulate Traceblog. The explanation in the Internet users obsession to show about page entertains the premise of themselves and be in touch: just surveillance and data-mining and consider common tools as Blogger, their relation to loss of privacy. What I propriety of a big commercial don’t explain, however, is that I use corporation as Google, just to make traceblog to reflect on the shifts that an example. But we could make few blogging as a practice has taken in the other names as Facebook, Twitter, last couple of years. How expression Linkedin, and also (whatever they are of one’s opinion can begin to turn into not related with browsing), Skype, noise, due to over-saturation and Msn, the free services for email and so expectation that everyone should on and so on We talked with Eduardo write on a blog. On the other hand, about all that and much more. automation in access of information is really becoming the norm with RSS feeds, and for a while I had been thinking about the act of blogging becoming automated. I thought of how a diary is simply a labor that is hard to keep up with today, due to all the multi-tasking that is expected of people.

I felt this to be the case with my reblogging of the Warhol Diaries( . http://navasse.net/star). So, aside from developing a project that that Lucrezia Cippitelli: Introduce in few would comment on the transparency words the essence of Traceblog. Not of data-mining, I also wanted to its “how to”, that Internet users can create a project that would expose find in the presentation page, but the possibility of having a software specifically your conceptual focus. write something for the user. The Eduardo Navas: Part of my conceptual appropriation of TrackMeNot enabled focus is explained in the About page, me to put all these interests into practice, thus creating a commentary

72 on blogging as a pervasive act of are somewhat a reflection of what I boredom to some degree. do online. According to the developers of the Firefox extension, TrackMeNot keeps track of the actual searches and with time begins to assimilate parallel results that somehow reference indirectly what the user would search for.

I find this interesting, and can see how some of the results in my logs could be of my own interest, but I would never had thought to do such . searches. It’s like having my own double, a clone about whom I’m What I find most interesting about learning more and more about. I like TrackMeNot ( this about TrackMeNot, and it was http://mrl.nyu.edu/dhowe/trackmen actually the first thing that interested ot/ ) is that the pseudo search results me about it.

73 and evaluating material for thematic presentations.

The forms through which the material is presented, of course, is different, but in principle, to blog is to curate: to blog is to remix. Traceblog is really just an extension of what I explored in Diary of a Star; only I go about it in a different way, by taking a critical

. position on data-mining. I also consider Traceblog to be critically Lucrezia Cippitelli: We already had a informed much like Goobalization. For long interview, 3 years ago, about me Traceblog is another project in your project newmediaFIX which I aim to explore the ( implications of the growing http://www.digicult.it/digimag/articl pervasiveness of information flow and e.asp?id=239 ). Since then, your its manipulation. editorial project seems to go ahead. Meanwhile you developed an intense From this point of view, I see it in theoretical activity with your blog direct relation to my ongoing Remix Theory, and a curatorial activity investment in blogging culture. So, I for gallery@calit2, at UC San Diego, don’t know if I have gone back to my where you are a Ph.D. candidate. early net-based artworks, as you “Traceblog” seems to bring you back suggest. I would say that I’m doing to your early net-based artworks. I what I have always done: to use blogs especially refer to Diary of a Star to comment on networked culture. (2004-07) and Goobalization (2005). How did you arrive to set up this project in the context of your wider artistic and theoretical research?

Eduardo Navas: I have relied on blogging technology for some time to develop most of my online projects, as well as online resources. I think my curatorial interests are also informed by the aesthetic of blogging, which in the end, I deem to be about selecting .

74 Lucrezia Cippitelli: Years ago, I relation to computers, but extend the assisted to your presentations on term to all other areas in life, and blogging technology, which you believe that others who write about viewed as some kind of activity hacking as a constructive attitude related with hackers. With Traceblog think about it in the same way. I it looks like you are completely believe that this has been in large part changing your point of view, relating the driving force in the development blogs with web 2.0, along the lines of of blogs and other CMS platforms. more popular and obvious social networks such as Facebook, Flickr, Today the hacker aesthetic (of playing Myspace or Youtube. What happened to see what happens) is everywhere, in the meanwhile to the”hacker and everyone even the most casual ethic”? user is given options to optimize a tool, and is often pointed to forums Eduardo Navas: I believe that the that explain how to improve on “hacker ethic” in online culture is still particular tools. But if you mean by at play. But blogs have become hacking a form of resistance, I think assimilated, which is what happens that this is another aspect of with anything that is introduced and networked culture that is also still gains value in online communities. quite strong, and I do think that blogs One of the reasons why blogs have play a contingent or at least thrived is because developers saw complementary role in this area as potential in them for data mining. I well. If you imply that blogging had knew this from the very moment that the potential to be a critical tool, in Google bought blogger. I knew Search line with the origins of computer was entering a new stage of hacking practice, I do believe this is pervasiveness. When I discussed also still possible. It is up to people to hackers in the past I related them to do what they want. the concept of play. I believe that in the presentation that you refer to, which took place in Santiago De Chile , I discussed a reflection by Richard Stallman about his college experience. He explains that hackers are interested in playing with things, to see what could happen. Hackers like to figure out how to make things perform in unexpected ways. I do not reserve the term hacker only in direct

75 . appropriated elements. I chose blogger because this one is Lucrezia Cippitelli: The esthetic of embedded in the system of search. It Traceblog shows, in my opinion, your is one of the most popular blogging interest in being absolutely under- tools today. I find it of great stated. I guess you deliberately used a importance that blogger is owned by simple and common blog interface Google, and Google is one of the from the popular “Blogger”, a green search engines which TrackMeNot background, a totally un-designed uses to perform automated searches. type and the pages are filled with long So in this sense the information and unreadable ghosts of your web comes full circle, and the purpose of search activated by the Firefox plug-in using TrackMeNot could TrackMeNot. Since April 2008, beconsidered futile to some degree. Traceblog published online pages and pages of links and characters. You’re You can think of Traceblog as a not taking (and I think you avoid) any conceptual mashup; by this I mean underground aesthetic. You’re not that just like in a musical mashup one assuming any critical, radical political can notice two or more elements at position. You’re not playing with the play at once. Traceblog functions in big classics as Orwell’s Big Brother, similar fashion. It presents the logs as you’re not embracing the radical they are archived each time that I log hacker community position about the on and launch Firefox and it necessity to guarantee privacy for the deliberately looks like a blog from users against the control of contents. blogger with one of the most generic Is there a specific conceptual reason templates. Presenting the material as for that? default deconstructs both the logs’ and the blog’s naturalized states. And Eduardo Navas: There is a very hopefully the viewer can see the specific position for the look of implications behind both elements. At Traceblog. This actually goes back to the same time, the entries, as you your previous question. You asked explain are not welcoming to the about the “Hacker Aesthetic” before, reader, if anything they deny any and in this sense, Traceblog is a possible coherent reading, and the conceptual hack. By this I mean that I most one can hope for is some have taken two elements meant to random scanning of terms. This is function in a certain way and have actually a comment on people’s brought them together for critical obsession to express themselves reflection. To achieve this I have done online. Expression online via blogs has as little as possible to the become so co-opted that it can now

76 be read as an empty form of mechanism working for decades, just entertainment. The log entries are think about Echelon for instance. Do reference to this. you think that the development of web 2.0 and the massification of social networks changed something in terms of critical use of networking media and control?

Eduardo Navas: One of the things that concerns critically minded individuals is how emerging technology can be misused for political purposes. I am rather diplomatic in my statement about data profiling as I believe that . there is a positive side to the current development of data-mining. But the Lucrezia Cippitelli: What I personally major problem for me is that there is find interesting about TrackMeNot, little education about the implications the plug-in developed to obfuscate of emerging technologies that thrive internet search that you use as the on data-mining. Regarding Echelon, engine to develop Traceblog, is that has it changed networking control in the developers in 2006 say that the Media? Well, of course–since the plug-in “protects users against search endeavor is a collaboration between data profiling”, pointing out especially, the United States and the United the defense of Internet users from Kingdom and other well-developed commercial data profiling. Quoting countries. But in reality this is just an the presentation text “About extension of the early days of the Traceblog” , it also says that “Keeping Internet. Nation-states monitoring track of people’s surfing activity has information is not new by any means. become an essential element for As it is commonly known, we would data-mining” often used “to better not have the Internet were it not for understand people’s trends”: here the Cold War. So, having global there is not a specific reference to powers invested in the next stage of something I think is the real scary data mining is not unexpected. One effect of the “transparency” of every thing that I do think is crucial for a Internet-related activity (from conscious global culture is to have a emailng to browsing): the control with deliberate investment in the focus on the “war on terror” understanding and utilizing legitimized since 9/11; in general a technology constructively.

77 This is quite possible. The most commodity, which is why it gets more historically obvious example to date is and mor expensive not only in the the outcome of the United States United States , but all over the world. 2008 presidential elections. I strongly The power of education is that once a believe that Barack Obama won person understands how to learn on because he understood how her own, such knowledge cannot be networked culture functions, and he taken away. It’s like learning a secret. made the most of the technologies It cannot be taken back. And that available to him to reach as many person has the power to do as she people as possible. It is quickly pleaseswith the information. Once a becoming common knowledge person understands how to research through numerous articles that to keep learning on her own, that Obama learned from the mistakes of person’s position can only increase in John Kerry, and also the strategies of value. So, the real issue in culture has Howard Dean. always been about education. Traceblog is about educating oneself, in order to learn about the real implications of daily actions that appear innocent and incidental, but which are of great value to data- miners. Traceblog is about awareness–critical awareness to be more precise. Critical awareness cannot be bought or sold, it can only be developed through cultural exchanges that question reality. We . should keep this in mind day in and Ultimately, I find that education is the day out. real issue with all that is going on today. I think it has always been the case since humans developed the http://navasse.net/traceblog/ concept of culture. Education is the only investment that cannot crash like http://newmediafix.net the market. It is the highest prized http://navasse.net/star/

78 79 Transmediale 09: The Berlin’s Paradoxes

Donata Marletta

the Berliner group raumtaktik (http://www.raumtaktik.de/), are exhibited the numerous artistic projects coming from multidisciplinary backgrounds. For an entire overview on the productions I suggest to check the Transmediale’s website that offers the necessary information about the artists and the artworks showed, which range from the mobile kitchen of “Specialità di First paradox: Berlin it’s frozen. Silicio”, to the equipment for the Transmediale’s 09 theme “Deep perfect squatter of “Field Notes: North” rotates around the concern Forays into Cocoons”. about the planet’s climate change, and how this inexorable process inevitably has an impact on every aspect of the contemporary culture and society. “Deep North” is the starting point that opens the doors to diverse artistic interpretations, raising a whole range of issues translated and relocated into the language of digital art.

. Second paradox: Where are the emotions? Among the projects I would like to highlight “Post Global Warming In the exhibition hall, and in the foyer Survival Kit” by Petko Dourmana of the huge space, perhaps too (http://www.dourmana.com/), an dispersive, of the Haus der Kulturen interactive installation that walks the der Welt (HKW – House of World visitor, through the use of infrared Cultures) arranged for the occasion by binoculars, inside a disturbing post-

80 apocalyptic scenario, simulating a . sensorial and introspective Transmediale and Club Transmediale experience. A huge part of the jointly present the awaited programme is also dedicated to film audiovisual performance “Parallel and video curated by Marcel Head”, the latest work of the Schwierin and Florian Wüst, with Japanese artist Ryoichi Kurokawa about seventy productions chosen for (http://www.ryoichikurokawa.com/), the Transmediale 09 Award. interviewed by Bertram Niessen for Digimag17/September06 - Third paradox: Words, words. http://www.digicult.it/digimag/articl e.asp?id=627). Ryoichi pervades the The festival turns around the audience with images and sounds in conference (for those interested it perfect synchrony, creating a may be listened on stream on the dreamlike and celestial narration of Transmediale web site), the debates, unique elegance reflecting the and the presentations that take place standards of the Japanese culture and in the auditorium of the HKW, in the style. Ryoichi plays with the Cafè Global, and in the space called inextricable interlacement between Digital Greenhouse, creating a forum audio and video, gently wrapping the for critical confrontation on the auditorium of the HKW in a soft and themes related to the healthiness of muffled cocoon. our planet, and in particular how art and technology could contribute to Big expectations also for the Dutch bring in the front page what before trio Telcosystems was just a prediction, and today has (http://www.telcosystems.net/), become reality: the planet Earth is in creators of the official trailer for serious danger. Transmediale 09; this year they also present at the auditorium of the HKW their recent work “Mortals Electric”. The performance is developed around a sonorous cathartic crescendo, accompanied by graphics that take different nuances, until it reaches the final part where the acoustic and visual impact charge the ambient of power, until it becomes quite unbearable for the human body.

81 workshops, under this year’s theme “Structures”.

The Club gives a dynamic impulse to the general bourgeois atmosphere, and a bit sleepy of the elder sister Transmediale, which seems to suffer, like many festivals of the same genre around the world, of a tiredness probably owed to the consolidation of

. a formula that now it’s almost obsolete. Fourth paradox: the gift of ubiquity.

Transmediale crosses, with the risk of a crash, the programme of Club Transmediale, which this year celebrates its tenth anniversary. The www.transmediale.de/ festival, primarily focussed on www.transmediale.de/en/transmedia electronic music, offers also a wide le09-streaming-programme daily programme, with debates and www.clubtransmediale.de/

82 To Give Shape To Social Networks

Gigi Ghezzi

he presence of trade marks is impressive: there is obviously the Internet with MySpace, Facebook and Yahoo, the content producers such as Endemol or MTV, and multinational companies like GM and Coke: it is a deployment of public relationships showing that multinational companies believe in Social Networks – or maybe they want people think that they believe in them with a logic of space It is no accident that the next Social occupation. For the World Forum the Networking World Forum taking place problem of the estimation (in money) on 9 and 10 March at the Olympia of Social Media seems fundamental Conference Centre in London has an and it is not a new dilemma for the auspice as a title, that of “giving a phenomena on the Internet (see the shape” to social networks. article by Mark Hopkins, Just What is The forum is actually divided into two Social Media, Exactly, main events: one is devoted to social ( networks, the other to Mobile http://mashable.com/2008/11/18/soc Socialnetworks. During the event the ial-media-defined/). most important issues concerning Social Networks will be discussed: the challenge of new social networks to face-to-face communication, the opportunity to increase the value of our professionalism within “virtual communities”, and the opportunity for big and small firms to make oneself known through a new, more direct and personalized relationship with their customers. .

83 From a more cultural point of view, it most of the abilities of distributed, has to be underlined that the concept extensive and personalized of Social Media, a topic that has been communication of the Internet. maybe too abundantly discussed for two years, has the credit for having further increased the ambiguity of the concept of “media” and so for having pointed out the necessity to constantly reflect on the community of communication and of the communication of the community. If “media” have to be first of all communicative, we cannot but wonder why digital media have not . managed to be also “social” yet. In my opinion, there is no doubt that ne of the many definitions of Social with Social Networks we are Networks can help us; it was witnessing a new phenomenon of formulated by Monica Fabris who technoculture, it does not matter if it considers these communication is temporary, lasting or bound to channels “means that want to decline; what is important is to improve communication with new underline that interaction and modes of integration of users and networking multimedia platforms – multimedia, whose aim, in that already existed – saw an active comparison with other kinds of participation of a lot of people all over communication, is to give importance the world when they were focused on above all to relationships between social relationships: find old friends, individuals” look for a partner or to a person ( similar to us, the desire to share our http://x.jmailer.com/it/allegati/Abstr tastes and interests, spare time and, act_Monica_Fabris_ITA.pdf). although less, work. The fascination of Certainly, it is not the most Social Media lies in the opportunity to comprehensive definition of Social create, through systems of automatic Networks, nor the most satisfying, but aggregation, channels of public it is worth taking it into account communication in which informality is because it is paradigmatic of the mixed with suggestions, ideas and current way of considering the new meetings between individuals with tools of (re)approach and contact similar interests or experiences or between individuals, who make the

84 who live in far places. problems that, I think, are caused many times by users themselves, who Moreover, Social Media show that show their imprudence by publishing wonders will never cease with the online; maybe, since they are involved Internet when people think about in a new confidential relationship with ways that can improve sociability, that the Internet, they often operate is, the opportunity to express oneself imprudently or –like in a relational and obviously have fun; it has to be chain – friends and acquaintances do it underlined that the play element must for them. In this case, I do not not be belittled or underestimated: consider completely inadequate certainly, some studies such as those popular articles dealing with Social by Nicholas A. Christiakis and J. H. Networks in an apocalyptic way, Fowler on the success of happy because at least they act as a people within Facebook make us deterrent towards their users, who do smile not want to wonder too much about ( hidden threats and dangers. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ch ristakis_fowler08/christakis_fowler08 _index.html ) but nonsense and banalities that are discovered or left In my opinion, instead, the as a message in the profiles make biographical and mnemonic users feel closer. characteristics of Social Networks are not underlined enough: like in the blogs, which have the form of a diary, but with more intimacy and spontaneity, people are encouraged to update their profiles, because they have many comforts at their disposal. It is not relevant if the profile corresponds to the mood or the thoughts of these people or if it expresses their banality, in any case the user contributes, often . unconsciously, to the creation of an archive of his/her social relationships. It is difficult to investigate, in this For this reason, Social Media could short article, privacy legal problems even be defined “personal memory” or linked to Social Networks, which are “biographical media”, but they more deeply discussed elsewhere, certainly do not lack the new

85 concepts associated with Social . Networks. A last remark is by the politician of sociability on the Internet. It is unfortunately in the shortage of As Carlo Gambescia underlined in a tools bringing to a healthy contrast recent message on the Internet, the between cultural and political groups definition of virtual relationships that Social Networks exhaust their leaves something to be desired: the potentialities and disclose relational ideal of participative democracy and dynamics that are too mechanical: as tools that give importance to it has often occurred in history as well acquaintances and relational abilities (Schmitt taught this to us), it is the are all essential, but “benevolence is enemy who reveals the unsoundness not sufficient if it is your enemy that of friendships that are struck up too considers you that way. Evil is quickly. unfortunately a social reality. We have it to reckon with”. http://carlogambesciametapolitics.bl ogspot.com/2009/01/franco- carlini-e-leconomia-del-dono.html www.socialnetworking-forum.com

86 Cada: Did You Say You Wanted An Evolution?

Marco Mancuso

widespread software technologies: from Processing to VVVV, from Arduino to Sybian, from C++ to Oper Frameworks.

Partly as it occurs in Italy, Sofia Oliveira, Jared Hawkey and Rui Trinidade, CADA’S three founding members, have made a virtue out of necessity and, defying the general lack of interest and poor competence CADA is a cultural, multi-disciplinary of schools and institutions, have platform based in Lisbon: a centre raised funds to found an independent that organises workshops, meetings, society: a place where they can create cultural activities and events within their own production micro-economy that grey area that lies at the margin alternating artistic projects with between art and design. commercial ones and with workshops with international guests, capable of CADA obviously focuses on the new meeting the needs of students in their digital technologies and software, search for artistic contents and even though it would probably be innovative projects. more accurate to say that CADA (like some Italian art and design studios The chance for this interview sprang such as Limiteazero, Dot Dot Dot, from a project that I have undertaken, Todo and others) focuses on the use basically a search in Europe for and misuse of portable technologies independent, non-institutional, multi- and everyday items, that can be productive and multi-functional reconfigured with an attitude that spaces dealing with art and design, much has taken from the hacking and from the invitation that Jared universe, on design objects, on items Hawkey received by Celestino Soddu for audiovisual production, to attend the Generative Art Festival visualization of complex data, in Milan last November . This was an communication and interaction. All occasion for CADA to meet some this relying on today’s most pioneers in art and generative

87 software, but also to face the need combined skills. People need to excessively academic attitude that focus on what they’re good at. So still typifies our institutes, that can’t we’re into collaborative work, but thus keep in touch and abreast with believe the strongest work comes that fertile ground of production and from getting inside it, entering the creativity and its emerging codes and bubble. Which means really liking any aesthetics. one you work with is fundamental – more than being on the same wave length . We work in loose, project-b- -project way.

Sofia Oliveira: CADA means Each in Portuguese. We work on two fronts: project work and workshops. There are three core members. Rui Trindade who used to be a journalist, and currently does exhibition design and organises conferences. Jared whose . background is fine arts and, me with a background in sociology. I’ve always Marco Mancuso: Would you like to been interested in systems, networks talk about CADA’s platform. What are and generative processes. And the your activities, who is involved and patterns of everyday life. what is your background? Jared: Hidden patterns. Objects with a Jared Hawkey: CADA was born in life of their own, whirring away in their 2004. It’s interest is art, and own little worlds. Ambient experimental work, which is inspired computing. I suppose we’re realists, by, or questions new technologies, or but there’s got be space for colour- technological structures. It’s not the field painting, frozen time, and the only work we’re into, at all. But these fact that sometimes it all feels like a are the times we live in. And there are stage set. some really Big issues in this department. As well as endless possibilities…. galaxies. Anyway long before that, we realised that you could quite easily go insane trying to work with computers on your own. Often projects are so complex they

88 . working in Flash lite could be a bit easier, we did it in C++ for Symbian. It Marco Mancuso: How does your will get easier in the future workshops activity relates with your So, workshops are fun to do, and a attitude for artistic and production good way of interchanging practice? In other words, is there any knowledge and meeting people with possible link with projects such as similar interests. We’ve done them for “TODAY, mobile application” Processing, Arduino and we’re doing [http://today.cada1.net] or “sketcher an iPhone one this February. 1.01″ and the results/inputs/outputs that emerge from the workshops that Marco Mancuso: Tell something more you organize? about “TODAY, mobile application” and about ” sketcher 1.01 ” or about Sofia Oliveira: The link between some project of yours you are fully projects and workshops? It’s not a satisfied with. Do you think there can literal link but, yes, there is one. be a sort of common ground that joins Workshops are normally around these projects also in terms of issues, tools or processes that we are concept or technique? currently interested in exploring. The link between TODAY is that, back in Jared Hawkey: TODAY is a piece of 2006 I was intrigued by a lack of ambient computing. experimental work for mobile phones. Having already ran several Processing Sofia Oliveira: TODAY is a piece of workshops, I decided to organize the generative art slash design. first Mobile Processing workshop — Jared Hawkey: It’s a piece of data where we ended up meeting Heitor visualization. Ferreira, who later worked on TODAY with us. When we started doing it — with a tiny budget — we realized pretty quickly why there weren’t that many. It’s really complicated: different operating systems, and hundreds of different devices, if you want to be sure you have to test the app on the actual device, which means a lot of money on phones. So, in terms of development it requires big budget – specially if you need to go ‘deeper’ . into the operating system. I mean

89 Sofia Oliveira: It’s freeware. An the bus. application that visualizes what happens on your mobile phone in terms of communication. So, it’s like the story of your day; it has an auto- biographical character.

Jared Hawkey: And no it doesn’t have any direct relationship with anything we’ve done before. But there’s always been the in hidden patterns.

Sofia Oliveira: Yeah, before we . started we weren’t mobile phone fetishists at all — we had cheap ones, Marco Mancuso: Your attitude seems with black and white screens to be towards those borderline territories of use/misuse of digital Jared Hawkey: Heitor is a mobile technologies and mechanical or developer though, and obviously had electronic instruments, of hacking a good one. attitude towards everyday objects and interactive technologies, towards Sofia Oliveira: But we’ve always been generative software for graphic curious about what communication design and the visualization of would look like. And the mobile phone complex data. How do you work on was an obvious device to explore – it new projects and how do you develop gets carried around by 3.2 billion a workshops at CADA? people. Also, we wanted to explore the personal. And saw it as intimate Jared Hawkey: The “perfect mix”, device, as opposed to seeing it as thank you. Hmmn, ur . I don’t know, another social network tool. Also we about the “misuse” or “hacking wanted to create something that attitude”. We certainly didn’t set out wouldn’t require too much interaction to misuse the phone in a to give you something back. These dysfunctional, ironic, abusive or days people are constantly interacting useless kind of way. But we lost a lot with everything, all the time. It’s a of hair trying to do something that slow and quiet piece of software. seemed to all of us stupidly obvious – logical and simple. In that way, it was Jared Hawkey: It lives in the one big hack, trying to do something background — something that you against the grain — dealing with the might want to check while waiting for

90 constraints. Because it monitors your That’s it. calls in real-time, there was the question of getting it passed by the Jared Hawkey: I don’t know. If you powers that be – that is getting it mean that design works with the Symbian signed. We never really knew world of commodities, directing itself whether they’d approve it or not until to the generation of pre-experienced it passed. But yes, otherwise, it was sensations and art doesn’t, then the conceived and made in an TODAY is probably a piece of art. But uncontrolled manner. when we made it we thought of it as a piece of design, only because Art puts Sofia Oliveira: When we start a lot pressure on things. And — this something we try not to think too might be because my definition of Art much – whether it’s art or design. We as defined by the academies, of which see where it takes us. So the I’m a product, is too narrow — because distinction is never a starting point. the idea of it being reflexive, in terms What I’m interested in design is its of its place in discourse and distribution model, I’m interested in production, was not an intention. We reaching people in a similar way – also saw it existing in the social, relating to their everyday life, as running on a device that’s the opposed to have the work living in a ultimate piece of consumer hardware gallery. – three reasons to call it design. Still as Sofia said is not something that Jared Hawkey: Living?… on a life bothers us. The designers call it art, support system. and the artists look at you as if you’re in league with the devil.

Sofia Oliveira: When we talk to designers that come from a more market and commercial world and they give us feedback about TODAY, they say we need to improve the service component, the functionality of it, or that it needs to be faster, or that the visual system is too abstract’ we think “oh god, this is definitely not . a piece of design!” because for us, Sofia Oliveira: Yeah… I like the idea of those things are the key to it – the a piece being carried around in contemplative and slowness of it. But peoples’ handbags… or plastic bags. then when we talk to more arty

91 people, they seam to have a problem Sofia Oliveira: CADA started with with the mobile phone to start with, two-years of public and private and can’t really understand why we’re funding with the objective of not selling it. So I think that we are in stimulating the area in Portugal . So an in-between space — and you can we had money to distribute around, call it experimental design. which meant we did things like promoting an ideas competition for Jared Hawkey: Ultimately the two years, were winners would get distinctions need a review. But we the project co-produced with us — won’t be holding our breath. We are that’s where Gonçalo Tavares’ quite happy being filed under “other”. Sketcher came from –, a TV programme about Portuguese electronic arts, organized several workshops and events, and so on. Once the funding stopped in 2006, it became more difficult to carry on with this public service. Next year, we will be able to apply for structural funding again but for the time being we need to work on the balance between programming and producing work – if we have to chose it will be the latter. . So realistically, what we can carry on Marco Mancuso: You say that CADA is doing without funding, is the connected with the Lisbon workshops. community and I can imagine that this has been a demanding and long-term Last year we got funding for specific task. How difficult is it and what is the projects, like TODAY and other project degree of attention shown by cultural – Emotional Object – we are doing institution, schools, academies, the with some friends – Adriana Sá and public and the media towards culture, John Klima and also for a 4 day Mixed design and digital art? In other words, Media Festival we co-produced how difficult is it to raise funds and together with Polar Produce, from obtain the support by the Institutions Bristol. So we can’t really complain. to keep CADA’S activities alive and We also have partnerships that allow how are you connected with other us to do this with little money, like cultural centres in Lisbon or in free space and equipment for the Portugal? workshops, we got tons of help for the Festival — equipment, spaces. We

92 are just starting collaboration with a future for this art/design discipline? university, a computing engineering lab, to develop work together. It’s ok. Jared Hawkey: I was out of my depth There is a price to pay if you become in Milan . You told us what to expect, too formal. I’m happy in this but I was totally unprepared. It was independent space. academic. Still apart from the embarrassment of one sloppy talk, … it Traditional media don’t pay too much was all bit chaotic so I got off attention to technologically inspired lightly….anyway, I went to learn, and work. And I don’t pay too much like a ‘good little boy’ asked lots of attention to them. When I do questions. Both Celestino [ Soddu] something all my communication and Enrica [ Colabella] are true efforts go online and that normally pioneers. And it was great to be at works well. There is a Portuguese such a venerable gathering, among cultural tradition of moaning, the areas’ heavy weights — Philip complaining. That takes up a lot of Galanter was there. And I did learn a energy. I think it is difficult to work in lot. The only thing which I couldn’t this ‘grey’ area everywhere. You just quite grasp, was what seemed to be have to do it the best you can. an overall will to complexity. For instance, I understand, and agree with, Celestino’s and Enrica’s call to Poetics, and loved the way they put the boot into Modernist architecture for failing to create openings for subjectivities, and the consequent lack of Identity in modern cities, and why, therefore, you might want to produce the most complex output. But felt their position that the best way to achieve this is, by starting with . complex inputs, was way too militant. Marco Mancuso: Lastly, how was the Sofia Oliveira: Is there really hype? It’s experience at the Generative Art certainly entered motion graphics, festival here in Milan a few months and the commercial stream. What ago and, more in general, what is your kind of future that is I don’t know. opinion about the great hype that has marked generative tools over the last few years? What do you think is the

93 www.cada1.net/

94 Matthew Barney: Contemporary Mythologies

Francesco Bertocco

books full of symbols and with mythopoietic orientation, in which the artist’s performance moves on the tracks of “Gesamtkunstwerk”, the total work. It is a space where funambulism is worthy and well tolerated, where imagination awakes neurotically among the references it has to start from. A space where, if you have not been warned, image’s description increases awkwardly the work’s In Turin, at the Fondazione Mario structure. Merz, a retrospective of one of the As it should be done in every wide- most visionary and discussed spreading environment, and with all contemporary artists, Matthew the risks that it implies, I will only Barney, has just ended. In a site- point out the central aspects of the specific set, composed by 5 screens artists’ work and career. arranged in a circle and others following the site’s perimeter, Barney’s work was exhibited in all its spectacular mood and in its entirety, together with sculptures and drawings which guided the visitor to a better comprehension.

Matthew Barney is one of those few and long-awaited cases in which the difference between theoretic and artist becomes irrelevant. In some . way, it grows rapidly into something aseptic and dull. Matthew Barney’s The universe created or described by analysis has a plasticity and a mobility Matthew Barney starts from the idea which makes it very similar to those that the mainstay of all its artistic

95 evolution is the artist himself and his with the only objective of producing a Body. Since the beginning, the Body, drawing. as an evolving machine, as a system in which the pivotal points of his poetics are realized, is the element from which everything starts and is realized. The Body’s continuous training, its exceeding among self- imposed forces, creates an hypertrophic state, where the matter it is composed of grows as an indeterminate and asymmetrical mass, out of its natural control. In this . state of coerced evolution, Matthew Barney connects the metaphor of This path suggested to Barney to creation. analyze himself and the parts which constitute himself. He identifies three A work is created among phases in his own evolution, similar to psychophysical resistances of the the processes characterizing human artist. Every initial impulse (a raw and nutrition, and marked by a symbol impure state) is followed by some which becomes the artist’s opposing forces, which mediate and cosmogony emblem. The first phase is discipline this initial state. In the series “Situation”, the early state, the raw “Drawing Restraint”, produced during energy (“Raw”), the sexual the early years of research and study, undifferentiated impulse; it is the artist, physically “restrained” in followed by “Condition”, where the different ways, creates drawings (or initial raw energy gets processed and marks, at least), recording these disciplined. In the last phase, operations with A/V instruments, as “Production”, the disciplined matter is they did for performances in the 70′s, pushed out, that is to say, “produced”- when they analyzed the frontiers of it is the anal phase. language in similar ways, though with different objectives. This early period’s production is not limited to recorded (photo and video) In these video tapes the artist himself performances, but there are also climbs on walls tied up by partially drawings, sculptures, collages, notes. elastic ropes, he bears weights and The elements’ complexity grew as the body building equipment, so as to put artist’s research thickened with himself to harder and harder tests,

96 references, following the body’s cult every orifice of his own body. This as a model of universal knowledge. work is the foundation for another “Field Dressing (orofill)”, dated 1989, work that will become the highest represents a first step towards the realization of his personal mythology, construction of a personal mythology, the work that defines in an “esoteric” initially linked to the work’s material way the theoretical and symbolic (body- vaseline – resistances). In this system of the “Path”. The “Cremaster dissertation, his last production from Cycle” is Matthew Barney’s opera his education in Yale, Matthew Barney omnia, his most significant work. builds an action, in which the athletic There are plenty of exegesis, activity is connected to symbology theoretical dissertations and and rituality. important re-readings about this work. It is the reconstruction of a The artist crosses a room hanging visual universe, under the artist’s and from ropes, completely naked, so as his sign’s total control, where lots of to reach his own emblem realized in characters are involved. Vaseline, that he’s going to spread on

97 creation. Existence matures after this passage has been concluded and the unborn child’s genre is finally defined. He has been given all the raw material which will be the foundation of all his existence.

“Cremaster Cycle” is a huge fresco about the development of an a priori existence, the “es” central region, the

. principle of shape. In the five episodes it is made of, Matthew Barney as an The “Cremaster Cycle” is a set of actor plays lots of transformations, myths and models of the American embodying emblematic characters, culture, but, as well as it happens for made up of lots of references. Beside the greatest post-modern reports, the vastness of content, the “Cycle” such as Pynchon, Delillo, David Foster utilizes a specific cinematographic Wallace, it is supported by any kind of grammar, shaped by a decidedly cultural extract, such as Greek sculptural and rarefied use of time, by mythology, kabuki theatre, optics which alter perspective so as to Freemasonry, vaudeville, shintoist get a greater involvement in the ceremonies, esotericism and Nordic performance, and by a suggestive mythology. The biologic being, the music, redefining the sound’s space. artist, Matthew Barney, grows and models himself through fragments of modern and mythological history, among physical resistances, among energies invading his organic structure so as to become myths, example, human being.

Gonads’ initial movement is the cause for the initial choice of genre. Their movement decides the sex, their movement is the example for a . resistance on which life is placed on since its beginning. Matthew Barney’s The audience watches, beside the Cremaster represents the initial moving images, according to Barney’s resistance during the moment of initial production, a variety of

98 sculptures deriving from movies’ set Matthew Barney’s art is suggestive designs, some still inedited, drawings, and leaves interpretation free to display windows with objects linked move, but at the same time, it keeps to Matthew Barney’s imagery, such as interpretation distant, disorienting it ruins and extracts of an imaginary as it happens in the interpretation of a universe. These worlds’ traces left myth, the strength of which is in form the artist in galleries and believing and seeing, more than in museums, are the most vivid understanding. necessity of representing a universe, instead of making it live, of symbolizing a mythology, that is moving towards common directions but is anyway a closed, hermetic http://matthewbarney.fondazioneme system, where reading can only rz.org/ confuse, rarefy, to the most rational definition.

99 You Tube And The Accidental Videoart

Monica Ponzini

“long portraits” – where a person stares at the camera, to the message chains – like the one started by MadV; from “hallucinated” videos made by fans -where a whining Chris Crocker tells the world to leave Britney Spears alone, to real music videos, that sometimes brought a band to its commercial success – like with the band OK Go

YouTube has radically changed not And the lifespan of a video on the only the way we look at video, but Web doesn’t stop here: once it’s also the role of the audience and the posted and shared, it can be recast, language of video. No longer a mere mashed-up, and mixed to create a spectator for the images created by new piece of art where the original the Author, Youtube users are author’s images and purposes are increasingly involved in the making of mixed with other authors’ purposes unique and peculiar videos, and means (that could be other unexpected “viral” trends that images, thematic connections or even generate in turn new influences – and software). all shared on the Web.

Certainly YouTube is the product of a technology revolution that allows practically anyone to record, film, edit and perform postproduction tasks with basic means – which are almost intuitive by now. But the originality and variety of products that circulate on video portals (Youtube, ma but also Vimeo, or the more recent Seesmic), has exceeded all expectations. From . extremely basic segments such as the

100 An example -among many- of the very absurd and random. My favorite artistic and social effects of the ” discovery on YouTube was the YouTube phenomenon” was the subculture of people who evening dedicated to video triptychs documented their own washing held at Postmasters Gallery in New machine — and this is a very large York. Organized by the art collective subculture, pretty massive at this “Artists Meeting” and curated by point– from the aesthetic or technical Thomas Hutchison, Maria Joao point of view –. In the end I made a Salema and James Andrews, the triptych of washing machines and I’m event showed a compilation of convinced that on social level in a way “accidental video art”: video triptychs is connected to the American where the most diverse products of tradition of tinkering with your own the Internet were aggregated thanks car or motorcycle ”. to a custom software, You3b, an Eyebeam project produced by Jeff Crouse and Andrew Mahon.

These three-channel videos –that have extremely diverse features and themes- are products of the “YouTube” mine: “The project takes off from the freedom that you find in YouTube itself, from the eclectic nature of it. These videos are a sort of modern narrative, made not with . words but with images. There’s a An interesting aspect of the event is hunger for information, for images, for definitely the “authorial shift” of the stories and there’s also a library that is final works: “This show mutilates the expanding very rapidly” explains whole idea of ownership”, notes Raphaele Shirley, one of the James Andrews, “You really can’t organizers. figure out who on Earth owns these “For me, what was interesting about triptychs: you have one set of people YouTube are just the crazy, who created the triptych software, fascinating, wild videos that people then you have three different groups publish” says James Andrews, “It’s a of people who potentially created the little bit like public access TV, a kind of three videos, you have the three ad hoc personal media that can be different YuoTube accounts that very serious and profound, or can be published the videos – which may or

101 may not be the same people who . created them, you then have the curators, then you have Artist Meeting An event in which each viewer – the and you then have Postmasters last link of this long chain – looks at Gallery. And each of the original the triptychs, getting his or her own, videos could be removed from the very personal narrative: for Raphaele Net at any time ” Shirley “this kind of triptych really lends itself to non-linearity: you can’t In a sense, this project takes to the grasp a single image or a single story extreme not only the concept of and follow it through from beginning authoriality, and the fact that new to end. It’s really about cross media art often needs team work in connections, cross pollination of order to be produced, but also, says ideas, like unconscious thinking and James Andrews, “it could simply the way you create a dream, or the obliviate the human factor, which I way you connect data ”. think is even more interesting. No one in particular got credit for anything in the show – it was just something that www.postmastersart.com/ happened ”.

www.artistsmeeting.org

www.you3b.com

www.raphaeleshirley.com/

102 Link index

Otolab Method http://www.otolab.net

Biological Strategies At The Service Of Design Graphic Design With Momomaker http://momoshowpalace.com/EMPM3.html http://momoshowpalace.com/EM1.html http://momoshowpalace.com/emtry5.html http://momoshowpalace.com/momomaker.html http://momoshowpalace.com/TheNewYorker.htm http://blog.anonymousgallery.com/underground/%20 http://momoshowpalace.com/+BigVIDEO.htm http://www.subaquatica.com

Trevor Wishart: Chemistry Of Sound http://www.trevorwishart.co.uk http://www.giga-hertz.de http://www.dur.ac.uk/music http://www.composersdesktop.com

Generative Nature http://caliban.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de/~stueber/haeckel/kunstformen/natur.html http://www.celestinosoddu.com/ http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beno%C3%AEt_Mandelbrot http://www.karlsims.com/genetic-images.html

103 Anna Adamolo: Practical Critique Of Ideology Milano 2009: Where Are You Culture? Eduardo Navas: Track Me Not, Please! http://navasse.net/traceblog/ http://newmediafix.net http://navasse.net/star/

Transmediale 09: The Berlin’s Paradoxes http://www.raumtaktik.de/ http://www.dourmana.com/ http://www.ryoichikurokawa.com/ http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=411 http://www.telcosystems.net/ http://www.transmediale.de/ http://www.transmediale.de/en/transmediale09-streaming-programme http://www.clubtransmediale.de/

To Give Shape To Social Networks http://mashable.com/2008/11/18/social-media-defined/ http://x.jmailer.com/it/allegati/Abstract_Monica_Fabris_ITA.pdf http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/christakis_fowler08/christakis_fowler08_i ndex.html http://carlogambesciametapolitics.blogspot.com/2009/01/franco-carlini-e-le conomia-del-dono.html http://www.socialnetworking-forum.com

Cada: Did You Say You Wanted An Evolution?

104 http://www.cada1.net/

Matthew Barney: Contemporary Mythologies http://matthewbarney.fondazionemerz.org/

You Tube And The Accidental Videoart http://www.postmastersart.com/ http://www.raphaeleshirley.com/ http://www.you3b.com http://www.raphaeleshirley.com/

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