Network Culture in Italy in the 1990s and the Making of a Place for Art and Activism

By

Valeria Federici

Ph. D., Brown University, 2019

Dissertation

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree in Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Italian Studies at Brown University

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2019

© Copyright 2019 by Valeria Federici

This dissertation by Valeria Federici is accepted in its present form

by the Department of Italian Studies as satisfying the

dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date______Prof. Massimo Riva, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date______Evelyn Lincoln, Reader

Date______Courtney J. Martin, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date______Andrew G. Campbell, Dean of the Graduate School

iii Valeria Federici received her PhD in Italian Studies and, while at Brown University, she obtained an MA in History of Art and Architecture through the Open Graduate Education program.

Federici had graduated in Letters from the Università Roma Tre in Rome, Italy. In 2015, she co- organized Chiasmi, the Brown-Harvard graduate student conference. In 2016, with the collaboration of the Center for Digital Scholarship at Brown University, she completed a digital interface that investigates the relationships between the Garibaldi Panorama (a painting, two hundred sixty feet in length, which has been digitized at Brown University) and the visual and textual materials collected in the Harvard Risorgimento Preservation Collection. Her contribution to this project is the subject of an article that appeared in the XXXIX volume of the NEMLA

Journal of Italian Studies (2017.) Her past and current research has resulted in academic publications on several topics, among which: contemporary art theories and practices (Oxford Art

Journal; Caareviews.org; Interdisciplinaryitaly.org); the visual representation of women in Italian television and cinema—this subject is discussed in a book chapter titled “Television and cinema:

Contradictory role models for women in 1950s Italy?” which is part of the volume, Representations of Female Identity in Italy: From Neoclassism to the 21st Century (2016); and finally, the history of modern Italy (Italian Americana, 2018.) She presented about these topics in various conferences in the U.S. and Europe. In 2017, she was awarded a Travel Fellowship from the Center for Italian

Modern Art in New York, NY as well as the Brown in the World Travel Grant from the Cogut

Center for the Humanities that helped her to spend time in Italy to conduct archival research related to her dissertation. Prior to Brown University, she worked for three years as Program Coordinator for a nonprofit arts organization in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. She currently teaches history of art and Italian literature at an international school in Rome, Italy.

iv Acknowledgements

This dissertation marks a new beginning and stems from a six-year journey. It could have not been possible without the help of advisors, artists, colleagues, family, friends, and the incredible supportive environment at Brown University. I cannot thank enough Prof. Courtney J. Martin for her insightful comments to my work and professional suggestions as a graduate student and as a doctoral candidate. Prof. Evelyn Lincoln showed me how openminded a scholar should be by demonstrating a keen interest to every subject, including mine, even when off of her scholarship path. She is an example of how to be a coherent, kind, and humane scholar. Prof. Massimo Riva believed in my project and in my ability to carry it out, and I have no words to express how much I have benefitted from his support throughout the years. His creative and interdisciplinary approach to scholarship is a source of inspiration. My colleagues and friends made this journey the most enjoyable intellectual experience while some institutions contributed in making my stay in Italy possible. My summer research was partially funded by the Center for Italian Modern Art in New

York, NY and by the Brown in the World Travel Grant from the Cogut Center for the Humanities.

Thank you both for allowing me to travel across Italy. I wish to express a sincere thank you to the collective of Forte Prenestino in Rome, the collective of the Cox 18 and of La Calusca library in

Milan, and to the collective of the Ex-Ermerson in Florence. In particular, thank you to Giorgio,

Mario, Nikki, Paolo, Raffaele Valvola, Stefano, and Arturo Di Corinto. I also wish to thank Gino

Giannuzzi of the Neon Gallery in Bologna. A greater thank you goes to Agnese Trocchi and

Tommaso Tozzi for the time they have dedicated to my countless questions, and to Antonio Glessi of the Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici. I hope not to leave anyone out, but if I do, please forgive me.

Above all, this project is dedicated to my husband, Sean. I own him infinite gratitude for sharing his heart, mind, and creativity with me throughout these long, hectic, formidable years. His emotional and intellectual support has been invaluable. This thesis, and many other projects I overtook while at Brown, would have not existed without his tremendous help, endless encouragement, and love.

v Table of content

Introduction p. 1

Chapter One: A “real virtuality:” Italian network culture in the 1990s. Hybridity, cyberpunk, and social centers p. 22

Chapter Two: How Forte Prenestina became the C. S. O. A. Forte Prenestino p. 56

Chapter Three: Information as an artistic medium p. 96

Chapter Four: Exhibiting the digital p. 123

Conclusions p. 158

Illustrations p. 167

Bibliography and p. 203 Webliography

vi List of illustrations

Fig. 1 Tommaso Tozzi, Happening Digitali Interattivi, 1992, cd-rom, BBS, book, floppy disk. Photo by the author.

Fig. 2 A stencil graffiti inside Forte Prenestino, 2017. Photo by the author.

Fig. 3 Agnese Trocchi, Warriors of Perception, 2001, Still from HTML loop.

Fig. 4 Tommaso Tozzi, Interattività e controllo, 1991. Happening in chat. Still from video.

Fig. 5 Il Manifesto, June 4, 1994, The possible community – A map shows several social centers around Italy. Archivio Forte Prenestino

Fig. 6 Flyer to promote a series of events organized by Forte Prenestino in the summer of 1994 that took place throughout the neighborhoods at the periphery of Rome. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

Fig. 7 Decoder, Issue 12, 1998. The image (top-right) is outlined as if the viewer is looking at a computer screen while the image is being edited. Archivio Grafton9

Fig. 8 Decoder, Issue 3, 1991? – Article dedicated to the Cyber-Punk and to Williams Gibson. Archivio La Calusca, Cox 18

Fig. 9 Bulletin of self-managed social center. Cover. 1989. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

Fig. 10 Bulletin of self-managed social center. Last pages. 1989. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

Fig. 11 The belt of forts in Rome. ISCAG, Forti di Roma, 17001, 84/F

Fig. 12 A floor plan of Forte Prenestina, 1889. ISCAG, Forti di Roma, 17001, 84/F

Fig. 13 Detail of a map showing the “tenute” around Forte Prenestina. 1880 circa. ISCAG, Forti di Roma, 17001, 84/F

Fig. 14 Cover page of the fanzine L’URLO. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

Fig. 15 A poster produced for an event by Forte Prenestino along the lines of cyclostyled fanzines. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

Fig. 16 A poster produced for an event by Forte Prenestino along the lines of silk-screen printed fanzines. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

Fig. 17 Poster, May 1, 1987. Cristiano Rea. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

Fig. 18-23 Exhibition of graphic work by Cristiano Rea, Forte Prenestino, Rome, 2017. Cristiano Rea. Photos by the author.

vii Fig. 24 Event calendar of 1991’s art festival. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

Fig. 25 Map of Forte Prenestino and layout of activities and laboratories during the 1991’s art festival. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

Fig. 26 The underground corridors and cells during the Crack! Fumetti Dirompenti festival, 2017. Photo by the author.

Fig. 27 Cover page of the fanzine “Tutta Salute” featuring two figures with their heads replaced by a TV set. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

Fig. 28 Flyer announcing an event dedicated to Cyberpunk, Hacker Art, and the network INTERZONE during the 1991’s art festival. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

Fig. 29 Flyer by INTERZONE. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

Fig. 30 Flyer explaining how to connect to FIDO Network. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

Fig. 31 Poster for May 1- No Labor Day event at Forte Prenestino. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

Fig. 32 A manifesto referring to the kidnapping of Aldo Moro in 1978 in Rome.

Fig. 33 A commemorative piece celebrating the graffiti artist, Tromh. Forte Prenestino, 2018. Photo by the author.

Fig. 34-37 Commemorative piece celebrating graffiti artist, Tromh. Details. Forte Prenestino, 2018. Photos by the author.

Fig. 38 Another piece commemorating graffiti artist, Tromh outside of Forte Prenestino, 2018. Photo by the author.

Fig. 39 Flyer to announce Forte Prenestino’s radio program on Radio Onda Rossa, 1987. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

Fig. 40 A poster designed in occasion of the sixth year of the occupation in 1992 that shows the different laboratories and activities inside the fort. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

Fig. 41-46 Graffiti art in the park surrounding Forte Prenestino, 2018. Photos by the author.

Fig. 47 “Street Art – Bansky & Co. in the Urban Form,” Palazzo Pepoli, March-June, 2016 Bologna, Italy. Installation view of “Bambina Precoce” by Tommaso Tozzi. Photo by the author.

Fig. 48 Still from an animation of the computer-based comic strips titled, Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici. In this particular scene, the three main characters are leaving the Bar Taboo with Ella. GMM, 1986. Courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 49 Computer elaborated network of subatomic particles resulting from the collision between matter and antimatter following an experiment conducted by Nobel viii Laureate Carlo Rubia at the CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. On display in the section “Lo Spazio” at the 42. Venice Biennale, (1986). Photo: Archivio Storico ASAC La Biennale di Venezia, f. 160 - A.V. 160. 1986.1. © Copyright Archivio ASAC La Biennale.

Fig. 50 View of the installation site of “Tecnologia e Informatica” at the Corderie as part of the 42. Venice Biennale (1986) Photo: Archivio Storico ASAC La Biennale di Venezia. © Copyright Archivio ASAC La Biennale.

Fig. 51 Picture taken probably during the set-up of the section “Tecnologia and Informatica.” 42. Venice Biennale, (1986). Photo Archivio Storico ASAC La Biennale di Venezia, f. 156 - A.V.156.1986.12. © Copyright Archivio ASAC La Biennale.

Fig. 52 Poster of U-Tape ’85 festival. Archivio Centro Video Arte, f. 1985 fasc. 583. © Copyright Archivio Centro Video Arte.

Fig. 53 Giacomo Verde, I˚ Video-Totem Est-Etica Antica-T-Astro-Fisica, (1986), preparatory sketch. Archivio Centro Video Arte. Video Set 1986. Fasc. 590. © Copyright Archivio Centro Video Arte.

Fig. 54 Fabrizio Plessi, Mare di Marmo, (1985). © Copyright Archivio Centro Video Arte.

Fig. 55 Tommaso Tozzi, Hacker Art BBS, (1991). Installation view, Anni Novanta exhibition, Galleria Comunale di Arte Moderna, Bologna. Image courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 56 Art graph by Tommaso Tozzi in Opposizioni ’80, © Shake Edizioni, 1991

Fig. 57 Screenshot of the webpage on tommasotozzi.it hosting a description of his project, VTTV – Virtual Town TV, (1994)

ix

Introduction

In 1991, new media artist and activist, Tommaso Tozzi circulated an invitation for a collective work to be produced via his Hacker art BBS, which he had established in 1989. The digital happening was titled “Happening Interattivi Digitali” (Interactive digital happening, 1992).

According to Tozzi, Hacker art is a practice through which one can infiltrate the art world in order to undo the logic of the market and the commodification of the artistic product following the methods of hacking. Hacker art BBS was a vehicle through which the content of “Happening

Interattivi Digitali” could be distributed and shared. The BBS-based happening resulted in a collection of digitally manipulated images, music, messages left on the “Cyberpunk” online forum, and other texts written by one or more participants (Fig. 1.)1 The outcome of these interactions were saved as a cd-rom (a portable disc for data to be read using a cd-player and a computer) and they were meant to be re-edited by anyone who possessed the copyright-free cd.2 Those early experiments in “networking” anticipated the potential of digital platforms to function as social clusters. “Networking” speaks to the artistic shift following which the making of the “network” replaced the making of an object, and relationships between people were enhanced and enticed through the use of information technology.

This research project explores how the practice of sociality and relationality as typical of

Italian community spaces called “social centers” (centri sociali) permeated Italian new media art between the late 1980s and the early 1990s. From projects using Teletext and BBS (Bulletin Board

System) that offered a means of communication and visualization of text on a screen through a telephone line to later artwork on the World Wide Web, this research delves into multiple aspects of new media art. In particular, I examine the effects of the computer and computer use on artistic production and its implications for public reception and interaction; I conduct an analysis of information as an artistic medium and the emergence of digital aesthetics; and I investigate the categorization of new media art within the parameters of conceptual art. On the one hand, by

1 analyzing the historical context in which new media art emerged in Italy, I trace its path and ponder initial interpretations of this phenomenon in light of more recent new media art discourses in order to highlight the relevance of these artistic experiences in relation to the current digital landscape.

On the other hand, I propose to consider new media art as crucially linked to its structure (binary language), the data it produces and collects (product), and its representation (meaning), in order to emphasize the role of information as an artistic medium. The significance of new media lies in the cultural references they carry with them, and how these cultural references are perceived, reiterated, or disrupted. By considering information as an artistic medium, I refer to new media’s ability to be representation and simulation, as well as to how artists and activists orbiting around Italian social centers have elaborated and worked with or against that ability. New media art as emerging from

Italian social centers was characterized by sociality and relationality occurring while artists and activists were experimenting with new forms of community building. Their social practice transferred into the cybersphere as soon as the technology made it possible.

What is social?

“Social” and “relational” are used interchangeably to describe the interaction in human encounters, virtual or physical, that occur as a consequence of an artistic initiative. At the same time, within the political scenario of Italy, “social” indicates a phenomenon which is entrenched in the separation between the politics of Italian political parties and the political desires claimed by the

Italian youth starting from the mid-1960s. This separation characterized the so-called “student movement” of the 1968, which rejected political parties as a model of political identification and dismissed their methods as a model of political praxis. The “student movement” became an entity made up of individuals that acted together as a social body. As noted by historian Francesca Socrate in a book that compares and contrasts the political approach of the two generations participating in the uprising of 1968, it was the younger generation that rejected the hierarchical structure within

2 political parties as typical of the democratic institutional discourse of the time. In her words, since the early 1960s:

…New and unexpected social subjects enter the public sphere: they are young, and above all, they are students. Their cohesion seems to disregard the political models of the official youth organizations. It is a surprise, a novelty, an unknown variable.3

Disregarding existing political models was common among the younger generation of the 1960s regardless of political tendencies. In other words, the decline of subscriptions to youth political organizations characterized the entire spectrum of Italian politics, from left to right.4 However, due to the subjects and places under consideration here, I focus on the experience of the left-wing movements.

In the 1960s, the disenfranchising of political groups from the main political parties brought to the resurgence of political theories that had been set aside along with the emergence of new political ideas. For instance, in the area of the Italian left, some tried to re-propose an analysis of

Trotskyism, but they were labelled as libertarian.5 In addition, due to a series of underlying issues simmering below the surface a fracture between the Communist party and the working class emerged. These issues surfaced on the pages of the magazine “Quaderni Rossi” (Red notebooks) funded by Mario Tronti, Toni Negri, and Raniero Panzieri in 1961, and in the political experience of “Operaismo” (Labourism). The political idea of the leaders of “Operaismo” was to establish a direct relationship with the working class divested from the traditional structure of the party and the union.6 That led to a breach between the Communist party, some of its constituency and of its members. Throughout the 1960s, “Operaismo” still considered the working class as central to the economic development of a capitalist society.7 Stemming from this hypothesis, in the 1970s the very idea of work was brought under scrutiny, and the refusal of labour, along with the refusal of every form of structural authority, was embraced by social subjects that continue not to recognize themselves within the logic of stale political parties.8 From a branch of “Operaismo,” a new “area of influence” emerged, that is “Autonomia operaia,” defined by Sylvére Lotringer as “a post- marxist, left-wing political movement that came to involve thousands of people.”9 The seeds of

3 Autonomia’s political thoughts are to be found in the 1960s, but Autonomia had a great impact on the Italian social and political movements throughout the 1970s.

Social centers had surfaced in the mid-1970s in major urban areas such as Milan and Rome.

They were modelled on the German Gemeinschaften, youth communes, and appeared as a result of the formation of the Autonomist concept of the refusal of labour, which opposed work ethics and hierarchy.10 Non-identitarian tendencies characterizing social subjects in the 1960s, remained throughout the 1970s, and became a feature of individuals joining social centers in the late 1980s and 1990s. Social centers were, and still are, places in which communities gather and organize. The relational character of early Italian new media art stems from the communal aspect of social centers and from their collaborative and collective political initiatives, which they inherited from the Italian political experience of the 1960s and 1970s, and that still lingers in the online community of the

Italian social networks of today.11 Hence, social, as a term, speaks to the multiplicity of subjects joining a common struggle as well as to the relationality that drives their unity.

Even though, the counter-political experience of the Italian youth seems to follow a linear path, from the 1960s to the 1980s, I refrain from giving it a homogeneous profile, which will contrast with the essential characteristics of social centers as places for non-linear multiplicity. In addition, in order to contextualize early Italian new media art, factors such as globalization and the idiosyncrasy of the global, the influence of the market, the development of information technology, and the historical and cultural shift that occurred in the Italian political sphere after the fall of the

Berlin wall, should be considered as substantial differences from those of the previous decades. In western countries, as well as in those countries connected to the political establishment before 1989, the end of the Soviet Union marked a fracture with the past.12 In Italy, in particular, the end of the cold war led to the dissolution of the Communist party in 1991, whose decline added to the opportunity to reshuffle political possibilities and identities (even thought this process had started long before.) In a 2010 essay, digital media scholar, Marco Deseriis summarizes this transformation, and the role of social centers as new venues for youth aggregation and artistic

4 experimentation.13 How social centers emerged and what role they played as places for community gathering and organization is explored here in Chapter One, while Chapter Two is dedicated entirely to Forte Prenestino, a self-managed social center active in Rome since 1986.

By investigating the primary sources coming from Forte Prenestino’s archives, I narrate the story of its surfacing and survival in order to clarify how an abandoned military fort built in the nineteenth century came to be one the largest squatted social centers in Europe. Run by a collective of political outcasts and community organizers, and sitting on the verge of illegality, Forte

Prenestino (formerly Forte Prenestina) has been a social center for over thirty years. In the mid-

1970s, activists tried for the first time, and with little success, to occupy the fort that had been disestablished soon after the end of the Second World War. Surrounded by a park, and an object of contention between the City and the State since the mid-1970s, Forte Prenestino was occupied again for a week in 1985. Finally, following a concert held in the adjacent park on May 1, 1986, community organizers, activists, and other individuals entered the fort and established the community that has remained in occupation since.

Forte Prenestino soon became a point of reference for Rome’s counter-culture. It was the first Italian social center to have a connection to the Internet, and one of the first to have its own press office, which was established to counter-balance the portrayal of their political and cultural initiatives from the mainstream media. Forte Prenestino’s relationship to media makes its case relevant (Fig. 2.) In line with the counter-political and anti-hierarchical stand of the previous decades, the collective that runs Forte Prenestino published a book in 2016 celebrating their thirtieth anniversary at the site. The book is a collection of stories gathered under several themes. It does not contain a chronological history of the fort, rather it delivers a narrative of its people’s experience as emerging from their interaction with the fort as a place and as a collective of individuals. I return to the significance of the fort as “place” in Chapter two. By publishing this book, Forte Prenestino’s participants continue to tell their story in their own terms. On the one hand, this is driven by a confidence in self-determination of those individuals who have been

5 orbiting around the fort. In particular, those who have lived through the political stonewalling that have marked some initiatives outside of the official political parties as “dangerous,” “degenerative,” and “extremist.”14 On the other hand, it is also driven by the so-called “possessive memory” of those who would like to narrate their historical experiences in their own words.15 Their memories and their history belong indeed to them. I tried cautiously to make that history emerge from the underground culture by integrating interviews that I collected over the course of my research project into this historical account. I do not wish to appropriate that history, rather I wish to recognize its importance, and the relevance of the artistic experiences that emerged within it as well as their relationship with current discourses of new media art.

Should we still say new media art?

Since every medium was at some point new, it could be initially correct to define it as such.

In addition, digital technology (the computational devices, and later, the web) needed to be differentiated from analogue technology (television and radio). However, it has been noted that the word ‘new’ means almost instantly “old” while we remain waiting for the next new thing.16 When finally, the computer–which was originally conceived as a device for calculus–entered the media sphere along with its more recent offspring, digital portable devices, it became impossible to maintain the distinction between new media and old media. In ‘Language of New Media,’ Lev

Manovich notices that until the early twenty-first century computing devices were still called new media as a way to distinguish cinema, photography, radio, and television from the computer. He argues that this distinction is no longer valid as all media share a common numerical computing language. In his words, “media becomes new media.”17 The numerical language of digital media has embedded all the other existing languages pertaining to communication. In addition, media technology has come to occupy a prevalent role in our everyday life and, probably due to its pervasiveness, even the distinction between technology and media has withered, with the former often used to indicate the latter. However, I maintain the distinctive label of new media art in

6 reference to the artistic practices analysed here, for “new” relates to the cultural condition and political implications that emerged as a consequence of using the digital medium. As mentioned, new media art as discussed here—in particular, the work by the Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici

(GMM), Tommaso Tozzi, and Agnese Trocchi—is characterized by the sociality and relationality coming from a political experience rooted in the movements of the 1960s and the 1970s, which were transferred into the cybersphere when newly available information technologies made it possible. For instance, members of the Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici, Antonio Glessi and Andrea

Zingoni participated in the making of “Happening Digitali Interattivi” (Fig. 1) while Agnese

Trocchi’s online project “Warriors of Perception” was again a copyright-free collaboration with several individuals (Fig. ”.)18 I will return to Trocchi’s work later in this introduction.

Even though, at times, the artwork discussed is not exclusively digital, the epistemological umbrella under which the artwork is created speaks to the digital condition and its possibilities. In other words, it speaks to aspects such as a networked society, the hybridization of our body, the virtual travel, the constant presence of a controlling superstructure, and the emergence of a self- centered spectacle, which as it has been noted, did not emerge with the new media or the Internet, but have become particularly relevant because of new media.19 As a consequence, by referring to it as new media art, I intend to highlight those artistic experiences that not only saw the opportunity to expand realities and bodies in the cybersphere, but also initiated a critical discourse around new media, which is still relevant today. In Agnese Trocchi’s “Warriors of Perception”—a work consisting of an HTML page-loop—a fictional character, Variante (variable) runs “from flesh to simulation and back” while she is “stored as data.”20 During the online narration, Variante warns the beholder that “the warriors of perception have infiltrated reality and simulation.” Trocchi’s work is preoccupied not only with language simulation and structure, which she wittily undoes, but also with the perception of the disappearance of materiality in the cyberpshere.

The debate around the relationship between the human and the machine as developed by

Italian artists and activists speaks to more recent concerns about the use, significance, and

7 pervasiveness of media in the so-called post-digital era. As demonstrated by a series of recent meetings held in Rome in 2018 by the new media art collective NONE, that debate is still active and crucial to contemporary artistic practices that engage directly or indirectly with the digital.21

Post-digital is intended here as a condition in which the digital is assimilated as part of our everyday life and the consequences of this assimilation emerge in the realm of artistic production regardless of the medium employed, or in Florian Cramer’s words: “a condition in which digital technology is no longer new media.”22 Even though early new media art is not post-digital, it speaks directly to the current experience of the post-digital. For these reasons, I contend that new media art departs from the experience of conceptual art, and I discuss this approach in Chapter Three.

Media and information

Media as a term has acquired several meanings throughout time, and it continues to change and be used in a versatile manner. Some might argue that the liquidity of the term is what has contributed to its fortune and charm. In technical terms, media refers to communication technology, to the ability of a tool or a device to exchange information. In the mass society, media were and remain tools to transmit information. But, the importance and impact of these tools on society, and not only their mere functionality, is what makes them so complex to analyze and grasp. In his ground-breaking text, “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,” Marshall McLuhan describes media as an extension of human senses. In particular, he refers to the media available in the electronic-age, television and radio. Stemming from the impact and meaning of electricity and its function in modern life, McLuhan’s analysis of media is concerned with light speed, and therefore with time. McLuhan writes: “…the greatest of all reversals occurred with electricity, that ended sequence by making things instant.”23 By making things instant, electronic technology carries a transforming power able to intervene significantly in the life of individuals and society at large.

The importance of media is therefore their significance, and their ability to create “a totally new

8 human environment.”24 In McLuhan’s famous words: “’The medium is the message’ means, in terms of electronic age, that a totally new environment has been created…” Since, he continues,

…The “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs… it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.25

With the introduction of electricity in modern life, society inevitably changed. Not only did the day lengthen with labour no longer dependent on daylight, but also the whole city landscape as well as the domestic environment was modified. In addition, time, both in physical (measurable) and in perceptual terms, acquired a different value with images (television, cinema, photography) and speech (radio) transmitted without necessarily a temporal link between record and event.

That being said, can McLuhan’s discourse on media be applied to pre-electronic-age media?

McLuhan discusses the emergence of the written word in ancient Greece, as well as the emergence of the printing press in the fifteenth century. Written language and the press are both accountable for a significant change in the human environment in which they appeared. Therefore, media as an extension of human and as a modification of the human environment does not refer only to the electronic age. But the impact on the perception of time, on the empirical knowledge of what has past, marks a distinction between pre-electronic age technology and what followed.

Along the lines of McLuhan’s argument, others have considered current media as an extension of our body and of our consciousness, that expand from the digital world into the analogue and vice-versa in a process called ‘feedback loop.’ In his essay, “Thinking Color and/or

Machine,” German media theorist Friedrich Kittler argues:

…Those who have tried to put the fuzzy logic of their insights and intentions into computer code source know from bitter experience how drastically the formal language of these codes distorts those insights and intentions.26

Through this ‘feedback loop,’ the computer imposes its language structure over programmer’s intentions. But the ‘feedback loop’ applies also to computer-user interaction, and not only to computer-programmer interaction. The significant transformation between digital and analogue media dwells both in the common computational language they share, and in the human-machine

9 relationship made possible through interactivity. In other words, digital media are not simply old media in a digital sphere, but offer a new degree of dependency and interrelation.

Computer and digital devices conform to, and confirm, McLuhan’s theory on media, in particular, his description of the content of the medium. He writes: “The ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium.”27 As mentioned, through digitization (turning information into digital formats), new media devices have the ability to embed other mediums (video, audio, still images, text.) But, unlike old media, digital devices allow users to interact with these formats, to modify them, to copy, delete, save, and re-write their content. Whether this opportunity to create one’s own content has had an impact on the human environment in a similar way that electricity has had on modern life, might still be a matter of discussion. Media theorist, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun writes:

“It seems impossible to know the extent, content, and effects of new media.”28 However, the implications of such effects appear clearer in light of most recent scandals on data collection. In addition, I contend that the scale or degree of dependency and interrelation relates to the cultural and historical connotation and developments of media for it is the informational ability of the latter that makes interaction pervasive.

Stemming from this reflection, I consider information as an artistic medium under three different lenses: structure (binary language), the data it produces and collects (product), and its representation (meaning.) The significance of this approach is twofold. On the one hand, it speaks to the importance of information’s exchange as typical of electronic and digital devices, therefore as a relational event based on interaction between devices, between people, and between people and devices. This relational event refers to the implications of the format as a carrier of cultural inclinations, and as an enhancer of human behaviour. Further, it speaks to technological developments as planted into historical circumstances. On the other hand, this approach aims to consider the digital as part of a complex apparatus of visual and sensorial representations and physical appearances, in an open conversation, but not in line, with recent discourses in media theory that refer to the Heideggerian approach to phenomenology as grounded in calculation—and

10 therefore, essentially, in abstraction.29 This deterministic discourse takes media away from its current forms of representation, in other words, it separates diegetic from non-diegetic aspects, and therefore, it bypasses the technology of interaction that is at the base of new media artistic experiences under consideration. I continue to delve into this matter in chapter 3, as well as into some additional aspects of new media art that need further consideration such as whether new media art comes with its own aesthetics, which are a consequence of the very structure of the medium, the flatness of the screen, and the sharpness of digital visual representation.

The reception of Italian new media art

In the mid-1980s and early 1990s in Italy, a long string of galleries, artist-run spaces, art organizations, and public institutions led the way in presenting new media art to the public and— with the aid of private companies such as IBM and Computer Graphics Europe (CGE)—prompted experimentation with information technologies within a nation-wide “Electronic Resurgence.”30

The mystique of the byte was elicited in the title of exhibitions such as, The syntactic community

(“La comunità sintattica” - 1992), Communicative processes (“Esecuzioni comunicative” - 1993), held at the Galleria Paolo Vitolo in Milan, and The shimmering consciousness (“La coscienza luccicante” - 1998) held at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome.31 The enthusiasm for newly available devices and their potentials in art was explored within initiatives such as the Electronic

Art Festival of Camerino, held in the Marche region, and the conference L’Immagine Elettronica, held in Bologna—both sponsored by hi-tech companies and attended by scientists and humanists— and the Centro Video Arte, an art organization based in Ferrara that operated as a hub for Italian and international artists experimenting with new technology, video, and computer art. Further, the

Italian National Broadcasting Company (RAI) allowed artists to venture out with computer graphic tools and the results were featured in the Electronic Art Festival of Camerino and included in television shows such as “La Pittronica” (Paintronic) in which artist Emilio Greco demonstrated how to paint with recently released computer software.32

11 Along with institutional exhibition venues, social centers emerged as creative laboratories for artists and activists to experiment with new technologies. They were not necessarily in opposition to existing traditional art spaces or exhibition opportunities as many artists working out of social centers were often featured in international exhibitions or institutional venues.33 For instance, the Galleria Paolo Vitolo featured Tommaso Tozzi in several occasions in both Milan and

Rome, and the owner, Paolo Vitolo had written a text for “Happening Digitali Interattivi.”34

However, the artistic production emerging from the Italian network culture struggled to enter a broader art historical narrative. As I discuss in Chapter Four, the reasons for the marginality of the

Italian new media art experience internationally are many. On the one hand, even though Italian institutions had embraced new media art and showed it extensively, the latter was framed as yet another chapter in the long relationship between art and science which resulted in a dismissal of the peculiarities of the new tools. This was the case of the 1986 Venice Biennale curated by Maurizio

Calvesi. On the other hand, the attitude towards information technology was marked by a general skepticism due to its connection to the business world as well as to military technology. New media were perceived as tools foreign to the art making process, and this perception was emphasized by the critics and by the press. In a review of the installation “Art and Computer” at the Corderie during the XLII Venice Biennale, Enrico Filippini wrote in the national daily La Repubblica that

“the realm of information and technological invention is a pure and simple realm of indiscernible noise.”35

Along with the exhibition context, in chapter 4, I analyze the content of Tommaso Tozzi’s website. He has gathered a significant number of works and information on his website, de facto saving from the oblivion the records of events, happenings, and artworks that could have been lost due to the lack of a proper, dedicated institution committed to preserving these initiatives as well as to the intrinsic obsolescence of the tools originally employed. Tozzi’s archive constitutes an opportunity to reflect on the digital archive, in particular, on how to handle digitized artworks that while they function as a proof of an otherwise ephemeral phenomenon, they stand as a simulacrum

12 of it. When and if, a new media art project is re-proposed to the public, it is most likely displayed as a simulation of the original, a reproduction (digitized), or a duplication (digital). These categories are borrowed from a digital art categorization as illustrated by Jon Ippolito, and they are used in chapter 4 to investigate whether and how is possible to re-purpose what has been recorded and digitized by Tozzi. The purpose of this analysis is to historicize early Italian new media art; to propose a mode of display for it; and, possibly, to respond to the question of obsolescence that haunts new media art.36

Is new media art contemporary?

Social centers as places for art and activism emerged in a climate transformed by historical, cultural, and political circumstances in a process of departure from modernism and its tradition. I assess these cultural, historical, and artistic circumstances within the condition of contemporaneity, of a multifarious world that is different from the world of modernism.

In “What is the contemporary?,” Giorgio Agamben poses the contemporary as an ‘out-of- time’ condition of the living beings through which the characteristics of a certain period could be grasped and understood. He writes:

…Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands. They are thus in this sense irrelevant [inattuale]. But precisely because of this condition, precisely through this disconnection, they are more capable than others of perceiving or grasping their own time.37

In other words, we have the potential to be contemporary because of our very condition of living, but this potential might not resolve itself in the ability to assert the contemporary, as we might not be capable of perceiving it or grasping it. For Agamben, contemporariness is ‘a singular relationship with one’s own time.’38 Without such relationship, a relationship with the present, and without the ability to hold the gaze of one’s own time, one cannot be contemporary. Therefore, contemporary are they, who can establish that relationship with the time they live in.

13 Meanwhile, Agamben warns about the impossibility to truly meet the appointment with the present. He writes:

...To be contemporary is …like being on time for an appointment that one cannot but miss…the present, is in fact not only the most distant: it cannot in any way reach us.39

His analysis of the contemporary converses with Walter Benjamin’s thesis on the dimension of the present as expressed in his “On The Concept of History,” (1940) according to which the present is a dimension that involves the past as well as the future and cannot be a point in time. The importance of Agamben’s reflection on the contemporary speaks to its dimension of being outside of time

[inattuale], and simultaneously enclosing other temporalities. Stemming from this understanding of the present, contemporary has been adopted to define the current period, which is characterized by a multifaceted centerless contemporaneity.

The history of art has embraced the term contemporary to signal this condition of timelessness or better, simultaneity, but the debate around its use is vast and unsettled. The contemporary remains a slippery category. In addition, contemporary can be intended not only as the current period, but also in a more literal sense, as a period in time that does not refer exclusively to today. By obliterating the significance of contemporaneity as typical of the world today,

“contemporary” remains a strictly temporal category to define synchronicity. In this sense, everyone and everything can be described as contemporary.

But etymology is only one of the reasons scholars do not agree on a definition of the contemporary or on its periodization. In 2009, the magazine October published a survey involving critics and curators based in the United States and Europe who were asked about the category of contemporary art. In 2012, the magazine Field Notes launched their questionnaire on the contemporary titled, “The And: An Expanded Questionnaire on the Contemporary,” that was sent to critics and curators based in Asia and the Pacific regions. By reading the several answers and comments, one can gather the sense of anxiety and uncertainty around the category of the contemporary.

14 In the introduction to the 2009 questionnaire in the magazine October, art critic and historian, Hal Foster writes that the paradigm of postmodernism has ‘run into the sand,’ and although the category of contemporary ‘is not new,’ it speaks to present artistic practices that ‘float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment.’40 In Field Notes, art historian, David Clark and others notice that the concept of contemporary is too Euro-centric and still relates to modernism.41 It seems that the difficulty of pinpointing the contemporary is given by the fragmentary conditions of current times. The existence of a counter-questionnaire, one that offers a different point of view compared to the one coming from the United States and Europe, is a symptom of the multiplicity of territories and stories that feed into the current art world.

This diversification speaks to an historical shift in art historical studies, which reflects the manifold scenario of a post-colonial, post-modern, globalized world as noted by curator and art history educator, Miwon Kwon in her response to the questionnaire posed by October.42 Current comparative art historical studies acknowledge the diversification of the actual conditions of art making, and the significance and relevance or irrelevance of periodization. The linearity of historical narrative as it occurred in the Western tradition seems to be inadequate to other contexts.

Again, in Field Notes it is noticed that ‘in Asia…the contemporary has never been read uniquely through its relationship to the before or after, to a linear history,’ and there are cultures and languages were the word for both yesterday and tomorrow is the same suggesting a complete lack of temporal reference as intended in Western terms.43

In his text “What is Contemporary Art?,” art historian, Terry Smith acknowledges the multiplicity of the contemporary art scenario and proposes three tendencies in current artistic practices: remodernist (art directly connected to the experience and the tradition of modernism); post-colonialist (art that engages with or stems from aspects emerging as a consequence of the end of colonialism); and media-temporality (art that manifests the conditions of contemporaneity, of presentness.)44 According to Smith, the variation from modernity is signalled by the paradoxical,

‘irreconcilable and indissociable’ relationship between these three tendencies.45 Within the western

15 tradition, new media art as emerging from Italian social centers speaks to the time condition as expressed by contemporaneity for it is a manifestation of the cultural, historical, and political shifts that transformed the modern world into a centerless and timeless media scape.

According to Marxist theorist and activist, Franco (Bifo) Berardi, the contemporary appears as an age preoccupied with the present, whereas modernism can be considered as an age preoccupied with the future. In his Post-Futurist Manifesto (2009) he writes that in 1909, the futurists started a becoming-machine process that reached its potential in our age of post-future.46

By speaking of a technological turn that is connected to a transformation of the conditions of labour, which affects the system of life that originally emerged within the nation state in the modern period, Berardi relates to modernism and at the same time departs from it. He affirms that our collective body turned into a machine while the promise of the future refers only to the economic sphere, and it is a promise based on debt. More interestingly, he affirms that due to this lack of future, the only temporal frame we can refer to is the present. Berardi is concerned with the conditions of labour modified by the advent of technology, the relocation of industries, and the relationship between the global and local market. These conditions are particularly significant in the context of social centers in which artists and activists operated in 1980s and 1990s Italy.

As mentioned, a certain organization of labour, and as consequence, of leisure time, as intended until the early 1960s and 1970s had been under scrutiny by new forms of political organization that emerged mostly from the political discourses developed within the Italian left.

Meanwhile, in Western Europe, the old system of party representation, and therefore of political identification, has been facing a long crisis.47

In his essay, “Crisis Theory for Complex Society,” art critic, cultural theorist and activist,

Brian Holmes analyzes analogies between 1970s Italy and the significant shift in the organization of labour at the time, with the job losses that resulted from the financial crisis of 2008.48 Even though historical shifts never occur abruptly, and dates never sharply mark the beginning or the end of something, it seems plausible to consider that Italian society has been characterized by a series of

16 political, social, and economic shifts started in the late 1970s with the re-organization of industries.

For instance, both, Berardi and Holmes argue that currently there is no correspondence between labour supply and demand in western countries. More precisely, in his essay, ‘Emptiness,’ Berardi points out:

…Financial crisis, unemployment, recession, depression, and so on – all these economic technicalities are the result of the complication of a very simple truth: general intellect, technology, and knowledge have created a situation which is making human work useless.49

As noted by Holmes, through a proper critique, the “invention power” of Autonomia can be re- considered in current society, especially in times of a crisis when, he writes, “a greater possibility for social cooperation at the grass root level” can serve as a trampoline for regeneration.50 Art made in social centers has been speaking to these changes and transformations through performative elements as well as the use of information technology. The impact and potential of information technology remains central in Tozzi’s work.

In 1991, following an invitation by a not-for-profit organization called, “Lo Specchio di

Dioniso” (Dionysius mirror) based in Bologna, Tommaso Tozzi realized another happening titled,

“Interattività e Controllo” (Interactivity and Control), which consisted of a chat running on his

Hacker art BBS through which, prompted by Tozzi, users conversed about the significance of virtual identity, and about the concept of interactivity as induced rather than intrinsic to the medium

(Fig. 4.) In situ, the chat could be followed on four monitors, while users could join the discussion by connecting to Tozzi’s Hacker art BBS from any location. Tozzi’s concerns revolved around issues such as control over computer-user interaction, a tool that according to him, could support a horizontal and collective way to build informed communities.51 At the same time, the work helped to establish a conversation between the audience present at the event in Bologna with users connected to the BBS. Through the BBS, Tozzi started to infuse his art practice with the ubiquity made possible by information technology—a characteristic that we tend to take for granted today.

Experimenting with new media is not a novelty in art, even though the technology might be new.

Happenings and performances are also not novelties in the history of artistic practice. However,

17 Tozzi, and others, were invoking its use for artistic and communal purposes other than profit, control, surveillance, and manipulation in response to the historical, cultural, and political circumstances that had obliterated the world of modernism. That early analysis of information technology is in direct conversation with new media artistic practices and discourses of today. The goal of this research is to function as a bridge between the two.

18 NOTES

1 Among the participants are Massimo Cittadini (Professor of Media Art at the Forence Art Academy), Gabriele Perretta (Author, historian, and professor of semiotic of art at the Brera Art Academy in Milan), Marco Philopat (Activitist, community organizer, member of the social center Cox18 in Milan), Raf Valvola (Founder of the magazine Decoder, activitist, community organizer, member of the social center Cox18 in Milan), Paolo Vitolo (Owner of the Paolo Vitolo Gallery, Rome and Milan). See, http://www.tommasotozzi.it/index.php?title=Happening_digitali_interattivi_(1992), accessed February 2019

2 Cd-rom (compact disc read-only memory) were in use as portable memory devices throughout the 1990s. See, https://www.britannica.com/technology/CD-ROM and https://www.philips.com/a-w/research/technologies/cd/cd- family.html, accessed February 2019

3 “È l’ingresso sulla scena pubblica di soggetti sociali nuovi, insospettati: sono giovani e soprattutto sono studenti. E la loro adesione sembra prescindere dalle forme organizzative della politica ufficiale giovanile. È una sorpresa, una novità, un’incognita.” Socrate, Francesca, Sessantotto. Due generazioni, Editori Laterza, Bari, 2018, p 29 [Emphasis added] (Translations my own, unless otherwise specified)

4 Socrate, Francesca, Sessantotto. Due generazioni, Editori Laterza, Bari, 2018, p 18

5 Between 1962 and 1966, one of these youth organizations, the FGCI (Italian federation of young communists) pushed to reinforce the so-called “Togliatti doctrine” (Togliatti was the leader of the Italian Communist Party, who died in 1964). The “Togliatti doctrine” aimed to exclude political theories and currents that were not aligned with the purpose and scope of the party. Following this doctrine, the FGCI rejected libertarian left proposals inspired by the political experience and thought of Polish Marxist theorist, Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) and Russian revolutionary, Lev Davidovič Trotsky (1879-1940). Following this rejection, many students left the FGCI voluntarily while other were expelled by the organization. Socrate, Francesca, Sessantotto. Due generazioni, Editori Laterza, Bari, 2018, p 21

6 The bibliography about “Operaismo” is extremely vast. The term is here defined according to the Central Library in Florence, Italy. http://thes.bncf.firenze.sbn.it/termine.php?id=51363, accessed February 2019. For a preliminary approach to the subject, see: Mezzadra, Sandro, “Operaismo,” in R. Esposito et C. Galli (ed.), Enciclopedia del pensiero politico. Autori, concetti, dottrine, Laterza, Roma-Bari, 2000; Filippini, Michele, Mario Tronti e l'operaismo politico degli anni Sessanta, EuroPhilosophie, 2011; Gli operaisti. Autobiografie di cattivi maestri. Ed. by Borio, Pozzi, Roggero, DeriveApprodi, Roma, 2005; L'operaismo degli anni Sessanta. Da "Quaderni rossi" a "classe operaia," Ed. by Trotta, Giuseppe and Milana, Fabio, DeriveApprodi, Roma, 2008

7 “The power of workers resides in their potential command over production,” wrote Mario Tronti in 1965 as part of the "Initial Theses" published in his volume “Operai e Capitale” ("Workers and Capital"), republished in Autonomia. Post- political politics, Ed. by Lotringer, Sylvère and Marazzi, Christian, Semiotext(e) Journal, Intervention series Part 1, New York, 2007

8 The history of the factions and divisions within the Italian left in these and following years is long, complex, and very articulated. That history cannot find justice in this introduction. I refer here to the volume by Franco (Bifo) Berardi, titled “Contro il lavoro” published in 1970, for which there is no English translation. In this volume, Berardi seems concerns with formulating an answer to the concept of work and protest as theorized by Mario Tronti, in particular on the pages of the magazine “Contropiano.” See, Berardi, Franco (Bifo), Contro il lavoro, Edizioni della Libreria s.r.l, 1970, p 9; See also, Tronti, Mario, Workers and Capital, (1966), Verso books, 2019; and https://www.alfabeta2.it/tag/mario-tronti/, accessed February, 2019

9 Lotringer, Sylvère, “In the shadow of the Red Brigades,” in Autonomia. Post-political politics, Ed. by Lotringer, Sylvère and Marazzi, Christian, Semiotext(e) Journal, Intervention series Part 1, New York, 2007, I

10 Marincola, Elisa, La Galassia dei Centri Sociali, in Limes 3/2001, 61; Lotringer, Sylvère, “In the shadow of the Red Brigades,” in Autonomia. Post-political politics, Ed. by Lotringer, Sylvère and Marazzi, Christian, Semiotext(e) Journal, Intervention series Part 1, New York, 2007

11 A recent hashtag “#facciamorete” (which could be translated as “let’s create a network”) was launched on the Italian twitter to mobilize virtually against some of the leaders of the current Italian government who have a prominent online presence.

19

12 The impact of this break in the political balance in Italy and its consequence on the social sphere is analyzed by Caniglia, Enrico, Identità Partecipazione e Antagonismo nella Politica Giovanile, Sovenia Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2002; and Deseriis, Marco, Italienischer Cyberpunk: Die Entstehung einer Radikalen Subkultur, in Vergessene Zukunft: Radikale Netzkulturen in Europa, Ed. Clemens Apprich and Felix Stalder. Bielefeld, 2012

13 Deseriis, M., Lots of Money Because I am Many: The Luther Blissett Project and the Multiple-Use Name Strategy, in Thamyris/Intersecting No. 21, 2010, 65–94, p 74

14 “Dangerous” and “degenerative” were terms used by the FGCI, Italian youth organization of the Communist party, which since the end of the 1950s, had been characterized by a severe self-discipline, and had disputed the transformations occurring within the younger generation. A strong opposition to the libertarian fringes came from the rank of the Communist party in those years and continued until the party dissolves in the 1991. The term “extremist” was used by Grazia Cherchi and Antonio Bellocchio in “Quaderni Piacentini” (a magazine of the leftist youth) as early as 1962. Cfr, Socrate, p 17 and 31 (and notes)

15 In her volume, Sessantotto. Due generazioni, Francesca Socrate refers to “possessive memory” in order to describe what happened with the making of the history of the 1968 movement. Socrate affirms that historicizing the 1968 has been complicated because of the appropriation of its narrative from those who lived it. She, then combines historical records with interviews to the protagonists of the Italian political movement of the 1968 in order to highlight how much the participation of the youth to the uprisings of the 1960s that led to the 1968 was diverse in scopes and desires. Socrate, Francesca, Sessantotto. Due generazioni, Editori Laterza, Bari, 2018, xv

16 See, New Media, Old Media. A History and Theory Reader, Edited by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan, Routledge, 2006

17 Manovich, Lev, Language Of New Media, MIT Press, 2001, p 48

18 See, http://www.newmacchina.net/warriors/index.html, Accessed February 2019

19 A recent exhibition at the ICA Boston titled “Art in the Age of the Internet. 1989 to Today” framed these aspects as a result of a longer cultural history that speaks to our fears and sense of unsettlement as it relates to the relationship between the human and the machine. Cfr, Art in the Age of the Internet. 1989 to Today, Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018

20 http://newmacchina.info/en/artworks/netart/29-warriors-of-perception.html, accessed February 2019

21 See, Cramer, Florian, “What is post-digital” in http://www.aprja.net/what-is-post-digital/, accessed February 2019; In addition, a current debate about the relationship between the human and the machine has been the subject of a symposium organized by the Rome-based media art collective NONE, held in January 2018. See, http://simposio.none.business/, accessed February 2019

22 Cramer, Florian, “What is post-digital,” http://www.aprja.net/what-is-post-digital/, accessed February 2019

23 McLuhan, Marshall, “The medium is the message,” in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964

24 McLuhan, “Introduction to the second edition,” in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964

25 Ib. [Emphasis added]

26 Kittler, Friedrich, Thinkink Color and/or Machine, in Theory Culture Society, 2006 23: 39, p 49

27 McLuhan, “The medium is the message,” in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964

28 Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, Programmed Visions, MIT Press, 2013, p 1

29 Kane L., Carolyn, Chromatic Algorithms. Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code, The University of Chicago Press, 2014, p 14

30 “Rinascimento” and “Risorgimento Elettronico” were used to describe what was happening with the newly available information technology. Whilst the reference to the Rinascimento (Renaissance) might be clear to many, “Risorgimento” is a period in the modern Italian history that refers to a series of battles that occurred throughout the 19th century to unify the country. Art historian, Francesca Gallo referred to these expressions in occasion of a 20 conference dedicated to the Electronic Art Festival of Camerino. “Memorie della Computer Art in Italia. Il Festival Arte Elettronica di Camerino,” MLAC, Museo Laboratorio Arte Contemporanea, La Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome, Italy, October 20, 2017. Conference notes.

31 See, Bordini, Silvia, Arte Elettronica, Giunti, 2004, pp. 132-136. (Translations are my own)

32 The show was aired in 1985. The collaboration between RAI and visual artists was discussed at the conference “Memorie della Computer Art in Italia. Il Festival Arte Elettronica di Camerino,” MLAC, Museo Laboratorio Arte Contemporanea, La Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome, Italy, October 20, 2017, and needs further consideration (Translations are my own.) La Repubblica, “Ora c’è anche la Pittronica,” February 2, 1985, http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/1985/02/02/ora-anche-la-pittronica.html, accessed October 2018

33 Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici were featured at the Electronic Art Festival of Camerino in 1985. In the late 1980s, many of their works appeared on RAI. Source: http://www.gmm.fi.it/Gmm/gmm2.htm; Agnese Trocchi’s work was exhibited at the CAMeC, Center for Modern and Contemporary Art, La Spezia, Italy, and Manifesta in 2008, among other venues, Source: http://www.newmacchina.info/en/images/exhibitions.html; Tommaso Tozzi exhibited at La Quadriennale in Rome in 1996. Tozzi’s work was also featured at the Castello di Rivoli, at the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna di Rimini, at the Galleria Neon in Bologna, at the Galleria Paolo Vitolo in Rome and Milan, among others. Source: http://www.tommasotozzi.it/index.php?title=Tommaso_Tozzi, all websites accessed October 2018

34 The work was featured at the “Galleria Paolo Vitolo” in Rome in 1992 with the title “Conferenze Digitali Interattive,” and Tozzi was included in the Quadriennale in Rome in 1996. Source: Archivi Quadriennale, b. Tozzi, MF 6440, Rome.

35 La Repubblica, June 29-30, 1986

36 Ippolito, Jon, “Death by Wall Label,” in New Media in the White Cube and Beyond, p 118

37 Agamben, Giorgio, What is the contemporary?, in ‘What is an Apparatus,’ Stanford University Press, 2009, p 40. It is worth noticing that the translator translates ‘inattuale’ as ‘irrelevant,’ although ‘inattuale’ can refer to non-actual, non- current and in this sense, it retains a more time-specific connotation.

38 Agamben, p 44

39 Agamben, pp 46-47

40 Foster, Hal in Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary,’ October 130, Fall 2009

41 David Clark in Field Notes, Issue 1, 2012.04, p 30

42 Miwon Kwon in Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary,’ in October 130, Fall 2009

43 Editorial Note, in Field Notes, p 8

44 Smith, Terry, What is Contemporary Art?, University of Chicago Press, 2009, pp 197-198

45 Smith, p 269

46 Berardi, Franco (Bifo), Manifesto of Post-Futurism, http://eipcp.net/n/1234779255?lid=1234779848 (Accessed February 2016)

47 See Negri, Antonio, Insurgencies, Constituent Power and the Modern State, University of Minnesota Press, 1999

48 See Holmes, Brian, “Crisis Theory For Complex Societies,” in Disrupting Business: Art and Activism in Times of Financial Crisis, Edited by Tatiana Bazzichelli and Geoff Cox, Autonomedia, 2013, pp 199-226

49 Berardi, Franco (Bifo), “Emptiness,” in Disrupting Business: Art and Activism in Times of Financial Crisis, p 27

50 Holmes, Brian, “Crisis Theory For Complex Societies,” p 200

51 http://www.tommasotozzi.it/index.php?title=Interattivit%C3%A0_e_controllo_(1991), Accessed February 2019 21 1.

A “real virtuality:” Italian network culture in the 1990s. Hybridity, cyberpunk, and social centers

In the mid-1980s, Europe still had two Germanys, the Soviet block was a reality and the threat of a third world war loomed over the future. A few years later, the Berlin

Wall came down and vanished under the ashes of the Cold War. Meanwhile, new information technologies had emerged and finally, as the Iron Curtain was lifted, the

West seemed to have changed permanently. How did that change affect local and international communities of artists and activists who for years had tried to establish a network among the not-so-vast-anymore global geography? In particular, how did artists and activists in Italy respond to those changes?

This chapter is about the development of a network culture in Italy in the early-

1990s. “Network” is intended here as a system of relationships as shaped by activists and artists as they visited Italian social centers and that speaks to the artistic shift following which the making of the “network” replaced the making of an object. Social centers

(centri sociali) started to appear in Italy in the 1970s following the model of German

Gemeinschaften or youth communes.1 They emerged as a result of the formation of the

Autonomist concept of the refusal of labor, which marked a significant turn in the history of Marxist political thought.2 However, within the context of my analysis, it is important to note that some participants joined these spaces for their commitment to sociality more than to their politics.3 By departing from extant ideologies as conveyed by traditional political parties, and by utilizing social centers as sites where to experiment artistically and politically, artists and activists made the system of centri sociali their way to

22 mobilize as well as to make art. These social centers, dotted across the urban fabric of major Italian cities, promoted a network culture within which individuals as well as communities could possibly come together in occasion of common struggles.

A self-managed community site open to non-identical subjects is probably the closest description reflecting what a social center was and still is. The notion of self- regulated social center is relevant in relation to how their participants managed to redefine political identity and the role of hybridity in political, cultural, and artistic interventions. In 1991, Italian journalist and politician Nichi Vendola noted that social centers were “a thorn in the flesh of a form of urbanization that does not see or foresee spaces for mere socialization. They are places for free communication, corners of freedom impossible to commodify.”4 The emphasis therefore is on the possibility given by these sites to escape a social hierarchy based on a prominent, at times hegemonic, culture.

In 1994, the number of social center participants in Italy was estimated at around two thousand (Fig. 5.) In the early 2000s, this amount increased to approximately five to six thousand people while the number of centers throughout the country was approximately two hundred.5 These sites were never organized in a homogeneous or univocal way. Their mission, organization, management, status, and operations varied from region to region. However, along with an interest in art, culture, and in creating a supportive community for their participants, the social center founding groups have shared concerns about the condition of labor in Italy that had been modified by the advent of technology, about the relocation of industries, and about the relationship between the global and local markets. These spaces have often been squatted, abandoned or disused

23 factories, or municipal buildings no longer utilized by local or national governments.

They have been reclaimed by groups of people who felt in need of alternative locations for bringing about a different idea of community, and a different idea of politics, possibly foreign to the yoke of cultural hegemony while venturing outside of the “sphere of the complex superstructure.”6

Popular initiatives and community gathering locations since the end of WWII in

Italy have been coordinated and managed by the two main political forces, i.e. the Italian

Communist party and the Christian Democratic party, both in pursuit of a cultural hegemony.7 Social organizations and political identifications that have dominated youth aggregation models since the end of WWII can be finally considered dismantled after

1989. In this regard, the historical significance of the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 in

Europe and elsewhere as related to the Cold War, the Iron curtain, and the world order of the time, is crucial to the Italian scenario. It can be considered as a significant historical mark, even though political models started to change or to be bypassed before that time.

Although the Italian Communist party remained a political and cultural reference for Italian youth throughout the 1960s and the mid-1970s, by the late 1970s and throughout 1980s and 1990s, squatters congregating around social centers departed from its initiatives both politically and intellectually.8 After the fall of the Berlin Wall, social centers showed themselves open to a new hybrid political identity that was emerging as a consequence of a departure from the stale logic of party or group identification and affiliation. At the same time, in response to a devastating drug problem among Italian youth, in the mid-1980s social centers tried, though not always successfully, to offer heroin-free spaces of aggregation for the Italian youth.9

24 As mentioned, social centers started to appear as a result of the formation of the

Autonomist concept of the refusal of labor. The refusal of labour indicated not only a scrutiny of the very idea of work has a drive for society, but also an opposition to the organization of everyday life based on the division of labour and schedules. Along with

Autonomists, other groups related to the Italian left—and often in contrast with the Italian

Communist party—joined and/or founded social centers, including anarchists. Many of these sites closed down after the ’77 Movement lost its momentum, while others persisted and continued to operate throughout the following decades. The link to the political, social, and most importantly, cultural unrest of 1977, and its consequences for Italian activism, is crucial to frame the craving for new spaces for sociality and collectivity.

The 1977 Movement was manifold. On the one hand, militants who espoused the violence that characterized the 1970s –known as “the years of lead”—wanted to push the social unrest towards an armed struggle against the state.10 On the other hand, and in opposition to militancy, the protest was colorful and joyful. It embraced the anti- authoritarian practice of détuornement typical of the Situationist International, and rejected the society of the spectacle. “The revolution had to be a party” made of actions whose main weapons were irony, dark humor, and sarcasm.11 Some elements of its festive approach survived the dramatic debacle of the 1977 Movement. As known, the armed struggle was defeated by the Italian state, many had fallen and other were arrested, and spent years in jail.

From a visual and artistic point of view, the language of work undertaken at social centers that developed both locally and virtually in the early 1980s resembled the spontaneity and irreverence of what was produced in the late 1970s.12 In focusing

25 attention on different cultural models as well as in organizing alternative communities’ activities (different, for instance, from the Feste de l’Unità led by the Italian Communist party), social centers aimed both to depart from the cultural debate within the parliamentarian left in those years, and to create new, alternative environments for art and activism. Opening up the field of political and artistic possibilities and helped by recent information technologies such as Teletext and BBS (Bulletin Board System)—through which it was possible to visualize a text on a screen and to send it worldwide via a telephone line—artists and activists established online artistic practices and activist strategies that were interlacing virtual and physical space. The network culture they put into place then transferred into the digital realm once the opportunity presented itself.

This analysis takes into consideration the issue of cultural hegemony as theorized by Antonio Gramsci.13 Gramsci affirms that a predominant ruling class is most likely to manifest itself not only through its politics, but also by imposing its own culture on the society it dominates. As a consequence, the hegemonic power of the ruling class “is not limited to matters of direct political control.”14 After having pursued cultural as well as a political hegemony since the end of WWII, the two major Italian political forces—the

Italian Communist party and the Christian Democratic party—ended up being models to bypass and overcome.

In addition, I analyze Italian network culture through the lenses of theoretical discourses on hybridity, identity, political activism, and the masses, borrowing from

Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” translated into Italian in 1995;15 and referring to Tiziana

Terranova’s “Network Culture,” originally published in English in 2004, and translated

26 into Italian in 2006. Seminal to my definition of Italian political identity is Haraway’s concept of hybridity in opposition to a concept of inscribed identification and cultural essentialism. In her words:

Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of their social and historical constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in 'essential' unity.16

In the Italian network culture of these years, the concept of hybridity as emerging within the discourse on cyborg identity became a political characterization. Such a concept is closer to Haraway’s approach to identity characterization than to Homi Bhabha’s “ironic compromise” due to its relationship to information technology and the possibility of interaction, and ultimately to the Italian historical context of the years considered.17 Both theorizations look at the pursuit of identity as a response to a desire for change. However, through the digital device, cyberspace seems to offer a novel element of agency. Outside of cyberspace, the relationship with the machine is signaled by adding visual clues to the body. In a 2017 event about Punk culture in Italy at the social center Forte Prenestino, in

Rome, artist and activist Agnese Trocchi, introduced by the speaker as a “digital manipulator,” affirmed:

In the 1990s we experienced an intimate relationship with technology, the metal of the machine, and its chemistry. The piercing was a mark of the process of hybridization between the body and the machine.18

Differently from mimicry, the hybridization process brings artists and activists to differentiate themselves from existent cultural and political models, embracing the possibility to augment one’s presence in society through a multifaceted identity, online and offline.

27 This relationship between the real and the virtual had an impact on the opportunity to interact with one another on both an individual as well as on a collective level. Tiziana Terranova’s reflection on the relationship between the individual and the mass speaks to this change, in particular as illustrated in the following passage:

In a network culture, a mass is a transversal cut in the body of an informational milieu that never ceases to be micro-segmented, highly differentiated and at the same time interconnected. If this mutual although uneven segmentation… is possible at all, it is because differences have not simply become interchangeable, and social and cultural processes have not lost their capacity to qualify and differentiate image flows. At the same time, it has become necessary to think through the relationship between these social qualities and the mass perception identified above—we are always simultaneously both mass and class, mass and multitude, mass and race, mass and nation; and so on.19

Terranova’s development regarding the political category of mass differs from Marxist theorist Raymond Williams’ even though they are both writing within a similar concept of technology as progressive. For Terranova the mass is not “apopulist and thus implicitly anti-working class,” rather media and cultural studies have “tended to identify the mass with a kind of conservative modernity.”20 However, a shift occurred with the advent of new media, in particular the Internet for she affirms it is no longer possible to consider the mass as a passive entity manipulated by the communication industry. The fundamental distinction, according to Terranova, lies in the interaction made possible via the Internet, which differs from the engagement made possible via television and the printed media. In her words, “the Internet…proved to be an effective political medium in terms of its power of mobilization and the openness of its information space.”21

Williams’ and Terranova’s discourses are generated within two different technological realms: analog and electronic technology in the work of the former, digital technology for the latter. They both consider technology within the frame of social

28 studies, away from the orthodoxy of technological determinism according to which “new technologies are discovered by an essentially internal process of research and development, which then sets the conditions for social change and progress.”22 In other words, technological development may or may not result in relevant changes in society even though a certain technological discovery is made at a certain time, for technological development and social change are not necessarily historically consequential. sFor

Terranova, the Internet is seen as a possible resolution to the dichotomy that sees the working class in opposition to a silent majority as intended by Williams.23 For her, the majority is no longer silent, rather it is fragmented and hybrid. Hybridity, as interpreted within the political scenario of Italian social centers in the mid-1980s and 1990s, provides a way to escape political identity while acting politically, therefore realizing what

Terranova’s defines as a “mass mutation.”24

It might be relevant to clarify a category such as identity, in particular political identity, as well as to delineate the action of identification as considered within the purposes of this chapter. According to sociology theories, within the context of political participation, identity indicates a subjective sentiment of unity with an external environment. Such sentiment is developed through, but also subject to, a constant process of adaptation and maintenance in accordance to one’s own personal experience. Identity implies continuity between subjective sentiments of unity with a re-elaboration of such sentiments in accordance to mutating factors occurring outside of the subject.25 In particular, political identity takes shape through a process of belonging to a political group, to an association, and/or to an organization, which reflects determined ideas, social representations, political practices, actions, and goals.26 According to the

29 sociologist Enrico Caniglia, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a gradual fragmentation of the sentiment of unity, which characterized the Italian youth throughout the 1960s and

1970s, eventuated in a different type of political identity.27 It was no longer felt necessary to belong to a political identity prescribed by a party’s ideology. In particular, in social centers, one could express a possible interest in politics without having a specific political affiliation, thus avoiding assimilation.

In her text, Shivers of Sharing, artist and activist Agnese Trocchi refers to a system of interrelations established throughout the 1990s. Galvanized by the rising cyberpunk culture that combined the anarchic way of life of British-born punk with the mystique of cyberspace, social center participants embraced a nomadic approach to physical and virtual life. In her words:

In 1995 some of the young people who were gathering around the Social Centers were feeling constrained by political identities of the past and they adopted the concept and the practice of Psychical Nomadism. What they did exactly was to apply this concept to the rising reality of the digital networks. Internet was not yet as common as it is now but the cyberpunk myth was running fast through the telephone lines, using the Bulletin Board System as a means of communication for fast-growing communities.28

Psychical Nomadism is a rhizomatic approach to identity and subjectivity that implies taking elements (as one needs) from existing moral, religious, political, ethical, and other systems, without subscribing to any one of them fully. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari theorized a rhizomatic-nomadic thought that could stand as a form of resistance to State power in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), which includes a treatise in nomadology.29

Furthermore, Psychical Nomadism is one of the identity features described in the book

Temporary Autonomous Zone (1991) by anarco-theorist, Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn

Wilson.)30 Psychical Nomadism as mentioned by Trocchi, is a fluid form of resistance

30 that opposes the possibility of control by adopting an unsettled political identity (Fig. 6.)

This fluidity is a fundamental aspect of early Internet-based activism and of cyberpunk.31

Internet-based activism promoted an alternative space of political resistance that was able to escape the panoptical control of the state and of capital. In such a space, communication was reproduced and spread quickly and exponentially while sources remained difficult to trace, thereby allowing for anonymity.

As underlined by Trocchi, cyberpunk was an important phenomenon that characterized the counter-culture of social centers. How did cyberpunk spread throughout these sites? In 1988 in Milan, a new publishing company called Shake Edizioni

Underground was founded. The distinguishing trait of its catalogue was the presence of national and international cyberpunk literature. In the early 1990s, Shake edited a volume titled Cyberpunk: Antologia di testi politici (Cyberpunk: An anthology of political writings), which included texts by American science fiction author Bruce Sterling, and computer engineer Lee Felseinstein, among others.32

In addition, in 1990, Shake began to publish Decoder, a magazine that focused on the culture of computer and the network.33 Decoder, “the ‘bible’ of Italian cyberpunkers,” was the result of the merging of three existent fanzines: Comandino Puré, Famen, and

Idra Mentale.34 The latter, Idra Mentale, was also the name of a band whose members included three of Decoder’s founders: Ermanno Guarnieri (Gomma), Fabrizio Longo

(Kikko), and Raffaele Valvola (Raf). The other members of the collective were

Giampaolo "Ulisse Spinosi" Capisani, Gianni Mezza, Marco Philopat, and Giacomo

Spazio. The collective first formed in the late 1986, and was initially responsible for the entire project of Shake Edizioni Underground.

31 In an interview with Raffaele Valvola, it emerged that collective’s political identities were varied. Valvola defines himself as a socialist and a libertarian, and affirms that Ermanno Guarnieri was an anarco-communist; Fabrizio Longo was an anarchist coming from a conservative family; Giampaolo Capisani was an Autonomist; and Gianni

Mezza came from Avanguardia Operaia.35 Considering that both Autonomia and

Avanguardia Operaia officially dissolved at the end of the 1970s, the political identity of those two members of Decoder’s collective is to be considered more as a provenance than an affiliation. Valvola credits anarchist and writer Primo Moroni with the idea of inviting the group to make a magazine that could speak to and contain the manifold identities of the counter-culture. Even though Decoder was based in Milan, its story speaks to a broader situation that involved the Italian underground culture. Decoder’s collective revolved around La Calusca library, founded by Primo Moroni. The library was an important meeting point for different political subjects orbiting around the Left:

Autonomists, Internationalists, Marxists, Punx, and more.

According to Valvola, in the mid-1980s Italian youth were particularly fragmented and feisty and, differently from previous generations, “young proletarians were impossible to rule.” Further, “emerging groups did not want to participate in the social mechanism and they did not want to participate as an organized entity. They did not want to establish rules for themselves.”36 As a result, within the counter-culture sphere, there was the Gramscian tradition—the leading ideology of the Italian

Communist party—followed by a generation of activists whose politics were ascribable to the multiple entities that stemmed from, rejected, or responded to that tradition, but ultimately remained in conversation with its identity, and its contradictions. However,

32 there was a new generation that “considered that tradition as age-old” mostly due to a

“declining idea according to which work is the cornerstone of society.”37

Similarly to other fanzines, the first two issues of Decoder were comprised solely of photo-compositions with Xeroxed text. The fragmentary aspect of the magazine mirrored the multifaceted dimension of its collective, and most importantly, of its audience. At this time, resources were limited but thanks to the later success, future issues improved conceptually and materially. By the third issue, the target audience of the magazine was firmly the cyberpunk culture. The use of the computer and its meaning was stressed by its content as well as its graphics. Occasionally, images were published with outlines as if the viewer was looking at the computer screen while image editing software was being used (Fig. 7.) As a publication, Decoder was conceived as a continuous flow of information, a long string of released content. The pages were numbered progressively. For instance, the third issue started at page 145 and by issue 12, the pages numbered above 900, perhaps as a clever way to resemble the constant flow of information possible via online platforms. Even though, pages were numbered, the reader could go back and forth from one issue to another with a sense of continuity, as if no time had passed between publications.

From issue one to issue seven, the production of Decoder rose from 1,000 to

10,000 copies, finally reaching a stable printing run of 5,000. It was circulated traditionally as well as through social centers. In 1994, Ermanno Guarnieri, Primo

Moroni, and Raffaele Valvola traveled to Forte Prenestino in Rome to present the latest publications by Shake.38

33 In an interview with activists Stefano and Paolo at the Cox 18, which is a social center also known as Conchetta from the name of the street where it is located and home of La Calusca library and archive, it emerged that the Shake collective was also part of the Cox 18 collective, but the latter did not participate in the editorial choices of Shake

Edizioni.39 Stefano and Paolo affirmed that the Shake editorial team seemed to have international connections, and was able to invite international guests that otherwise were unattainable.40 In 1994, the American anarchist author Hakim Bey was invited to speak at the Cox 18, and his interview was published in Decoder. However, Valvola affirms that the relationship between the publishing collective and the social centers was often contentious due to the many political identities and goals within different collectives. In his words:

The social center was a tool, not an identity. The first Virtual Square took place in Broni (Pavia) without the participation of the social centers with whom the relationship remained conflictual.41

Nonetheless, in 1991 the same Virtual Square event was held at the Cox 18. The Virtual

Square was a two-day appointment where people could familiarize themselves with the still specialized computer and information technology.42 The relationship between information technology and social centers seems to have grown overtime. Information technology was seen as inclusive, but at the same time, as a tool belonging to the superstructure. This conflict would resolve itself by transferring the activist practice of disruption to the newly available technology.

In an attempt to elucidate how exactly social centers, cyberpunk, art and political movements intertwined, it is relevant to notice that a street gang called Panther Moderns was the protagonist of the fourth chapter of the cyberpunk culture’s seminal book

34 Neuromancer by William Gibson, published in 1984, and translated into Italian in 1986.

In 1990 in Italy, a strong student movement rose nationwide to protest against the privatization of public education. The movement was called La Pantera (The Panther.)

Allegedly, the name of the street gang in Gibson’s Neuromancer paid homage to the punk band of the same name whose lead singer was John Shirley.43 The Modern Panthers in Neuromancer are described as “differ[ing] from other terrorists precisely in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent.”44 The name certainly echoes the

Black Panther self-defense party founded in California in 1966. Perhaps, the Italian protest movement of La Pantera derived its name from Gibson’s cyberpunk bestseller— to which Decoder paid homage in its third issue (Fig. 8)—or it was inspired by the claim of self-defense and identity awareness coming from the Black Panther party—which was referenced by the image of the feline employed as the logo of the student movement—or both. As noted by psychologist Nando Simeone, following a proposal by two graphic designers and students who participated in the protests, the movement adopted a name and a logo able to carry different meanings, and to be appropriated by many.45

Additionally, the logo, unique in Italy, disentangled like-minded groups from any symbols related to the Italian political imaginary.

Ultimately, this uncertainty speaks to the practice of disruption, appropriation and re-adaptation as typical of activism in the information age. Media of any kind are tools through which artists and activists assimilate and reuse the language of the communication industry to ironically subvert meaning in order to infiltrate and disrupt the control of media over society and individuals. Media has fully entered the individual,

35 and vice versa. Individuals are conscious of their augmented human dimension and through it, they can if they so choose operate within the system of communication to create artistic interventions. In a way, these are the cyborgs of Donna Haraways’ manifesto that have embraced their hybrid existence as human-machine and move in and out of the network sphere, i.e. the cyberspace.46

The protest movement of La Pantera had a large following throughout Italy even though it lasts only for one year, which reveals how it was able to involve different strata of the society.47 In a 2012 essay, digital media scholar Marco Deseriis explains some of the connections between public schools, universities, and social centers that contributed in making La Pantera a widely participatory political initiative:

Squatted community centers [were] occupied for the most part by students, unemployed, and precarious workers in the early 1990s…with their stratified social composition and unique mix of political cultures and subcultures, the social centers formed a parallel sociopolitical sphere, in which a wide range of activities—including demonstrations, festivals, workshops, daycare services, concerts, sports, and art shows—were organized.48

In Italy, student protests are usually a response to recently passed-laws that affect state funding and the general organization of schools and universities. Historically, at least since the end of World War II, collectives of students belonging to different political realms had maintained a regular presence within the university.49 These collectives decide whether to put on protests against the government when specific laws are passed or subject to a debate in the Parliament. If laws, or other administrative orders, address the secondary school as well as the higher education system—which is often the case— the student body, through assemblies, decides whether to join the protest or not.

Generally, these protests are a form of participation in the general national debate. When

36 a political issue that affects the school system becomes pressing, it is discussed as soon as any of the members of the assembly bring it up.50

Since 1968, occupying public schools and universities has been a widespread form of political protest for youths in Italy. In the mid 1980s and 1990s, these forms of protests still represented a moment of political identification for students who were called to partake and to vote on how to run self-directed study during the occupation. It is significant to mention that a coalition of Italian center-left parties only won its first election since the end of WWII in 1996; protests within the public school system before that were likely to be guided or ignited by politics which were ascribable to the fragmented and sectarian world of the Italian left, which included: the Italian Communist party (which became The Left Democratic party in 1991), the Green Party, the Radical

Party, the Party of Communist Re-foundation (which included dissidents from The Left

Democratic party who did not accept the dissolution of the Italian Communist party), other extra-parliamentarian, anti-government political entities such as former

Autonomists, anarchist groups, and anti-globalism groups, among others.

However, most likely as a reflection of the emergence of a different way to identify politically in the 1980s and 1990s, La Pantera marked a watershed with the past and its form of political labeling. As noted by Simeone, “the novelty… of the movement of La Pantera… is in its character conspicuously social. [The novelty was] The consciousness of its being social.”51 Historic political groups such as Autonomia, Figc

(Italian Communist Youth Federation), and CL (Communion and Liberation) had lost steam during the period of La Pantera’s greatest influence. The non-politicized collectives—formed by individuals who did not necessarily identify with a specific

37 political party, faction, or ideology—became a model of student organization that was open to a larger pluralized mass.52 This is not to say that politically traditional groups were not part of the protests. They were there as well as within collectives who founded and ran social centers throughout Italy. However, the possibility to participate in politics without identifying politically had become a valuable prospect.

By the time the left managed to win the national elections by running as a large coalition of the center-left, the Italian Communist party had dissolved as a consequence of a profound crisis due both to the loss of political references such as the USSR, and to the contradictions implied in the alliance with the USSR, among other factors.53 In this new political climate, the pluralistic nature of social centers was well suited to nurturing alternative forms of aggregation and sociality. In a 2010 essay, Deseriis summarized how the Italian political and economic condition at the time encouraged people to join social centers:

The fall of the Berlin Wall uncovered the unsustainability of a clientelistic system… In a context in which a spiraling public debt required a discredited political class to make draconian cuts to the welfare state, the centri sociali became a catalyst for a generation of young people who were given little opportunity to practice their skills within a stagnant job market.54

Social centers were places in which being political did not necessarily mean one was expected to embrace a specific, and already existent, political identity. Stemming from the punk movement of the 1970s, anarchy more than communism was often the leading political idea within social center collectives. The presence of both anarchist and communist ideology demonstrates that traditional political categories were in place side by side with new forms of political thought.55

38 In the early 1990s, the initiatives of the Roman social center Forte Prenestino– whose history will be analyzed in the next chapter–started to be assisted by network technology. Forte Prenestino, as well as other squatted social centers, started to promote the use of BBS to connect with one another. BBS arrived in Italy in 1984 through computer engineer Giorgio Rutigliano who, aware of this technology as developed in the

U.S. at the time, opened the first BBS based in Potenza. Later that year, Rutigliano connected his BBS to the international node Fidonet that was based in the Netherlands.56

Before BBS became available, self-produced publications, radio, and of course, telephone, were the most common mediums used in communications among social centers. Shake Edizioni Underground had a fundamental role in distributing across Italy translated publications that were considered important within the cultural milieu of social centers, in particular among cyberpunkers. During the same period, other individual and collective publishing initiatives as well as radio stations flourished throughout Italy. At the end of the 1980s, a pamphlet containing news from social centers was circulating to keep participants and collectives informed about the activities held in other cities (Fig. 9-

10.) However, the advent of the BBS certainly accelerated communication between users by facilitating connections. In an interview Tuscany-based artist, Federico Bucalossi– who joined a social center in the city of Empoli in 1988–described how artists would travel around Italy to visit other social centers for a first-hand experience of what was happening elsewhere.57 Through network technology that became accessible to many in the 1990s, this network culture transferred and implemented itself. Social centers saw network technology as a platform from which to connect to individuals who shared similar political, social, and artistic interests.

39 In November 1989, members of several social centers held a meeting in Pisa to discuss a project regarding the formation of a computer network to foster communication among self-managed sites and to create an outlet for their news and ideas that would allow them to reach a larger public.58 According to the transcript of the meeting, locations involved were based in Assisi, Bologna, Feltre, Florence, Follonica, Livorno, Milan, Pisa,

Rome, S. Giorgo di Nogaro, Schio, Rovereto, Trento, and Udine, although not every location had the technology necessary. At the meeting were Ermanno Guarnieri and

Raffaele Valvola from Decoder, and Primo Moroni. The scope of the meeting was to discuss “the meaning of the network” as stated by Guarnieri in the opening remarks.59

During the meeting two approaches to “the net” emerged. On the one hand, some would have liked the net to be open to as many individuals or groups as possible in order to make communication horizontal. On the other hand, the group understood right away that an open platform, without constant coordination and control, was impossible to manage.

The technical aspect became immediately political. The politics of digital device usage permeated the debate around the making of a social center network from the early stages and continued as social centers began to use the BBS.

At Forte Prenestino, many interpreted information technologies as an opportunity to create a cyber political utopia as well as a way to use anonymity to protect political actions. In 1994, Forte Prenestino opened one of the first Italian BBS, under the name of

AvANa-net. AvANa-net is an abbreviation of Avvisi Ai Naviganti (Warning to Sailors.)60

The BBS migrated onto a website sometime in the late 1990s, and it has been combining digital and analog events since. By employing terms such as digital and analog, I simply refer here to events that took place on the AvANa-net BBS (digital), as well as to events

40 that took place on site at Forte Prenestino (analog.) I am not referring to these events as online and offline because many of them organized in situ by AvANa-net included the use of a LAN (local area network) connecting devices located at the social center.

Therefore, at times, those devices were on-a-net although not necessarily on the Internet.

Further, at times Forte Prenestino functioned as an internet café. Regarding AvANa-net initiatives, their goals are clarified on their mission statement, which reads:

- We let you know there is a way to use technology consciously, and we teach you how. - We let you know about how technology can foster sharing (not only in terms of knowledge), we share our knowledge and we encourage others to do likewise. - We let you know about the existence of free software, and we distribute it. - We warn you that technology implies control, and we teach you how to avoid it. - We let you know about freedom opportunities offered by technology, and we look for communication tools and methods to promote these opportunities. - We warn you about conflicts fought on the ground of technology, we try to spot such conflicts, and we equip ourselves to avoid unexpectedness. - We warn you…61

The group that manages AvANa-net aims not only to spread knowledge about information technology, but also to warn users about what risks technology brings about in terms of privacy, in terms of commodification of information, in terms of control over user’s online activities to heighten self-consciousness about the perils and pleasures of interconnectivity and privacy concerns. Agnese Trocchi, also a co-founder of AvANa, summarizes its mission as follows:

Avana BBS spread the concept of the Subversive Telematic: access for all, digital democracy, the right to anonymity, freedom of expression, the sharing of knowledge.62

Therefore, AvANa-net seems to have two different approaches to network technology: on the one hand, it encourages the use of such technology; on the other hand, it remains skeptical and defensive. The suspicious approach is certainly a consequence of knowing

41 how technology works and, as a result, how it can be used repressively and invasively, as things have borne out.

In May 1994, an investigation of computer piracy shut down dozen of Italian

BBS. There were accusations of “criminal conspiracy, contraband, illicit software duplication, and computer fraud, altering of computer and/or telematics systems.”

Needless to say, the investigation never led to actual charges, but a strategy of repression towards BBS in Italy remained. 63 Through the BBS the underground culture in Italy emerged as a series of singular entities, but were probably perceived as a unified, and maybe potentially dangerous, political body. What happened then made Giorgio

Agamben’s 1993 statement sound like clairvoyance:

Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be a Tiananmen, and, soon or later, the tanks will appear.64

Tanks did not appear in 1994, but the investigation did intimidate many BBS sysops. The

BBS that suffered the most from the investigation was FidoNet, which stemmed from the one based in the U.S. of the same name. Until 1992, FidoNet included the Italian

Cyberpunk area of the bulletin board systems, but they separated for both technical, and political reasons. Under the name of CyberNet, a new platform became the host of those

BBS sharing an interest in political activism, and specifically in Hacktivism.65 On

AvANa’s website a statement about the hacking practice in relation to politics is still available today:

Hacktivism is direct action on the network. Hacktivism is how, by operating on a computer, activists build new worlds to inhabit. Free.66

The difference between FidoNet and CyberNet is probably similar to the difference between international BBS such as Nettime, Syndicate, and Rhizome. The first two are

42 considered to be more oriented towards theoretical aspects and to the politics of online communication while Rhizome is considered to be more interested in the formal aesthetics of the web.67

As argued by Bazzichelli, Deseriis, and Marano, in Italy, unlike other countries, networking activities were characterized by specific political connotations. These activities included art making, hackmeetings, social events, and other initiatives.68 The process of participating in the network—of making the network—along with the opportunity to represent an alternative, non-indexical form of political identity preoccupied Italian artists and activists. As pointed out by Bazzichelli, one of the most important characteristics of Italian Hacktivism was to be “social.” “Social hacking,” as it is often defined, can be understood as a practice aiming to experiment with technology and software programming while remaining tied to the idea of sharing resources and knowledge. Goals such as experimentation and sharing translated into concrete act both

“in person” and on the Internet.

For instance, in 1995 following the initiative of Italian artist and activist,

Tommaso Tozzi, a network of Italian BBS organized the first Netstrike to protest against nuclear tests led by the French Government in the Mururoa Atoll.69 The initiative was discussed at the Metaforum conference in Budapest, Hungary in October 1995, and then launched in December that same year. The action consisted of generating on overload of online traffic towards a series of websites managed by the French government. Proposed by Tozzi and Stefano Sansavino of StranoNetwork, one of the online platforms for activism in Italy, the Netstrike was a successful initiative probably because it was

43 presented and coordinated internationally. It remains one of the very few Italy-born hacking initiatives of this kind that reached an audience outside of the Italian borders.

Locally, collectives of artists and activists continued to join forces in building counterculture websites, as well as in promoting the making of independent magazines, and in organizing hacker laboratories (Hacklabs), and meetings where it was possible to exchange skills with other hackers or cyber entrepreneurs (Hackmeetings.)70 People interested in activities such as the ones described above have been gathering in

Hackmeetings since 1998. AvANa-net organized a Hackmeeting at Forte Prenestino in

2000. The statement for that year’s edition reads:

Hackmeeting is a self-managed and independently-organized community event… an occasion to receive updates about technology… an incentive to discuss about, among other things, possibilities to develop free software, net rights, and social cooperation… Three days to collectivize your own ideas on technology and its use in a practical, political, and social way, but also three days (and nights) of contamination and gaming.71

Hackmeetings can be defined as a series of multilayered social and political moments of aggregation where hackers and artists work together in creating collective cultural interferences through a network. However, network is not simply intended as “the specific potential of cybernetic and electronic systems to use feedback relations, systems of control, abstraction of information, and manipulation.”72 What is at stake in this context is a network of cultural, social and political relationships that occurs via electronic systems. The expression “the machine in the studio” used to describe the change that occurred in artistic practice with the appearance of the computer can be modified and applied to networking practices as the machine in social spaces.73

As Bazzichelli points out, Italian cyberpunk not only had specific characteristics due to its political connotations, but also “making the network” was a form of political art

44 in itself.74 By shifting the attention from making art as an object to making art as a network of relationships, “making the network” meant to personally and collectively intervene in the creation of an artistic product.75 In other words, the attitude of hacking moved to art. Tommaso Tozzi, promoter of this practice, emerged as a central figure in a cultural milieu where hacking practices permeated art making processes. Again, through issuing a manifesto, Tozzi himself defines “Hacker Art” as follows:

Hacker Art as a proposal and as a non-destructive form of information and communication democracy. Hacker Art as a threshold on which the virtual action and the real action interchange roles indistinctly, keeping stable the managing and the purpose of the transgressive act. Hacker Art as a form of struggle for social freedom. Hacker Art or Subliminal Art as a struggle against definitions, against the roles and labels of official culture, against advertising practices about appearances, against the manipulation of things and facts through language. Hacker Art or Subliminal Art as an anonymous practice, non-confinable within a label then exploited for the economic interests of multinational corporations; against the very definitions of Hacker Art and Subliminal Art exploited by official culture. What is interesting is just the clandestine “practice,” the rest will be just trading goods or noise in favor of everything that moves against the system of cultural power.76

“Hacker Art” was also the name of one of the Florence-based BBS that Tozzi managed.77

In 2002, Bazzichelli analyzed hacking, art, and activism in occasion of a project she curated at the Museo Laboratorio di Arte Contemporanea (MLAC) of the University of

Rome “La Sapienza” titled, Activism-Hacking-Artivism. In the exhibition statement, she writes:

[Activism-Hacking-Artivism] takes into consideration artistic experimentation that uses the digital technology in its more vital manifestations, by necessarily incarnating the attitude of [t]he critical and self-managed use of mass-media. No more art-works but processes, no more originality but reproducibility, no more representation of a unique genius but a collective action, example of a creative skill...78

45 In 1994, Tozzi created Virtual Town TV (1994), a sort of Second Life platform available on a BBS that offers the possibility to activate art users politically. Second Life is an online game that allows users to create an avatar and live a second, parallel life in a virtual world.79 In the virtual space created by Tozzi users could freely interact, hang out, use the library (which contained newspapers), watch TV (which offered videos uploaded by users themselves), and make art online in the Hacker Art building.80 As appearance becomes experience, the art-making process mediated by the network resembles the interrelation between virtual and real as elaborated by sociologist Manuel Castells in his seminal text, “Rise of the Network Society:”

Together, the space of flows and timeless time produce a culture of ‘real virtuality’… a system in which reality itself is entirely captured, fully immersed in a virtual image setting, in the world of make-believe, in which appearances are not just on the screen through which experience is communicated, but they become the experience.81

As pointed out by McLuhan in his well-known text, “Understanding Media: The

Extensions of Man,” and considered by several media theorists (Kittler, Manovich, Paul), the extension of our body, and our consciousness from the digital world into the analogue and vice-versa has caught us in a “feedback loop.”82 Furthermore, Virtual Town TV seems to reflect a metaphorical discourse, which sociology and media scholar, Marc Ries attributes to Net.Art:

The Net was destined to transcend the physical and social fabric of the old, increasingly devastated, and uncontrollable “city bodies” in the virtual body of a “Telepolis.”83

Net. Art is intended here as art made and experienced in relation to the computer or the

Internet, not merely tools through which art is made, but also as evidence of a cultural and social system of relationships and transformations.84 The significant transformation

46 between digital and analog media dwells both in the common computational language they share, and in the human-machine relationship made possible through interactivity. In other words, digital media are not simply old media in a digital sphere, and the network culture is not simply a system of existent relationships migrated online when new information technology became available. Rather, this transformation offered a new degree of dependency and interrelation with media that affected activism strategies and artistic practices.

In conclusion, Netstrikes, participatory artworks, community and collective initiatives stemming from Italian social centers appear to have moved along with an international scenario involving artists and activists globally (at least, in those countries where computational devices or information technology had entered the commercial sphere and were available to some.) In their text, “Net.Art: Arte della Connessione,”

Deseriis and Marano affirm that the Italian scenario was characterized by a “tecno- linguistic deficit” along with the inherent fault of being participatory and collective.85

While the collective process might have slowed down some projects and their outcome, the linguistic aspect seems to have been a determining factor in relegating initiatives ignited in Italy within its own borders. Technologically, Tozzi began to experiment with art using an Apple computer in 1985, not long after this device became available on the market.86 As mentioned, Agnese Trocchi co-founded AvANa-net in the early 1990s. In addition, initiatives looking at how art and technology could intertwine were explored in a series of events at the Festival of Electronic Art of Camerino from 1983 to 1990, which saw the participation of artists, businesses, and the local university, showing that there was an interest in Italy on the topic as well as in the tools.87 Therefore, artists and

47 activists in Italy were aware of and used new technology available on the market at the time.

The concept of hybridity in terms of political and cultural identity as developed within the social centers, and also in terms of the intertwining of human body and machine as emerging by the international cyberpunk scene, remains fundamental to the

Italian scenario as well. When asked if Haraway’s manifesto had an impact on the activities of artists orbiting around Forte Prenestino, Agnese Trocchi answered:

Yes, absolutely. The Cyborg Manifesto arrived as a confirmation of the path we have chosen. It was our manifesto. By working on the right to anonymity and privacy online we argued against rigid categories of any identity, including gender identity.88

As discussed, Italian network culture brought about collective political actions outside of institutionalized political, cultural, and social spheres of society. Artists and activists operating within or around the underground environment of squatted social centers refused to take in what was passed on to them in terms of political identity. The possibility offered by emerging network technology to imagine a political identity non- indexical to any particular party or ideology was embraced by individuals and collectives and translated into political artistic actions. The very characteristics offered by the network–ubiquity, anonymity, hybridity—helped these groups to operate outside of traditional circuits of political intervention. Again, in Trocchi’s words:

By allowing access to the net, and by teaching others to go online, we saw the opportunity to create a new world through anonymity, privacy and non- hierarchical stances.89

Due to the way these collectives of individuals acted, their behavior seems to represent that mutation of the mass as conceptualized by Tiziana Terranova and previously cited.

Therefore, in responding to the original questions as initially posed, I argue that the

48 reaction of artists and activists to the political, social, and cultural scenario that developed in Italy between the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s brought about a specific situation that favored the making of a network culture outside of the traditional spaces of political parties, academia, internationally recognized exhibition venues, and public institutions. It seems evident that technology was available in Italy as well as in other western countries in the same capacity although the language and the peculiarities of the Italian scenario represented an obstacle to the spread of Italy-based initiatives outside of national borders. In addition, as I will show in Chapter Four, an apparent indifference, or maybe inability, of cultural institutions to support information art was one of the main causes that made this type of experiment difficult to present to the public.90 When computer-based art was finally brought to the attention of a larger audience results were unfortunately meager. As Sarah Cook has pointed out, although

The first-computer driven arts emerged in the 1960s… Internet-based art was not considered by the international mainstream art world until its inclusion in Documenta X in 1997, and even then, the new media art community considered the static, offline, and office-based presentation a failure.91

The space made by network artists and activists for themselves was somehow revolutionary, and yet that revolution as imagined and brought about in an immaterial world remained an experience at the margins of Italian contemporary art and political realm. In the next chapter, I discuss how the collective that runs Forte Prenestino made that revolutionary space a reality.

49 NOTES

1 Marincola, Elisa, La Galassia dei Centri Sociali, in Limes 3/2001, p 61

2 See, Negri, Antonio, “Domination and Sabotage” (1977) in Autonomia, MIT Press 2007, in particular, 62- 71; Holmes, Brian, “Crisis Theory for Complex Society” in Disrupting Business, 2013, 200; Negri, Antonio, Insurgencies, Constituent Power and the Modern State, University of Minnesota Press, 1999; Senta, Antonio, Utopia e Azione. Per una storia dell’anarchismo in Italia (1848-1984), Elèuthera, 2015

3 In a survey published in the volume Centri Sociali: Geografie del Desiderio, it is reported that the majority of participants viewed the social centers as a place to gather and socialize. 20% of the responders to the survey considered the social centers as a place for the organization of political actions. Source: Centri Sociali: Geografie del Desiderio, xEdited by Consorzio Aaster, Centro sociale Cox 18, Centro sociale Leoncavallo, Primo Moroni. Shake Edizioni, Milan 1996, p 42

4 Vendola, Nichi, Centri Sociali, Graffi sulla Città. Viaggio dentro Forte Prenestino di Roma, in “Liberazione,” December 21, 1991

5 Marincola, E., La Galassia dei Centri Sociali, p 61

6 Gramsci, Antonio, Hegemony, Relations of Force, Historical Bloc, in Forgacs, David, A Gramsci Reader, New York University Press, 190-225, p 189

7 For a more comprehensive analysis of the conflict on cultural hegemony in post-WWII Italy, Cfr Forgacs, D., and Gundle, S., Mass Culture and Italian Society, Indiana University Press, 2007; Crainz, G., Storia del miracolo italiano, Donzelli, 1996; and Casalini, M., Famiglie comuniste: ideologie e vita quotidiana nell’Italia degli anni ’50, Il Mulino, 2010

8 For an analysis of how the concept of cultural hegemony as theorized by Gramsci was employed by the Communist party in post WWII Italy, Cfr Caniglia, E., Identità Partecipazione e Antagonismo nella Politica Giovanile, Sovenia Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2002

9 The issue of drug abuse and addiction was raised in a series of interviews conducted by me with members of social centers based in Milan, Florence, and Rome, respectively Cox18, Ex-Emerson, and Forte Prenestino. The literature on this issue is vast. Some preliminary sources are: Tosoni, Simone, and Zuccalà Emanuela, Creature simili. Il dark a Milano negli anni ottanta, Agenzia X, 2013; http://www.raistoria.rai.it/articoli/la-droga-dietro-langolo/25992/default.aspx, Accessed April 2018; https://web.archive.org/web/20180110162225/http://www.radioradicale.it/exagora/cronache-di-droghe-e- repressioni, Accessed January 2018; https://web.archive.org/web/20180110162552/http://genova.erasuperba.it/rubriche/fine-anni-70-giovani- rivoluzione-eroina, Accessed January 2018

10 Il Piombo e le Rose. Utopia e Creatività nel Movimento, 1977, Ed. by Tano D’Amico and Pablo Echaurren, Postcart, Rome 2017, p 9

11 “La rivoluzione doveva essere una festa.” Quote by Sanguinetti, Gianfranco, “Un orgasmo della Storia: il 1977 in Italia. Disgressioni sul filo della memoria di un ex-situazionista,” in Il Piombo e le Rose. Utopia e Creatività nel Movimento, 1977, Ed. by Tano D’Amico and Pablo Echaurren, Postcart, Rome 2017, p 32 (Translations my own)

12 See for instance comics and drawings by Pablo Echaurren produced for the news outlet Lotta Continua or the magazine A/traverso.

50

13 Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. By Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, New York: International Publishers, 1971, pp 189-209, 245-246

14 Williams, Raymond, Keywords: A vocabulary of Culture and Society, 1976, p 117

15 A first reader of Donna Haraway’s essays appeared in Italy in 1995 translated by Liana Borghi and included in Braidotti, Rosi, La molteplicità: un'etica per la nostra epoca, oppure meglio cyborg che dea. Introduzione a Manifesto cyborg. Donne, tecnologie e biopolitiche del corpo, di Donna J. Haraway. Milano, 1995. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20180110161719/http://xoomer.virgilio.it/raccontarsi/presentazioni2006/borgh i1.pdf, Accessed January 2018

16 Haraway, Donna, A Cyborg Manifesto Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, in The New Media Reader, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 2003, p 295 (Emphasis added)

17 Bhabha K., Homi, The Location of Culture, Routledge, 1994, pp 85-86

18 Quote from my notes (Translations my own.) Agnese Trocchi participated in a debate about punk culture in Italy in occasion of the launching of the book “Lo stivale è marcio” by Claudio Pescetelli. The book launching was part of broader initiative called “Il Futuro era marcio. Storie di punk e sovversioni varie” that took place at the social center, Forte Prenestino in Rome on June 8, 2017. See, https://web.archive.org/web/20180110131411/https://www.dinamopress.it/news/al-forte-prenestino-la- storia-del-punk-romano/, Accessed January 2018

19 Terranova, Tiziana, Network Culture, London and New York, 2004, pp 150-1

20 Terranova, T., p 135

21 Ib.

22 Williams, Raymond, “The technology and the society,” in The New Media Reader, Edited by Wardrip- Fruin, Noah, and Nick Montfort, MIT Press, (2003) 293, originally printed in Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Hanover, N.H., Wesleyan University Press, (1972) 1992, pp 3–25

23 Terranova, T., p 135

24 Ib.

25 Caniglia, Enrico, Identità, Partecipazione e Antagonismo nella politica giovanile, Soveria Mannelli, Rubbettino 2002, p 111

26 Caniglia, p 112

27 Caniglia, pp 19, 115

28 Trocchi, Agnese, “Shivers of Sharing,” in A Handbook for Coding Cultures, Sydney, 2007, p 67

29 See, Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, University of Minnesota Press, (1980) 1987

30 Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20180110162752/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychical_nomadism, Accessed January 2018

51

31 From an interview with members of the Cox18 emerged that in 1994 in Milan, Shake Edizioni organizes a meeting with Hackim Bay. The collective that used to run Shake Edizioni at the time was in contact with an international milieu of activists.

32 Caronia, Antonio, Inchiesta sul Cyber. Milano. Digito Ergo Sum, in Virtual, 1:1993 - http://www.academia.edu/317000/Inchiesta_sul_cyberpunk_in_Italia_1_-_Digito_ergo_sum, Accessed January 2018

33 The story of Decoder considered here is the result of an interview with the co-founder of both Shake Edizioni and Decoder, Raffaele Valvola that took place on June 11, 2016 in Milan. (Translations my own)

34 “La ‘bibbia’ dei cyberpunk italiani,” quote in, La Repubblica, March 10, 1994, “Rave On. Cyberpunk contro Biscioni.”

35 The interview was held in Milan on June 11, 2016 (Translations my own)

36 “Il proletariato giovanile era ingovernabile… I gruppi giovanili emergenti non volevano partecipare al meccanismo sociale e non volevano partecipare in modo organizzato. Non volevano darsi regole.” Quotes from interview with Raffaele Valvola, June, 11, 2016 (Translations my own)

37 “La cultura tradizionale Gramsciana era avvertita come vecchia… Il lavoro come perno sociale in declino.” Quotes from interview with Raffaele Valvola, June 11, 2016 (Translations my own)

38 La Repubblica, March 10, 1994, “Rave On. Cyberpunk contro Biscioni.”

39 At times, activists do not give their last names or use pseudonyms or nicknames. I maintain here the names I was given during my interviews.

40 “Shake era anche parte del collettivo Conchetta [Cox 18], ma il collettivo non partecipava alle scelte di Shake che aveva contatti con l’estero e con ospiti che sembravano irraggiungibili.” Quote from an interview with Stefano and Paolo, Cox 18, Milan, June 6, 2016 (Translations my own)

41 “Il centro sociale era uno strumento non un’identità, quindi la piazza virtuale si fa a Broni (Pavia) ma senza la partecipazione dei centri sociali (i rapporti rimangono conflittuali).” Quote from interview with Raffaele Valvola, June 11, 2016 (Translations my own)

42 From an interview with Stefano and Paolo, two activists of the social center, Cox18, in Milan, held on June 6, 2016.

43 Di Marco, Emiliano, Il Neu-Romance(R) di William Gibson, https://web.archive.org/web/20180110162837/https://emilianodimarco.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/il-neu- romancer-di-william-gibson/, Accessed January 2018

44 Gibson, William, Neuromancer, (1984), p 58

45 For a full story of the name and the symbol of “La Pantera,” See Simeone, Nando, Gli Studenti della Pantera. Storia di un movimento rimosso, Alegre, 2010, pp 75-79

46 Haraway, Donna, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York, Routledge, 1991

47 See, Simeone, Nando, Gli Studenti della Pantera. Storia di un movimento rimosso, Alegre, 2010

52

48 Deseriis, Marco, “Italienischer Cyberpunk: Die Entstehung einer Radikalen Subkultur,” in Vergessene Zukunft: Radikale Netzkulturen in Europa, Edited by Clemens Apprich and Felix Stalder, Bielefeld, 2012, 137-144, p 141. [Emphasis added] (Translations sent to me by the author)

49 See, Socrate, Francesca, Sessantotto. Due generazioni, Editori Laterza, Bari, 2018

50 See, Socrate, Francesca, Sessantotto. Due generazioni, Editori Laterza, Bari, 2018

51 Simeone, N., Gli Studenti della Pantera. Storia di un movimento rimosso, p 41. [Emphasis original] (Translation are my own)

52 Simeone, p 45

53 In November 1989, the leader of the Italian Communist Party at the time, Achille Occhetto, proposed to change name, symbol, and form to the Party in what has become known as “La svolta della Bolognina” (The Bolognina turn) See, Simeone, pp 53-54 and notes.

54 Deseriis, Marco, Lots of Money Because I am Many: The Luther Blissett Project and the Multiple-Use Name Strategy, in Thamyris/Intersecting No. 21 (2010) 65–94, p 74

55 Cfr, Caniglia, Enrico, Identità, partecipazione e antagonismo nella politica giovanile, pp 27-28

56 For a brief history of the internet in Italy: “30 Anni di Internet in Italia: La timeline,” La Repubblica, April 29, 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20180110163628/http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2016/04/29/news/30_an ni_di_internet_la_timeline-138625953/, Accessed January 2018; https://web.archive.org/web/20180110163855/https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Rutigliano, Accessed January 2018; See also, Bazzichelli, Tatiana, Networking, the Net as Artwork, Genoa, Costa & Nolan 2006 (Eng. Trans. 2008)

57 Bazzichelli, T., Networking, the Net as Artwork, pp 118-9

58 Details about this meeting and its participants come from what it appears to be a 13-page transcript dated 12 November 1989. Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1989

59 “…era importante discutere del senso della rete.” Transcript of the meeting, 12 November 1989, 1. Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1989 (Translations my own)

60 Bazzichelli, T., 159: The word avvisi can also be translated as announcements. Although, I maintain here the translation as per Bazzichelli’s book, I would like to point out that the name of AvANa could also be translated as “announcements to web surfers.” See note 41 for details on possible translations of the Italian word avvisi.

61https://web.archive.org/web/20180110165232/http://www.forteprenestino.net/laboratori/avana, Accessed January 2018 (Translations my own): I am translating here the act of notifying as “to let know” or as “to warn” depending on the context. Considering the attitude of AvANa-net towards some of the aspects related to the use of information technology, I use “to let know” or “to warn” to imply different tones for different items listed.

62 Trocchi, A., p 68

63 Bazzichelli, T., pp 80-1; “30 Anni di Internet in Italia: La timeline,” La Repubblica, April 29, 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20180110163628/http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2016/04/29/news/30_an ni_di_internet_la_timeline-138625953/, Accessed January 2018;

53 https://web.archive.org/web/20180110165756/https://www.peacelink.it/diritto/a/5576.html, Accessed January 2018; https://web.archive.org/web/20180110165902/https://www.peacelink.it/diritto/a/3229.html, Accessed Janiuary 2018

64 Agamben, Giorgio, The Coming Community, University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p 87

65 Hacktivism is a neologism deriving from the blending of the words “Hacking” and “Activism:” https://web.archive.org/web/20180110165953/http://www.hackerart.org/storia/hacktivism.htm, Accessed January 2018

66 https://web.archive.org/web/20180110170034/https://avana.forteprenestino.net/hacktivism.htm, Accessed January 2018 (Translations my own)

67 Deseriis, Marco, and Marano, Giuseppe, Net.Art: the Art of Connection, Milan, Shake 2003, p 195

68 See, Deseriis, M., and Marano, G., Net.Art, the Art of Connection, and Bazzichelli, T., Networking, the Net as Artwork.

69 The first Netstrike stemmed from an idea of Tommaso Tozzi, full story here http://www.tommasotozzi.it/index.php?title=Netstrike_%281995%29, Accessed January 2018

70 Bazzichelli, T., pp 22-23; For a full account on the “Italian crackdown,” see, Gubitosa, Carlo, Italian crackdown: BBS amatoriali, volontari telematici, censure e sequestri nell’Italia degli anni ’90, Milan, Apogeo, 1999 71 https://web.archive.org/web/20180110170422/https://www.hackmeeting.org/hackit00/proclama.html, Accessed January 2018 (Emphasis added. Translations my own)

72 Drucker, Johanna, “Interactive, Algorithmic, Networked,” in At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet, MIT Press, Cambridge 2005, p 29

73 Jones, Caroline, Machine in the Studio. Constructing the Postwar American Artist, Chicago, 1996

74 Bazzichelli, T., p 25

75 Bazzichelli, T., p 20

76 Emphasis added. I am using here my own translations although the definition of “Hacker art” as described by Tommaso Tozzi is available in English in Bazzichelli, T., pp 125-6, and in Italian on https://web.archive.org/web/20180110170708/https://avana.forteprenestino.net/hackerart.htm, Accessed January 2018

77 Bazzichelli, T., p 80 (Emphasis added)

78 https://web.archive.org/web/20180110170835/http://www.strano.net/bazzichelli/engcom_stampa.htm, (February 2002), Accessed April 2017

79 https://web.archive.org/web/20180113181908/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life, Accessed January 2018

80 Images and video available on https://web.archive.org/web/20180110170925/http://www.tommasotozzi.it/index.php?title=Virtual_Town_ TV_(1994), Accessed January 2018

81 Castells, Manuel, The Rise of the Network Society, Cambridge, MA, 1996, p 373

54

82 McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York, 1964. See also, Kane, Carolyn, “Digital Art and Experimental Color Systems at Bell Laboratories, 1965-1984: Restoring Interdisciplinary Innovation to Media History,” in Leonardo, Volume 43, Number 1, February 2010, 53-58; Kane, Carolyn, “Programming the Beautiful: Informatic Color and Aesthetic Transformations in Early Computer Art,” in Theory Culture Society, 2010 (27), p 73; Kittler, Friedrich, “Literature Media: Information System,” in Critical Voices in Art Theory and Culture, Amsterdam, 1997; Kittler, Friedrich, “Thinking Color and/or Machine,” in Theory Culture Society, 2006 (23), p 39; Jones, Beverly, “Computer Imagery: Imitation and Representation of Realities,” in Leonardo, Supplemental Issue, Vol. 2, Computer Art in Context: SIGGRAPH '89 ArtShow Catalog (1989); Lehmann, Anne-Sophie, “Invisible Work: The Representation of Artistic Practice in Digital Visual Culture,” in Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice, Bristol, 2009; Manovich, Lev, Language of New Media, 2001; Paul, Christiane, Digital Art, London, 2003

83 Ries, Marc, “Rendezvous: The Discovery of pure Sociality in Early Net Art,” in Net Pioneers 1.0: Contextualizing Early Net-Based Art, Berlin, 2009, p 78

84 Several definitions of Net.Art has been given overtime. I use here a sort of combination of them all as I consider Net.Art not only art made with a computer or art to be browsed via the Internet, but also and similarly to Rhizome’s definition, a type of art that acts in response to computer networks as a cultural phenomenon rather than merely a technological one. See, https://web.archive.org/web/20180113183135/https://rhizome.org/editorial/2015/jul/17/notes-definition- net-art/, Accessed January 2018

85 Deseriis, M., and Marano, G., Net.Art: Arte della Connessione, pp 10-11 (Translations my own)

86 I refer here to the computer as we know it today, which includes a GUI (Graphic User Interface), a mouse, and the ability to connect to the net. A memorable commercial video to launch this product was directed by Ridley Scott for Apple in 1984. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNy-7jv0XSc, Accessed January 2018

87 This topic will be discussed further in Chapters Three and Four.

88 Extract of an email with the artist, May 2015 (Translations my own)

89 Extract of an email with the artist, May 2015 (Translations my own)

90 These aspects will be analyzed in Chapter Three.

91 Cook, Sarah, “Immateriality and its Discontents: An Overview of Main Models and Issues for Curating Media” in New Media in the White Cube and Beyond, Ed. by Christiane Paul, University of California Press, 2008, p 29

55 2.

How Forte Prenestina became the C. S. O. A. Forte Prenestino.

This chapter explores the process of transformation and re-adaptation of Forte

Prenestina, a former military fort in Rome turned into a site for art and activism between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s. Since 1986, Forte Prenestina has been C.S.O.A. Forte

Prenestino (Centro Sociale Occupato Autogestito, or self-managed occupied social center) also known as Il Forte. Il Forte has been both a counter-culture enclave and an art center where artists have explored and learned the practice of Graffiti, painting, printing, video-making, and new media art. Through an analysis of the artistic production at Il

Forte, I will unpack the story of how this social center came to be. In particular, attention is paid to how a network of artists and activists emerged from Il Forte through the making of fanzines and comics and through the realization of an international art festival.

And finally, I examine how Graffiti art speaks to the transformation and adaption of Il

Forte’s spaces.

Social centers (centri sociali) started to appear in Italy in the 1970s following the model of German youth communes or Gemeinschaften.1 They emerged as a result of the formation of the Autonomist concept of the refusal of labor, which marked a significant turn in the history of Marxist political thought.2 However, within the context of my analysis, it is important to note that some participants joined these spaces for their commitment to sociality more than to their politics.3 After the folding of the ’77

Movement, large Italian cities, such as Rome or Milan, were left with vacant political headquarters, fugitive activists, police repression, and a heroin epidemic. As explained in

56 Chapter One, social centers represented an alternative way for youth to congregate, disentangled from the control of political parties. According to an article from Il

Manifesto—a daily newspaper close to the stances of the Italian left— social centers are places that transitioned from refugium peccatorum of political outcasts and community organizers into aggregation places that anticipated the future. The article continues:

Social centers have represented the only example of social aggregation that included work and non-work, eradication and interaction, political passion and cultural experimentation.4

On the occasion of their thirtieth anniversary, Forte Prenestino, through their independent publishing services, published a book titled, Fortopìa, Storie di amore e autogestione, (Fortopìa: Accounts of love and self-governing), in which the collective that runs Il Forte compiled more than 400 pages of personal accounts and narratives about the social, political, and artistic experience of Il Forte’s participants. The book emphasizes that since it includes a large spectrum of political identities, Forte Prenestino has never been perceived exclusively as a space for politics. For some, Il Forte acquires the status of an historic monument, on the same level as others in the eternal city of

Rome. One of the participants signing as Silvia writes: “For years Il Forte was for me one of Rome’s monuments. I used to take people visiting the city to the Colosseum, the

Roman forum, then… Il Forte.” Silvia identifies an entire group of people as Il Forte itself. She continues: “Il Forte was both the building and the people, always traveling as a large colorful group: Il Forte has arrived… I am going to have a chat with Il Forte.”5

Another activist signing as Felipe writes that in spite of some disagreements, “Il Forte remains part of me, and me part of Il Forte.”6 From these accounts, it is possible to sense

57 how its participants respond to this place, its presence, and its significance within the cultural and urban context of Rome and its periphery.

Social centers often face evacuation or abrupt closing due to the precariousness of their legal status and the consequential, difficult relationship with state and municipal authorities, which is characterized by constant negotiation between concessions and deprivations. Still active today, the long-lived Forte Prenestino is one of the few enduring social centers in Italy. Its experience has evolved along three decades of Italian political history, from the dissipation of the years-of-lead to the rise of Berlusconi era, from the so-called First Republic into the Second and Third one.7

C.S.O.A. Forte Prenestino was once Forte Prenestina, named after Via Prenestina, the road on which it was erected. It is one of fifteen fortifications built between 1877-

1900 as part of a defense strategy after Rome was finally annexed to the newly formed

Kingdom of Italy and became its capital. On June 29, 1875, through the law n. 2577, the

State allocated thirteen million lire (approximately 44 million euros today) to build fortifications throughout Italy.8 A decree dated 1877 established that the Ministry of War could issue contracts for the construction of fortifications in Rome without seeking pre- approval from the State Treasurer, and it could then “…procedere senza pubblici incontri e altre formalità, alle spese ed ai lavori occorrenti per la difesa di Roma.”9

About 4.2 kilometers outside the ancient Porta Maggiore, along Via Prenestina, in a terrain “costituito da una serie di ondulazioni prive affatto di vegetazione,” the engineering army division built a fortress that could host 1,140 men, from which the military controlled and could attack access points to the city, respectively: on the north, the east bound Roma-Sulmona as well as the road to/from Lunghezza (near Tivoli); on

58 the east side—where the building presents a tooth-like shape called “a dente”—the hills of Tor Sapienza and Quarticciolo; on the south, the hills of Centocelle, all the way to the

Alessandrino Aqueduct and to Via Casilina.10

Like Forte Prenestina, any of the fifteen forts would control as much land as possible until crossing the nearby fort’s firing line. Altogether, the forts were positioned around the city as to form a “cintura” or belt (Fig. 11-12). In 1910, the military engineering offices attempted to implement radio communication between these constructions, soon to notice that the project was too expensive and counterproductive, for the implementation revealed the military strategy in peace time. In addition, if one of the forts fell under enemy’s control, the interruption of communication would have demoralized the troops “significantly.”11 No implementation of such communication projects seems to have taken place at this time, and overall, the forts never achieved strategic value. The development of new artillery weapons, along with the rapid expansion of Roman borgate—peripheral neighborhoods often established around an existent borgo, or borough—soon made the forts obsolete.12 The infrastructure thus created was open to reuse and it was eventually repurposed by a collective of community organizers, artists, and activists.

In a similar way to other areas outside of the perimeter of the ancient walls, the borgata of Centocelle, the neighborhood that over the years swallowed Forte Prenestina, started to form around 1928 following the “sventramenti:” city planning interventions carried out by the fascist regime that imposed the relocation of a portion of the urban population.13 A borghetto (little borough) was already present in the proximity of what later became the Stazione Prenestina, a local train station along the railway Roma-

59 Sulmona.14 In addition, following the urban plan of 1931, an industrial hub emerged in the area of Tor Sapienza, and workers began to reside in the vicinity of the fortress, alongside farmers, immigrants from other regions of Italy, and people relocated from the demolished central neighborhoods. Around the same area, more settlements soon formed, such as Villa Gordiani, Centocelle, and Quarticciolo. The new districts often took their name from existent estates called “tenute,” then sold to contractors, and broken up into lots to be turned into residential neighborhoods (Fig. 13).

Divested of its original function, Forte Prenestina was used as an armory during

World War II and then, for a brief amount of time, was probably a refugee camp, similar to Forte Aurelia and Forte Braschi.15 In April 1944, Forte Prenestina served as a detention center for people arrested during a Nazi sweep of the Centocelle and Quarticciolo neighborhoods.16 During the years 1944-45, following the liberation of Rome by the

Allied forces, the latter were granted permission to take over Forte Prenestina, along with eight other city forts and additional military buildings around Italy. These buildings were slowly returned to the Italian state in the following decades.17 The size of these forts made them good storage spaces or favorable locations to host some of the sixty thousand war refugees that, in an attempt to return to their homes, passed through Rome after

1945.18 Even though it is plausible to assume that Forte Prenestina hosted some refugees, it is relevant to notice that Cinecittà studios, only few kilometers south of Centocelle neighborhood, served as a refugee camp for thousands of people. It is somehow curious that throughout its history, Forte Prenestina seems to have always offered shelter to marginal figures rather than serving the military purpose it was originally made for.

60 When it reached capacity, refugees were then moved from Cinecittà to Forte

Aurelia rather than to Forte Prenestina.19 In addition, in September 1946, following a request for additional buildings to allocate refugees, the offices of the Ministry of Post- war Assistance (Ministero dell’Assistenza Post-bellica) proposed an empty barracks in the nearby neighborhood of Torre Maura that could accommodate up to 800 people.20

Hence, at that point, Forte Prenestina might have been at capacity or it might have already been entirely dismissed for some other reason. Finally, in 1948, the fort appears to have been removed from the list of “active” sites. Around that time, the Italian government started to plan the making of a public airport to serve the city of Rome. In a map illustrating the plan, Forte Prenestina is indicated as “Ex Forte Prenestina.”21 In other words, soon after the end of World War II, this fortress was no longer considered as a functioning military building. While the neighborhoods around it continued to grow erratically throughout the decades, this nineteenth-century construction that includes a moat, a drawbridge, numerous cells, and two parade grounds, had been lying idle at the periphery of the city, detached from its overflowing surroundings “like a stumbling rock in a river.”22

In the mid-1970s, covered in debris and vegetation, forgotten by military authorities, Forte Prenestina entered a list of sites claimed by the City of Rome for conversion into parks.23 The state obliged in exchange for a rent, which the City never paid. During the 1970s, local activists attempted to occupy Il Forte, which was evacuated by the police, while the City project for a park in that area never became effective.24 The

Roman suburbs surrounding the fortress formed in a non-homogenous way vis-à-vis a consistent lack of infrastructure to offer a better connection with the city center, and the

61 absence of services for the public (including schools, hospitals, theatres, and cultural centers.)25 However, it is relevant to consider that the striking difference and perceived distance from cultural offerings located in the city center also contributed to the appearance of local initiatives that led to the reclamation of abandoned spaces and their transformation into places by and for the community.26

In December 1985, a community association called “Associazione Culturale

Adesso Basta,” (‘Stop Now’ Cultural Association) occupied Forte Prenestina for a week during which it offered free concerts, exhibitions, and social gatherings.27 The occupation was a symbolic one that aimed to persuade the municipality that “Adesso Basta” was a valid candidate to be granted access to and control over the abandoned site. On January

1986, in a letter published by the Rome-based daily newspaper La Repubblica, the president of “Adesso Basta,” Leonardo Rinaldi wrote,

I am writing from Centocelle, one of the neighborhoods of the Roman periphery that dramatically experiences problems such as unemployment, heroin, cultural and social marginalization…28

Rinaldi opens his letter with the sentence “I am writing from Centocelle,” as if located in a far away, self-contained outpost. He, then continued:

In our neighborhood there is only one movie theatre and it is adult-only. In regards to anything else, such as theatres, community centers, places for aggregation, there is nothing here.29

In addition, Rinaldi explained how local associations, which carried out cultural and social activities in Centocelle for years, concluded that the abandoned fort was the perfect place to host their initiatives. In his letter, he also informed readers that in order to fulfill these expectations, they had launched a petition called “Forte Prenestino open to the neighborhood.”30

62 On March 17, 1986, he wrote directly to the 7th municipal district (circoscrizione) asking for the use of the fort and demanding a renovation of the building as well as the provision of electric power.31 These requests could be funded via cultural funds that were allocated by the City to each municipal district on a yearly basis, but were rarely spent.32

Rinaldi added that more than 1000 people in the community had signed the petition that was launched earlier that winter. In exchange for using the space, the association promised to be involved in the making of numerous free events, open to all, thanks to the participation of local artists and activists.33 In particular, Rinaldi laid out a calendar of events that included concerts with local bands; seminars and workshops on the use of mass media, the making of fanzines, the production of video and audio; performances; debates on macro-economy, ecology, nuclear energy, and sexuality.

On May 1, 1986, riding the momentum that stemmed from the recent community engagement with the issue surrounding Forte Prenestina, and in opposition to the verdict of the municipality that, in the meantime, had declared the fort not habitable, Rinaldi and other activists decided to occupy the space, this time permanently. The activists wanted to re-purpose the fort’s multiple spaces, to revitalize the park surrounding it, and to claim

33 acres of abandoned land through artistic, cultural, and political initiatives for the local community. Activists participating in the occupation of Forte Prenestina were originally grouped in numerous community associations that were promptly organizing cultural events in Centocelle and its surroundings. In addition to “Adesso Basta,” there were

“Vuoto a perdere;” “Comitato di Lotta Pigneto;” “Gruppo Giovani Pigneto;” and “I

Compagni di San Giovanni.”34 In order to manage the occupation of Il Forte, a collective was formed by members of the above associations. However, being a member of a

63 community group did not mean automatic participation in Il Forte’s collective or vice- versa. Further, as some of these associations had an anti-government political agenda, within the dynamics related to Il Forte, it remains difficult to trace exactly which associations lasted and for how long.

It seems that about forty individuals were engaged in the original occupation of

Forte Prenestina in 1986. They were soon joined by “Il collettivo fuori sede di Roma,” a collective of out of town university students mainly from the southern regions of Italy.35

Lastly, a group of anarchic punx started to ask permission to use some of the spaces inside the fort and later joined the occupation.36 Due to their political actions, individuals associated with these groups maintained a low public profile, often using nicknames or pseudonyms, and did not appear in newspapers or official communications with public institutions. In addition, some operated in more than one organization, and were also active in official party political groups, such as F.G.C.I., the Italian Youth Communist

Federation (Federazione Giovanile Comunista Italiana), among others.37 As analyzed in

Chapter One, no monolithic and simplistic definition of political identities, or any other form of identity within the context of social centers, can characterize the experience of these sites and the activists involved.38 That being said, one of the leading associations and main interlocutor with the public administration seems to have been the association

“Adesso Basta,” whose president, Leonardo Rinaldi, exchanged several letters with municipal authorities before and during the early years of the occupation, in order to legitimize their cultural initiatives and, most important, their presence at the fort.

A few days after the 1986 occupation, the city sent the police with an order to vacate the building. The activists replied with a letter to the community seeking

64 additional support.39 On May 5, 1986, Sergio Scalia, president of the 7th municipal district, wrote a letter to the mayor of Rome, Nicola Signorello, as well as to the

Counselor of Art and Antiquities, and to the Counselor of the building registry, co- responsible for the management and maintenance of Forte Prenestina, urging a meeting and expressing concern over the lack of social spaces in the district under his jurisdiction, therefore partially backing the activists’ stand.40

In the following months, the Council of the 7th municipal district discussed and approved some interventions in order to revitalize the park surrounding the fort. In July, the Council sent a letter to the Cabinet of the Mayor of Rome informing the City’s highest authority that the municipal district was going to 1) provide the park with lights;

2) repair its public water fountain; 3) add the area to the district park maintenance services in order to allow for proper and periodic cleaning; and 4) repair and re-activate the storage space of the park maintenance services.41 Scalia’s favorable position towards the activists’ struggle was crucial for the revitalization to take place. Finally, the intentions of the activists and those of the municipal district coincided. In particular, the local Council affirmed that:

The park surrounding “Forte Prenestino” represents the only ideal space for cultural events and gatherings for locals in Centocelle.42

Two important aspects emerged from this early negotiation between the activists and the municipality, which speaks to the long and complex process of mediation implied in the making of a social center. First, politicians were aware of, and were sensitive to, the issues pointed out by the activists as they recognized the lack of cultural and social spaces in Centocelle. Second, even though these measures were about the park only, by revamping the park, the municipality made the entire area usable, giving activists inside

65 the fort direct access to water, and perhaps feeding their hopes for permanent use of the building. They could continue to build the social fabric that helped them to establish a social network that would later expand online.

For Scalia, this was a good compromise and a good political move as on the one hand, he accommodated some of the requests of the activists while on the other, he did not officially give a green light to the occupation. While negotiations with local institutions continued, the collective of Forte Prenestino began its cultural and artistic programming using logistic skills and expertise acquired during years of community activism. Before the occupation, the association “Adesso Basta” and others used the park surrounding the fort for concerts and protests. For instance, on May 1, 1983, “Vuoto a perdere” had launched an event called “No Labor Day” (Festa del non-lavoro). The event acquired popularity over the years and it was at the end of its 1986 edition that a group of activists had entered the fort. The name of the collective “Vuoto a perdere” (wasting an empty container) plays on “Vuoto a rendere,” (returning an empty container for reuse).

They both indicate the practice of returning, or not, a glass container for a refill or a reimbursement, widely in use throughout the 1980s in Italy. Along with the “Festa del non-lavoro,” the pun “Vuoto a perdere” showed the intention of these activists to interrogate social structures as reflected by language, ordinary daily gestures, or participation in societal economic milestones such as work. “Vuoto a perdere” can be also intended as “A wasted vacuum.” By re-appropriating the language, these activists pointed out the sense of abandonment and social vacuity they felt around them in a neighborhood considered to be at the margin of the urban environment and of the cultural production.

66 Energized by the opportunity of having a dedicated space, members of “Vuoto a perdere,” “Adesso Basta,” and other activists, squandered no time in turning the fort into the communal place they had desired. A series of concerts, debates, and screenings were organized already in the first weeks of the occupation.43 In September 1986, they issued a programmatic document emphasizing two main strategies: one regarding the relationship with institutions, people, and audience; the other, regarding the logistics of the social center and the role of its members. The collective recognized the importance of “uscire il più possibile all’esterno” (visibility outside of the fort for their cultural work) and making the neighborhood aware of their initiatives by using banners, posters, and pamphlets to publicize their events (in particular music and theatre events). At this stage, the collective also started to conceptualize a network that could link Forte Prenestino to other social centers in order to “create coordinated actions that could potentially gain political consensus.”44 Such political consensus was an element to stir up in case of evictions, evacuation orders, or other political struggles. In other words, when necessary, the collective was able to rally for different causes by not only counting on the support of locals, who were the main beneficiaries of the fort’s cultural and social activities, but also on the support of other similar centers in Rome, and throughout Italy.

There were eight main strategic points at the core of Forte Prenestino’s internal organization:

- A kitchen for social and financial purposes - Organize classes of music, theatre, and visual art - Create a studio for music band to practice - Organize film screenings - Organize weekly concerts featuring local and non-local bands - Create a music library - Create a library of books, journals, and zines - Hold regular weekly meetings for discussion

67

Of course, these points have been modified and adjusted over time, but they do remain, for the most part, the core of the activities of Forte Prenestino to this day.45

After a year and a half of occupation, Il Forte issued a typed document summarizing its overall experience, the relationship with the surrounding neighborhood, and the aftermath of the new life given to the building and its park. The document stated that Il Forte had proposed countless initiatives and in so doing it had demonstrated that

“it is possible to build cultural networks without large amount of money, sponsors, or professional organizations.”46 At the same time, the document reported that “Il Forte has a difficult relationship with the neighborhood within which the weight of the occupation is minimal.”47 Il Forte’s collective had expressed concern for the

…inability to interact or to communicate with those who have our same emancipation needs and problems but uses different language and behavior. Therefore, there is the risk to build our own ghetto.48

Reasons for this isolation lie partially in the growing ostracism coming from the district representatives who seemed to respond more promptly to other revitalization activities connected to the merchant community. An article appearing in Il Manifesto noted that

While spending millions to back merchant initiatives, the 7th municipal district had managed to block city funding for 70 million lire granted to cultural production.49

Even though the municipal district had decided to fix up the park surrounding the fort, in a letter dated December 9, 1987, “Adesso Basta” along with “Senz’orbita” (“Without an orbit,” a new organization that had recently joined the occupation, and organized film screenings and related talks) lamented the lack of proper lighting in the park along with poor cleaning services and insufficient water .50 In addition, Il Forte itself remained without water or electricity. On behalf of Il Forte’s collective, “Adesso Basta” and

68 “Senz’orbita” informed the municipal authorities that, despite all difficulties, over the course of 17 months of occupation, the center run only by volunteers had organized many concerts, exhibits, and debates. In addition, the collective had established a film club; a document center for the auto-production of magazines, music, books and t-shirts; a theater lab; a photo lab; a silk-screen printing lab; and a pub. As a result, while Il Forte’s popularity continued to grow and attract many from outside of Centocelle, the interest of the neighborhood population seemed to lie elsewhere. But the collective was not discouraged and continued to work on building a community center open to all.

During the last stretch of the 1980s, Il Forte had revised its programmatic document and had joined efforts with other social centers in Italy. Eventually, the collective was able to bring to Rome internationally known artists. The “Henry Rollins” band performed at Forte Prenestino following their concert at the Helter Skelter, a nomadic music venue originally hosted in the Leoncavallo, a social center based in

Milan.51 The band Scream, from Washington, D.C., had performed at Il Forte in

November 1988, and many more.52 The relationship between alternative venues in Rome,

Milan, and other major cities helped Forte Prenestino to partially overcome the sense of separation from its own neighborhood. Their international music concerts were punctually reviewed in the press, and little by little the popularity of the fort started to grow nationally and internationally. During the years, and in particular, throughout the

1990s, Il Forte was able to feature local and national bands that would soon enter the

Italian music mainstream such as Assalti Frontali, Mano Negra, 99 Posse, and Torretta

Style.

69 At an international level, November 9, 1989 marked the Fall of the Berlin wall.

Along with the barrier that was the symbol of the scars inflicted by the Second World

War, an entire world order seemed to have vanished. At a local level, coincidentally, only a few days later, on November 12, 1989, representatives of Il Forte had met with

Raffaele Valvola, Ermanno Guarnieri, and Primo Moroni, among others, to discuss matters related to the use of information technology within the context of the counter- culture, marking the beginning of social centers’ extra-local dimension. Further, that same year, the Italian weekly news magazine L’Espresso had dedicated a long article to social centers and to new trends that interested the up and coming 1990s youth.53 The previously estranged social centers started to be referred to as influential, hyperactive, and friendly. Gleaming into the new decade, social centers had finally penetrated the cultural fabric of Italian cities. The nation counted about 55 sites in 1989, one-hundred in

1994, and two-hundred in 2001.54 The attractiveness of Forte Prenestino’s cultural production was officially recognized in the movie “Sud” (1993) by Award-winning film director and screenwriter Gabriele Salvatores. The music of a Forte-brewed band, Assalti

Frontali, was featured in the movie, consolidating their success as well as confirming the official debut of social centers’ culture into the Italian cultural mainstream of the time.55

But the precariousness of Il Forte’s legal status posed a constant threat to its permanence at Forte Prenestina. In November 1990, under the slogan “yes to private property only if self-governed,” Il Forte had joined forces with other organizations in

Rome and had started mediation with the Assessor of Cultural Heritage, Gerardo

Labellarte in order to explore the possibility for squatted social centers to receive an amnesty.56 That particular attempt led nowhere, but in January 1994, Il Forte had joined

70 another campaign and had submitted a petition with 10,000 signature to the City in order to request to be officially assigned the occupied spaces in return for a nominal rent.57

Even the mayor of Rome at the time, Francesco Rutelli, had signed the petition, which was successful in opening a negotiation with the City Council that eventually led to many squatted places beginning an official relationship with municipal authorities. However,

Forte Prenestino faced an impasse due to the contested ownership of the building.

In 1995, the Minister of the Interior issued a list of buildings to be auctioned in what many considered as a speculative real estate operation aiming at selling out national properties.58 Forte Prenestina appeared among the building to be sold. The news shocked

Il Forte’s collective, which since the very beginning of its occupation had openly negotiated its operations and permanence with the City. Even though the City managed the property, the procedure to pass this fortress from state to city ownership that was started in 1977 never became finalized. The city was defaulting and could not afford to buy the fortress from the state. The situation reached a deadlock that has never been solved.59 Even though the state has never recuperated its property, Forte Prenestino or better, Forte Prenestina still belonged to it.60 The City never completed the procedure of property dispossession. To this day, the situation remains unsolved. Meanwhile, C.S.O.A.

Forte Prenestino continues to make the site available to the public and to organize countless festivals and events; to maintain laboratories of music, serigraphy, and theatre, among others; and to maintain a politically active presence.61

An important aspect of the cultural production of Il Forte has been the making of fanzines, magazines, publicity material, and comics whose graphic inventiveness brings innovative visual results. The collective of “Vuoto a perdere” issued a magazine of the

71 same name that took the form of a fanzine: an independently produced publication made mostly of photocopied material assembled without following a specific layout.

Graphically, the fanzine “Vuoto a perdere” appeared ingenious as, up to the end of 1985, it was made of a single piece of paper, similar to a folded poster whose content could be read in any order without the imposition of a reading sequence implicit in bound pages.62

Around this time, two more fanzines were produced: “Tutta Salute” (Fully Healthy) and

“L’Urlo” (The Scream), (Fig. 14).

Fanzines were usually produced by chaotically assembling low quality reproductions of texts and images and printed with a cyclostyle (Fig. 15).63 The raucous effect of black and white photocopied material, stitched together in a disorderly fashion on the page, was progressively replaced with color silk-screen reproductions, and later by digitally elaborated layouts (Fig. 16). Throughout the 1980s, illustrators and artists orbiting around the urban counter-culture sphere started to make flyers inspired by the graphic input of Stefano Tamburini (1955-1986). Originally from Rome, in the late

1970s, Tamburini had created a widely known comic character called, Ranxerox, and later, he had co-founded two influential magazines titled, Cannibale and Frigidaire.64

Both magazines hosted the work of numerous Italian illustrators and artists, who were also part of their editorial team, among whom was the renowned comic artist and painter,

Andrea Pazienza (1956-1988).

These magazines had a larger circulation compared to the fanzines, whose distribution occurred independently and without the help of a publisher. Valerio Bindi, curator of Crak! Fumetti Dirompenti, a comics festival that takes place at Forte

Prenestino, affirms that Tamburini created his popular character Ranxerox following the

72 heated encounter between students and the general secretary of the CGIL Union, Luciano

Lama on February 17, 1977 at the University of Rome, La Sapienza. In that occasion, students forced Lama to leave the campus, and Tamburini had seen a destroyed photocopy machine lying in the university courtyard after the skirmish.65 Bindi affirms that Tamburini “wanted to do comics that smelled like tear gas.”66 Even though the ’77

Movement had been defeated politically, Bindi recalls that the creative drive of that experience still lingered throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and found a home in those forms of artistic expressions emerging from social centers. However, it has been noted that Tamburini’s highly citational graphic style explicitly referred to the historic avant- garde as well as to the California underground comics and the work of Robert Crumb,

Gilbert Shelton, and Greg Irons.67 Tamburini did not oppose political references in his work. At the same time, he welcomed and openly borrowed visual references from his surroundings. For instance, he highly regarded the work of Italian artist, Mario Schifano, often cited in his own graphic work.68

One of the illustrators active at Il Forte who looked up to Stefano Tamburini is

Cristano Rea (b. 1962). At the time he approached Forte Prenestino, Rea was a former punk living in the northern part of Rome. Recently, he explained how isolated he felt as a teenage punk in his neighborhood at the end of the 1970s as he was often bullied by neo- fascists. Rea’s encounter with punk culture had occurred via TV, in particular through a local channel called SPQR TV that aired a program featuring international music. In

1979, he founded a rock band named “L’Apologia di Reato” (“Crime defense.” To defend a crime is illegal according to the Italian law) and in the mid-1980s began to attend concerts and events at Forte Prenestino.69 There, he found the opportunity to

73 expand his creative endeavors, and in 1987, he realized the poster for the celebratory event of May 1st.70 The main character in the poster is a figure wearing a gas mask, and sitting on a metal barrel from which something seems to be spilling out. The person appears as if resting in a war zone. Behind the figure a broken wall is topped with barbed wire. The picture resembles the atmosphere of a street fight and tear gas evoked by

Tamburini, as well as an overall scene of urban chaos and filthiness (Fig. 17). In previous years, Rea had designed posters for the UONNA CLUB, a Rome music venue that presented punk, ska, and new wave music. In summer 2017, his work was exhibited at

Forte Prenestino (Fig. 18-23) in conjunction with a panel discussion about the Italian punk movement.

Visual and performing arts have always been prominent cultural activities at Il

Forte. One of the first recorded exhibitions was held in November 1986, on the occasion of the six-month anniversary of the occupation and it featured historic photographs of military topographical maps showing Forte Prenestina at the time of its construction.71 A month later, a solo exhibition was dedicated to Rome-based painter Vito Lella.72 In addition, Graffiti art became a prominent feature of Il Forte’s appearance. In a 2017 interview, Valerio Bindi defined “Il Forte as an artistic expression more than a political one.”73 He explains that Il Forte has always been a terrain for cultural and political possibilities and that, in the early 1990s, many students like him felt confined within the university and found a creative home at Forte Prenestino. According to Bindi, even though the university had tools and technology with which to experiment, their use appeared to be impeded by incompetence and the unwillingness of faculty and staff.74 In

74 1990, Bindi had participated in La Pantera, the strong student movement that arose nationwide to protest the privatization of public education.75 Bindi affirms:

[La Pantera] had a big impact on national media. In 1991, there had been the First Gulf War, which was a media event. We knew it wasn’t enough to say the right thing, we had to have a way to broadcast it.76

During the student protest, Bindi met with video-makers and artists, and after the capitulation of La Pantera, lacking the opportunity to continue any creative work within the university, they all decided to join a social center where they could continue to explore the potential of media. The decision was seminal to the making of the first

European art festival at Il Forte in 1991.

From June 1-9, 1991, Il Forte hosted numerous artists and featured paintings, sculptures, performances, video and sound installations. The festival included work by

Rome-based artists Marcello Blasi, Gerarda Lo Russo, Stefano Maksan, Leonetta

Marcotulli, Luciano Perrotta; the photographer Tano D’Amico; the collective Machina

Nefastis from Salerno; performers and artists from France, Germany, Sweden, the

Netherlands, and the United States.77 Characterized by an intense calendar of events, the festival turned out to be a watershed moment between the artistic and collective practices that had defined the cultural production of Il Forte since 1986 and what came next (Fig.

24). The theatrical component of the 1991 festival as well as the theatre laboratory at Il

Forte in its entirety—whose experience perhaps reached its highest point with the attendance of renowned German choreographer Pina Bausch (1940-2009) in 1998 on the occasion of her appointment for a three-year project for the Teatro di Roma—deserves its own investigation, which is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this chapter.78

75 Admission to Il Forte’s art festival occurred through a subscription, and information flyers were issued in English and German. After months of preparation, a press release announced that,

Under the banner of diversity, artists from ten countries coming from various experiences, will be featured with work from painting to fractal art, from sculpture to installation, from music concert to performance, from theatre piece to graffiti. By juxtaposing the countercultural self-production with situations more familiar with the art market, the festival aims to reveal the contradictions of contemporary artistic operations.79

In other words, through the festival, the organizers wanted to re-affirm the legitimacy of artistic production occurring outside of institutional and recognized channels. During the art festival the fort was used in its entirety, including the underground corridors that still today hosts artists and illustrators during Crack! Fumetti dirompenti (Fig. 25 and 26).

Il Forte’s long-standing video production had a prominent role throughout the festival, as well. The practice of making videos was always a feature of Il Forte—it had dedicated space and equipment since the beginning—although it had been mostly geared towards documenting happenings, events, and protests.80 In the 1990s, along with documentaries, video-making was extended to the “rave” culture in order to create a sensorial landscape in which to dance, often under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs.81 According to artist and activist Agnese Trocchi, “rave parties” were places in which it was possible to experiment with video and sound technology while recuperating the waste of industrial society—literally materials and chemicals—with which to create new imaginary landscapes.82 In the following decade, video production at Il Forte would be employed as part of Telestreet projects: the practice of hacking television frequencies and to air self-produced content, then adopted and further developed by the collective of

Candida TV. In Agnese Trocchi’s words:

76 [Candida TV] was a pop trash TV that spoke the most popular language possible, in order to unveil the mechanism of fictional TV... Candida TV was a mycosis infection of the mind, just like all television. However, we made the mechanisms of its manipulation explicit to everyone.83

This awareness about the uses of media, as mentioned previously by Bindi, is something with which artists and activists at Il Forte have always carefully corresponded. For instance, on the cover on the number zero of the fanzine “Tutta Salute” there are two people seated at a table, facing each other, their heads replaced by a television set (Fig.

27). Television was heavily criticized by the fort’s collective in the early years. Much of the rhetoric emerging from pamphlets, fanzines, posters, and other announcements produced at Il Forte bemoaned the negative effects of television compared to social interactions and lamented a lack of public understanding of political issues due to their televised “representations made of artificial and false creations that led to the annihilation of the ability to communicate.”84 This description is given in a flyer produced during the early stages of the occupation, but it is similar to skepticism over the use of television as spread by the Italian Communist party in previous decades.85 The Italian Communist

Party had suffered a delay in dealing with mass media. In general, left wing parties seemed to have ignored television for a long time in Italy, maybe due in part to a cultural prejudice, maybe for the lack of a Marxist theory of the media, or maybe because

Christian Democracy Party’s monopoly was impossible to contrast until parliament changed the pluralism law in 1975. It is relevant to notice that Il Forte was among the first social centers to have his own press office, and since its inception has been producing press releases—and video of its events—through which managed its communication in an attempt to escape manipulation of its information.86 Further, it is

77 important to highlight that in the early 1990s, television tycoon Silvio Berlusconi rose to power by means of television propaganda.

Skepticism was directed at the use of information technology as well, which in the afore-mentioned pamphlet is described as a “new weapon against the proletariat.”87 In a few years, Il Forte would become a center for information technology-based initiatives and the first social center in Italy to be connected to the Internet.88 The 1991 festival concluded with a debate dedicated to Cyberpunk (Fig. 28). Two years prior, when Il

Forte’s collective met with members of Decoder and other Italian social centers to talk about information technology, their main concern had been how to reconcile the employment of a tool that was a symbol of the superstructure in order to push forward their agenda, which fiercely opposed any institutionalized form of representation and cultural production. The debate had been a heated one, but social centers ultimately decided to establish a network called “INTERZONE,” which Il Forte presented at the

1991 art festival (Fig. 29).

This early network speaks to some important aspects of working with the newly available digital technology still relevant today. First, in regard to the “group” dimension that has always been a part of the political and artistic experience of social centers and that well suits the challenge of working with new technologies, a different level of expertise is often needed. During the 1991 festival, Forte Prenestino was ready to discuss

“Hacker art,” the practice of blending hacking and art as theorized by artist and activist

Tommaso Tozzi (b. 1968), for which a significant level of computer knowledge is required.89 (Fig. 30) Second, in regard to how to approach the relationship between the human and the machine, Agnese Trocchi has recently affirmed that “Ranxerox was

78 [already] a cyborg.”90 Ranxerox—who represented a cult figure within the milieu of social centers—was a robot made of leftover pieces of a copy machine. Most importantly—as explored in Chapter One, and will be further developed in Chapter

Three—artists and activists working with information technology at this time seem to have overcome the dichotomy between the human and the machine, and to have embraced their “real virtuality” fully. An initial strategy of AvANa—the BBS that opened at Il Forte in 1994—required its members to share the same nickname

“MRTUTTLE” so that every user was “the” user, and every individual was an extension of the collectivity.91 Third, political and social life as experienced within these sites offer clues to the importance of human interactions and information flow in the making of an inclusive community as well as the time necessary to reflect on, and collectively decide upon how, to proceed on every issue, including the making of art.

Finally, the 1991’s festival featured Graffiti art jam sessions. The overall look of

Il Forte’s walls had not changed throughout the 1980s, except for some rudimentary graffiti—different from the stylistic instances of throw-ups (tag-like drawings of bubble letters) and pieces. At the beginning of the 1990s, writers started to intervene systematically on any available surface around the fort, changing its aspect more prominently, ultimately hosting pieces by renown graffiti artists such as Blu.92 Figure 31 shows a poster related to a Graffiti jam session happening on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the occupation of Forte Prenestino. The use of Graffiti art inside the fort speaks to the process of appropriation and adaptation that this building went through since 1986 and deserves further investigation.

79 Graffiti art as a definition is usually used to define text-based art that occurs on a wall. The word graffiti in itself has a long history that others have explained at length.93

Graffiti art scholar David Novak defines current Graffiti art as characterized by four visual forms: tag (signature), piece (a complete mural made in the style of Graffiti art), throw-up (signature in bubble letters), and character (lettering as developed by artists).94

Stemming from this definition, the attention is on the relationship between individual and collective identity as expressed through the visual language of Graffiti art within Forte

Prenestino, and how these interventions are in conversation with the surrounding space, its accessibility, and with activism. Given Il Forte’s emphasis on collectivity, it is relevant to explore the significance of the implicit message of “I was here” embedded in each mark-making practice, how it relates to an audience of insiders, and what makes it political.

When Il Forte was first occupied, the practice of Graffiti art was well underway in other metropolitan areas namely, New York City, but the practice of writing on walls using paint in Rome was employed almost exclusively to convey political messages characterized by the use of ideologically charged symbols such as the hammer and sickle, the circled A, or the swastika.95 Longer messages were delivered by using posters affixed to walls (Fig. 32). This type of poster is called a manifesto and it is generally employed when the length of the message requires longer preparation, and it allows for the text to be propagated quickly on more locations. It goes without saying that Rome is a city full of inscriptions that marked the urban landscape since antiquity. In modern times, the invasive and methodic use of walls and building facades to convey state propaganda under the fascist regime probably left a mark in the consciousness of Italians on how to

80 use the public space politically by employing means of communication that allows for the massive reproduction of a poster, a stencil, an image, or a text. The same practice was in use in the Soviet Union, and it can be connected to political propaganda since. Obviously,

I do not intend here to reassign the beginning of political graffiti to fascism. However, within the political scenario of modern Italy, it seems as though graffiti that include a political sign (such as hammer and sickle, the circled A of Anarchy, the swastika) speak directly to the symbols employed by fascists, even if separated by an historical distance.96

Manifestos were largely used to spread political messages and commentaries in Italian urban areas throughout the 1970s and 1980s, in particular during the “years of lead,” a decade of political and social turmoil linked partially to labor issues that resulted in the formation of several terroristic groups within Italy.97

The Italian graffiti scenario of the second half of the twentieth century is different from the American graffiti scenario as emerging in New York City, even though, the two worlds were not so far apart. In 1979, while graffiti art was seen on every MTA train in the New York City area, LEE QUINOES and FAB5 FREDDIE, two graffiti artists active in the 1970s and 1980s, were shown in Rome at “La Medusa” gallery as part of an exhibition organized by Claudio Bruni titled, The Fabulous Five.98 As noted by art curator and art dealer Magda Danysz, “for people outside of New York, this is their first encounter with Graffiti.”99 Although in 1986 the characteristic graffiti form of writing called “lettering” had yet to emerge in Rome, writers active at Forte Prenestino appear to have soon adopted it and abandoned the indexicality and visual immediacy of political writing previously mentioned, or better, they seem to propose at first a combination of

American (New York) graffiti infused with explicit political meanings.100

81 An example of this stylistic turn is a 1994 piece by two artists, Bol and Filippo, originally located at the entrance of Forte Prenestino and now lost under multiple layers of paint.101 Even though the message was still political in terms of its function as a vehicle for self-determination—due to the use of the image of the rat which stands for punk culture, as well as the red flag with a dart inscribed in a circle which stands for self- managed social center—the duo Bol and Filippo departed from the anonymous writing style that characterized wall writings in Italy in the previous years. As a result, they arrived at a more elaborate representation of text and image and, by so doing, they put an emphasis on the individuality of the artists.102

This identity aspect urges us to look again at the political context. As noted, some center-goers joined these spaces for their commitment to sociality more than to their politics. In the same way as other Italian social centers, the focus of Forte Prenestino is to give its participants a space to socialize, interact, and collectively organize.

Paradoxically, in the case of writers or graffiti artists, identity is an ambivalent factor.

While their signature reveals their artistic persona, it denies their real identity. As pointed out by Danysz, in Graffiti art “the artwork is reduced to what makes it most singular: the signature.”103 At the same time, the presence of the artist—or its proxy, the signature, the tag—demarks another form of recognition. In fact, it is not only the artist who is identified, but also the place becomes recognizable through Graffiti art. At Il Forte, tags and other forms of Graffiti art demarcate the territory and contribute to seal the process of re-adaptation of its spaces and the appropriation of its walls. Graffiti art is always a manifestation of a presence. At Il Forte, these interventions are not only about the individual, but also about the community in which they occur. In a piece realized to

82 commemorate a graffiti artist and member of Forte Prenestino, whose nickname is

Tromh, the “I was here” symbolized by a signature, a tag, or a throw-up, turns into “We were here, together.” The piece is a concert of tags, styles, colors, forms, and texts composed by different writers (Fig. 33-37).104 It is possible to recognize at least five tags on the wall along with the place of the commemoration “Roma” and the lettering “Green

Skull.” The lettering reading “Tromh,” on the top left, is probably the first piece realized by the artist himself that has been later embedded into the overall composition, and it now co-participates with the new piece. In other words, leaving a mark through a signature, a tag, a throw-up, a character, a mural, a sticker, a stencil, serves as a proxy representing both the individual artist as well as the collectivity of this particular space.

Graffiti art inside Il Forte belongs to the process of transformation and appropriation of the space from the community that inhabits it and experiences it. It is the mark of their utopian and collective vision.

By activating the space through imagery and tags, or in the case of the piece dedicated to Tromh, by activating the commemoration through the participation of the reader or viewer, the time of the representation and the time of the beholder coincide.

They become contemporaneous. Interestingly, reading functions as a time machine. Tags and Graffiti art function as tools to take the action represented outside of its own temporal dimension for by reading the piece and the tags in it, and therefore by naming the characters depicted, and allowing the viewer to call their names or pseudonyms, the artists can re-enter the scene and the piece can be re-activated. Finally, in the assembled pieces and tags commemorating Tromh, it is difficult to give an exact chronology of the tagging. This lack of chronology speaks even more to the contemporaneity of the whole

83 piece for it avoids a linear history of its making and allows viewers to create their own path across the wall based on visual stimulus.

The use of Graffiti art to commemorate a member of the community of Forte

Prenestino speaks to how the space is perceived by its participants as private. Another piece outside Il Forte also commemorates Tromh (Fig. 38). It is located on a wall along a street that cuts through the park surrounding the fortress. However, its internal dynamic is very different from the piece inside the building. Only a single artist seems to be the maker, and no other tags were added to the piece. Differently, figure 33 shows that the piece inside the fortress attracts other writers who leave their tags and messages as time goes by.105 Perhaps, in the case of the latter, the proximity of Tromh’s original piece along with his tag, draws more attention, and overall, the space inside the fort represents a more significant dimension compared to the outside.

In conclusion, throughout the 1990s, Il Forte continued to propose endless initiatives to the public, including a festival to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Russian Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1983-1930), an underground movie festival (OFF! Fiction Overdose Festival in 1997, 1998, 1999), and to participate in nation-wide protests against globalization and nuclear weapons, in defense of LGTBQ rights, women’s rights, immigrant rights, and for the legalization of cannabis.106 Radio

Onda Rossa—a Rome-based radio station always preoccupied with the counter-culture— gave Il Forte’s members some air time with a radio program called “Gridalo Forte,” and their collaboration continues to this day (Fig. 39).107 The numerous events happening at Il

Forte were made possible by a gradual compartmentalization. They were proposed and brought to completion by separate groups active within Il Forte that managed their own

84 spaces and calendar independently but in accordance with the overall management (Fig.

40). Although, this investigation does not focus specifically and only on women members of Il Forte, they had always been active and came together in occasion of common struggle since the early stage of the occupation. Throughout the 1990s, they contributed to Il Forte’s official magazine “Nessuna Dipendenza” by focusing more and more on issues about women.108 On August 1993, they dedicated a two-page editorial to the

Italian law n.194/78 that since 1978 allows for women’s rights to abortion.109

Forte Prenestino has not only been a space of political activism per se, but also a relational space: a relational space is an environment lived through the relationship between the geometrical characteristic of a site (size; openness; narrowness; height…) with our own cultural and social identity, personal history, thoughts and imagination.

Such a space is defined by the internal relations between collective and individual experiences of the people who inhabit the site with the location itself, including the objects it contains, the decorated walls, the shape of its corridors, tunnels, cells, ceilings, courtyards, and so forth.110 Throughout the years, social center participants have expressed the need to intervene in this space to make effective the change that occurred with the occupation. Henri Lefebvre affirmed that without change in social space there is no change in society. Forte Prenestino is a sort of society within a society. It is governed by its own rules and, at the same time, it is a direct response to the society at large.

Within its walls, Il Forte has been working on the revolution of space of which Lefebvre writes, in particular when he affirms: “A revolution that does not produce a new space has not realized its full potential.”111 On the one hand, Forte Prenestino, embedded within the urban fabric that developed throughout several decades as a partially

85 spontaneous and unregulated response to power, appropriated the space of the superstructure, namely a military fortress. On the other hand, it remains confined within its territorial limits. The revolution might have occurred inside Il Forte, through the renaming of the place, by graffiti art, and by the redistribution of its internal spaces, though it might still be just a “stumbling rock in a river.” Many of the accounts included in Fortopìa, define Il Forte as “an island,” “a planet,” and lament its isolation.112

Curiously enough, when approaching Forte Prenestino from the street, its presence is signaled by the increase of Graffiti art. Progressively, the walls of apartment buildings or private gardens in the Centocelle neighborhood start to features tags, throw- ups, characters, and full pieces. The closer you get to Il Forte the bigger are these interventions, until they completely cover the walls of its enclosing park (Fig. 41-46).113

Somehow, Forte Prenestino faces or maybe poses a challenge to a reconciliation between a desire to reach a dimension that is extra-local, in order to escape the cultural periphery of a marginal neighborhood, and the practicality of appropriating a space physically.

Indeed, Il Forte has acquired new meanings, affirmed its locality, and as a consequence, achieved permanency.

For the past thirty years, Forte Prenestino has been a place to congregate, to learn and share skills, to make art, and to act politically. It has provided services that public institutions have failed to offer, and through a constant mediation with those institutions, it has become a feature in the peripheral neighborhood of Centocelle as well as a national landmark challenging the very notion of periphery. Its unique experience and location speak to a larger spectrum of alternative places throughout Italy, while its members, artists, and activists continue to swing from underground culture to the mainstream.

86 A relevant phase of Il Forte’s artistic development concerns information technology and its intersection with art. In particular, it embeds three important aspects of this intersection: the collective aspect, which speaks to the practice of sharing and co- working often needed in contemporary artistic practices that are involved with information technology; the approach to the relationship between the human and the machine, in particular the interactive possibilities of devices; and the aspect related to the experiential and emotional dimension of human interactions in light of technological dominance, which revolves around the exchange of information, and how to make the latter constitutional of online and offline human experience as well as art. These aspects will be analyzed in Chapter Three.

87 NOTES

1 Marincola, Elisa, La Galassia dei Centri Sociali, in Limes (2001) 3, p 61

2 Cfr, Holmes, Brian, “Crisis Theory for Complex Society” in Disrupting Business, Art & Activism in Times of Financial Crisis, Tatiana Bazzichelli and Geoff Cox (Eds.), Autonomedia, 2013, p 200; Negri, Antonio, “Domination and Sabotage” in Autonomia, MIT Press, (1977) 2007, pp 62-71; Negri, Antonio, Insurgencies, Constituent Power and the Modern State, University of Minnesota Press, 1999 Senta, Antonio, Utopia e Azione. Per una storia dell’anarchismo in Italia (1848-1984), Elèuthera, 2015

3 A 1996 survey showed that the majority of participants viewed social centers as places to gather and socialize. 20% of the responders considered social centers as places for organizing political actions. Source: Centri Sociali: Geografie del Desiderio, Consorzio Aaster, Centro sociale Cox 18, Centro sociale Leoncavallo, Primo Moroni (Eds.), Shake Edizioni, Milan, 1996, p 42

4 “I centri sociali hanno rappresentato l'unico esempio di aggregazione sociale che riuscisse a comprendere al suo interno il lavoro e il non lavoro, lo sradicamento e l'interazione, la passione politica e la sperimentazione culturale.” Il Manifesto, “Un arcipelago innominabile,” October 17, 1993

5 Squatting is an illegal practice in Italy, therefore many activists signed their account using pseudonyms, nicknames, or just their first name. See, Fortopìa. Storie d’amore e d’autogestione, Ed. Fortepressa – La Bagarre ONLUS, Rome, 2016, pp 206-207 (Translations throughout this chapter are my own, unless otherwise specified)

6 Fortopìa. Storie d’amore e d’autogestione, p 82

7 “The First Republic” defines the historical time of the Italian Republic from the end of WWII until the years 1992-1994. That period ended following the pressure of a series of corruption scandals that invested the entire system of political parties led by the Christian Democracy that had governed since 1947. From that time, it has been considered that the Italian Republic entered a phase called “The Second Republic,” which, according to some, ended in 2016 following the entrance into the parliament of the populist force named, “Five Star Movement.” See: https://web.archive.org/web/20180429132219/http://www.iltempo.it/politica/2016/06/02/news/ecco-come- e-nata-la-terza-repubblica-1011742/, Accessed April 2018; https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seconda_Repubblica_(Italia), Accessed April 2018

8 ACS, PCM 1877 f. Roma / 879

9 “…to proceed without public hearings or other formalities, with the expenditure and construction works needed to the defense of Rome.” ACS, PCM 1877 f. Roma / 879

10 “Made of a series of wavy hills with no vegetation.” ISCAG, Forti di Roma, 17001, 84/F

11 ISCAG, Forti di Roma, 17001, 84/F

12 For a preliminary exploration of how the Roman borgate came to be, see: Berlinguer, Giovanni, and Della Seta, Piero, Borgate di Roma, Rome, (1962) 1976; Clementi, Alberto and Perego, Francesco, La metropoli "spontanea". Il caso di Roma. 1925-1981: sviluppo residenziale di una città dentro e fuori dal piano. Exhibition catalogue. Dedalo Edizioni, Bari, 1983, pp 69- 74; pp 325-331; Cremaschi, Mauro, Tracce di Quartieri. Il legame sociale nella città che cambia, Milan, 2008, pp 162-163; Insolera, Italo, Roma Moderna. Un secolo di storia urbanistica, Rome, 1971;

88

Salvatori, Paola, Il Governatorato di Roma. L’amministrazione della capitale durante il Fascismo, Milan, 2006

13 See, Cajano, Elvira, Il Sistema dei Forti Militari a Roma, Gangemi, 2006; and Clementi, Alberto and Perego, Francesco, La metropoli "spontanea". Il caso di Roma. 1925-1981: sviluppo residenziale di una città dentro e fuori dal piano, Exhibition catalogue, Dedalo Edizioni, Bari, 1983

14 The construction site of the Stazione Prenestina was visited by Benito Mussolini in 1937. Source, Archivio Istituto Luce, http://www.archivioluce.com/archivio/jsp/schede/videoPlayer.jsp?tipologia=&id=&physDoc=13563&db=c inematograficoCINEGIORNALI&findIt=false§ion=/, Accessed May 2018

15 ACS, Min. Interno, Dir. Gen. Affari Generali e del Personale, Misc. Uffici Diversi, 1876-1961, b. 44

16 Fortopìa. Storie d’amore e d’autogestione, pp 52-54

17 ACS, PCM ’48-’50 f. 10859 sottof. 19-4 / 7.2

18 ACS, PCM ’44-’47 f. 33990 / 11.2

19 ACS, Min. Interno, Dir. Gen. Affari Generali e del Personale, Misc. Uffici Diversi, 1876-1961, b. 44

20 ACS, PCM ’48-’50 f. 73078 / 1.2.2 sottof. Lazio

21 ACS, PCM ’44-’47 f. Roma / 93187 / 1.2.2.

22 “Come uno scoglio nel fiume.” Quote in Andrea Bruschi in Operare i Forti, p 13 - Some scholars framed the life conditions of roman periphery within colonization discourses and compared the margins of the Urbe to the outskirts of the “spontaneous cities” of developing countries. Others have rejected the utopic idea of modern unity led by rational urbanism and tend to consider the architectural abusivismo that characterized these areas as a necessity. The unregulated expansion of private homes throughout the roman periphery is called “abusivismo” (abusivism) as to indicate an illegal practice of building without proper authorization and outside of the parameters established by city planners. Within the context of this paper, the following sources are significant in order to frame several reactions to this phenomenon (also see note 13): Berlinguer, G. and Della Seta, P., Borgate di Roma, p 355; Clementi, A. and Perego, F., La metropoli "spontanea," pp 120-129; Cremaschi, M., Tracce di Quartieri. Il legame sociale nella citta’ che cambia, p 8; pp 166-167; pp 268-269 Insolera, I., Roma Moderna. Un secolo di storia urbanistica, p 333

23 See, Bruschi, Andrea, et al, Operare i forti, per un progetto di riconversione dei forti militari di Roma, Gangemi, Rome, 2009, 11; and, Cajano, Elvira, Il sistema dei forti militari a Roma, Gangemi, Rome, 2006, pp 21-22; pp 87-92 In 2015, the ArchiDIAP—a project of the Department of Architecture of the Università degli Studi La Sapienza in Rome, Italy—included Forte Prenestina in its online catalogue of historical roman buildings, with a description and two videos, one showing the system of defensive forts around the city, the other showing how the site is used by the C.S.O.A. Forte Prenestino (in English and Italian). Available on, http://www.archidiap.com/opera/forte-prenestina/, Accessed May 2018

24 The occupation of the 1970s was part of a larger campaign for housing rights within the Centocelle neighborhood. Fortopìa. Storie d’amore e d’autogestione, pp 11-13

25 Berlinguer, G. and Della Seta, P., 317; Clementi, A. and Perego, pp 395-405

26 Cremaschi, M., pp 13-16

89

27 The first of many word puns that characterized Il Forte’s communication style reveals itself in the acronym of “Associazione Culturale Adesso Basta” which reads A.C.A.B., notoriously used against police forces. The acronym stands for “All Cops Are Bastards” or “All Coppers Are Bastards.” References to this acronym are countless in movies, graffiti art, and material produced in occasion of protests or uprisings.

28 “Vi scrivo da Centocelle, uno di quei quartieri della periferia romana che vive drammaticamente problemi quali la disoccupazione, l’eroina, l’emarginazione sociale e culturale.” La Repubblica, “L’associazione ACAB chiede un po’ di spazio,” January 14, 1986

29 ”Nel nostro quartiere esiste solo un cinema a “luci rosse”, per il resto (teatri, centri sociali, luoghi di aggregazione) c’è il vuoto.” La Repubblica, “L’associazione ACAB chiede un po’ di spazio,” January 14, 1986

30 It is interesting to notice that the fortress has always been called “Forte Prenestino” by the locals. Its original name, Forte Prenestina, is used only in official documents, by the military.

31 Comune di Roma, Circoscrizione VII, March 17, 1986. Protocol # 0008776. Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1986. A municipal district governs several neighborhoods and responds to the City Council.

32 One of the reasons for not spending part of the budget for cultural initiatives was the difficult political situation. At the time, the district council included seven different parties divided as follows: Italian Communist Party, Proletarian Democracy on the left wing; Christian Democracy, Italian Socialist Party and Italian Social Democratic Party considered centrist parties; Republican Party and the Social Movement Party-National Right on the right wing. Approval of a spending bill or every other bill was a result of difficult political maneuvers and compromises. Leonardo Rinaldi laments this situation in a letter sent to the municipal district in September 1987. Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1987; In addition, the problem of unspent funding was discussed in an article published in the weekly, Trovaroma edited by La Repubblica. Trovaroma, “Piccolo viaggio nei Centri culturali,” Agosto, 1986, p 64

33 Comune di Roma, Circoscrizione VII, March 17, 1986. Protocol # 0008776. Archivio Forte Prestino, Folder 1986

34 Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1985

35 The information about “studenti fuorisede” emerged from two interviews, one conducted by me with the curator of the comic books festival at Il Forte, Valerio Bindi in summer 2017, and another one conducted with current representatives of Il Forte’s collective by Nero online magazine. See, https://web.archive.org/web/20180416163942/https://zero.eu/magazine/1-maggio-1986-la-storia-del-del- forte-prenestino/?lang=en, Accessed April 2018

36 https://web.archive.org/web/20180416163942/https://zero.eu/magazine/1-maggio-1986-la-storia-del-del- forte-prenestino/?lang=en, Accessed April 2018

37 Letter to the President of the 7th municipal district from the members of the Socialist Party, dated May 12, 1986. Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1986

38 Still in December 1986, the Italian national newspaper, Corriere della Sera profiled members of Automia Operaia and their presence in schools, universities, and workplaces in Rome, and identifies one of the Autonomist centers in Forte Prenestino: “Ma i punti di riferimento sono ancora molti: il Forte Prenestino occupato dove si organizzano concerti Punk e reggae…” [Trans. “Points of reference are still many: the occupied Forte Prenestino were punk and reggae concerts are organized…”] – in Corriere della Sera, “Il chi è dell’Autonomia,” December 14, 1986; At the same time, in another article appeared two days later on the same newspaper, journalist Maurizio Caprara writes that the slogans used by members of a social center could be shared by right wing politics: “Uno degli slogan scritti dagli organizzatori sui volantini è formulato in un modo che potrebbe essere condiviso anche dalla destra moderata.” – in Corriere della Sera, “Arcipelago nuova autonomia,” December 16, 1986. Finally, in the 1990s, the

90 authorities and the press, renounced to speak of social center's members as the "new Autonomia." In an article from the weekly, Panorama titled, “Sinistra Virtuale” [Trans. Virtual Left] the word “Antagonist” was given, aiming to describe social center's members was given, and it is still in use. The paper writes: “This "left antagonism" is a magmatic universe: nor unitary, nor monolithic. Swinging between Autonomia and punk, telematics and science fiction.” Panorama, “Sinistra Virtuale,” October 18, 1992

39 Open letter to local associations and organizations. Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1986

40 Letter signed Dr. Sergio Scalia, dated May 5, 1986. Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1986

41 Letter sent by the Head of the 7th Municipal District, Vito Oscar Tifi, 25 July 1986. Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1896

42 Letter sent by Vito Oscar Tifi, 25 July 1986. Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1896

43 Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1986

44 “Creare un coordinamento che si muova unicamente sulle iniziative e raccolga consensi come forza politica.” Handwritten internal note titled, “Lo Strillo. Cosa fare e utilizzo di un centro sociale.” [Trans. The scream. What to do and how to use a social center] September 1986. Archivio Forte, Folder 1986 45 Handwritten internal note titled “Lo Strillo. Cosa fare e utilizzo di un centro sociale.” September 1986. Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1986

46 “…è possibile costruire circuiti culturali che funzionano senza bisogno di grossi capitali, di sponsor e di organizzazioni professionistiche.” The document is probably a draft to be published in one of Il Forte’s fanzines to be distributed to its participants. It also pinpoints important issues that will be re-proposed to the municipal district council later on. Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1987

47 “Il Forte ha invece molta difficoltà nei rapporti con il quartiere, all’interno del quale il peso dell’occupazione si avverte in maniera molto relativa.” Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1987

48 “Non riusciamo ad interagire, a comunicare con chi ha i nostri stessi problemi ed esigenze di liberazione, ma non usa il nostro linguaggio e i nostri comportamenti. C’è dunque il rischio concreto di costruire un ghetto.” Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1987

49 “La settima circoscrizione mentre spende svariate decine di milioni per sponsorizzare le iniziative dei commercianti, riesce a bloccare l’utilizzazione dei fondi stanziati dal comune per iniziative culturali, circa 70 milioni.” (70 million lire equaled to approximately USD 100,000 today) Il Manifesto, “Niente cultura sotto i lustrini. A Centocelle,” December 17, 1987

50 A first account of the activities of the association “Senz’orbita” in the Forte Prenestino’s archive can be found in an article written by journalist Marco Saladini for Il Manifesto, titled “Siamo noi la California. Punk e politica al Forte Prenestino.” Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1987

51 De Sario, Beppe, Resistenze Innaturali, Agenzia X (2009), p 118; La Repubblica, “Musica con una Marcia in più,” February, 1988; The coming to be of the Helter Skelter was discussed during an interview with co-founder Raffaele Valvola on June 11, 2016 in Milan, see Chapter One.

52 Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1988 and 1989

53 L’Espresso, “Ribelli metropolitani,” October 22, 1989

54 Cfr: King magazine, “La Fantasia al quartiere,” 1989; Il Manifesto, “100 centri socialmente utili,” June 4, 1994; Marincola, Elisa, La Galassia dei Centri Sociali, in Limes (2001) p 3, 61

55 Ciak magazine, “SUD,” December 1993

91

56 C.S.O.A. Forte Prenestino, Press Release, November 30, 1990. Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1991

57 La Repubblica, “Sanatoria, le tappe della delibera,” February 24, 1994

58 Il Messaggero, “Prezzi stracciati per le proprietà dello Stato,” September 8, 1995

59 Il Giornale, “L’ultrasinistra reclama una sanatoria,” November 3, 1997

60 The collective that occupies the fort calls it Forte Prenestino (with an “o” at the end, which is also the name of the area in which the fort sits, Quartiere Prenestino). However, the official name of the site is Forte Prenestina (with an “a” at the end), name after the street along which the fort was built, Via Prenestina. The appropriation of the site passes through the name change as well.

61 https://www.forteprenestino.net/index.php, Accessed May 2018

62 https://web.archive.org/web/20180416163942/https://zero.eu/magazine/1-maggio-1986-la-storia-del-del- forte-prenestino/?lang=en, Accessed April 2018

63 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclostyle_(copier), Accessed April 2018

64 Archival material about Frigidaire can be found on http://www.frigolandia.eu/, Accessed April 2018

65 This episode is also narrated in the recently issued monograph about Tamburini edited by Michele Mordente. See, Mordente, Michele, Muscoli e Forbici, Coconino Press, Fandango, 2017, p 7

66 “Voglio fare i fumetti con l’odore dei lacrimogeni.” Notes from a roundtable held at Forte Prenestino on June 8, 2017 about to the history of the Punk movement in Italy. CGIL (Italian General Confederation of Labour) is one of the most prominent left-wing union in Italy. For the episode of Luciano Lama at “La Sapienza” University on February 17, 1977, See, http://www.repubblica.it/cultura/2017/02/12/news/alberto_asor_rosa_che_errore_lama_in_ateneo_- 158130484/, Accessed April 2018

67 Mordente, Michele, Muscoli e Forbici, Coconino Press, Fandango, 2017, p 6

68 Mordente, Michele, Muscoli e Forbici, p 49

69 Rea describes the adventures of a young punk in Rome in the 1970s-1980s in a recent book by Claudio Pescetelli titled, Lo stivale è marcio, Abraxas (2013) - https://web.archive.org/web/20180417163734/https://www.dinamopress.it/news/roma-kaputt-mundi- avventure-di-un-giovane-punk/, Accessed April 2018

70 Notes from a roundtable held at Forte Prenestino on June 8, 2017 about to the history of the Punk movement in Italy.

71 C.S.O.A. Forte Prenestino, Press Release, November 9, 1986. Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1986

72 C.S.O.A. Forte Prenestino, Press Release, December 5, 1986. Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1986; Vito Lella is still living in Rome and his work was included in the 2016 RAW-Rome Art Week. See, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cxg23WSnLA, Accessed April 2018

73 “Il Forte è più un’espressione artistica che politica.” From a phone interview with Valerio Bindi in Summer 2017

74 “L’università aveva una tecnologia superiore rispetto alla capacità dei dipartimenti di utilizzarla.” From a phone interview with Valerio Bindi in Summer 2017 92

75 The student protest movement “La Pantera” is discussed in Chapter One.

76 “[La Pantera] era stata una occupazione mediatica. Nel 1991 c’era stata la prima guerra mediatica del Golfo. Sapevamo che non bastava dire cose giuste, bisognava avere un mezzo per diffonderle.” From a phone interview with Valerio Bindi in Summer 2017

77 Elenco adesioni (Participant list). Archivio Forte Prenestino. Folder 1991

78 Il Messaggero, “Bausch, danzando fino al Duemila,” December 18, 1998

79 “Dalla pittura all’arte frattale, dalla scultura all’installazione, dal concerto alla performance, dallo spettacolo teatrale ai graffiti, è all’insegna della diversità che artisti di dieci paesi provenienti dagli orizzonti più diversi esporranno ed agiranno fianco a fianco durante i nove giorni del festival dell’arte. Filo conduttore del meeting è proprio mettere a nudo le contraddizioni dell’operazione artistica contemporanea, confrontando sul campo situazioni che vanno dall’”ars furor” più o meno coinvolta nel circuito culturale ufficiale fino all’autoproduzione più antagonista.” C.S.O.A. Forte Prenestino, Press Release, Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1991

80 Laboratorio Comunicazione Sperimentale, Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1991

81 The “rave culture” is intended here as an illegal practice of throwing large dance parties in non- authorized spaces.

82 “Il Rave era un modo per superare i generi, dimostrare che la tecnologia era un rifiuto [del mondo industriale] sul quale mettere le mani.” Notes from a roundtable held at Forte Prenestino on June 8, 2017 about to the history of the Punk movement in Italy.

83 “Noi eravamo una TV pop trash che parlava un linguaggio il più popolare possibile per svelare i meccanismi della finzione televisiva (…) Candida TV era un'infezione micotica della mente, come tutta la televisione, solo che noi lo facevamo esplicitamente mostrando a tutti i meccanismi della manipolazione.” Email with the artist, May 14, 2015

84 “… alla rappresentazione di creazioni fittizie e false, di annichilimento della capacità di dialogo e comunicazione.” Forte’s internal communication. Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1986

85 I have discussed this issue elsewhere, please excuse me for the self-citation. See, Federici, Valeria, "Television and cinema: Contradictory role models for women in 1950s Italy?" in Representations of Female Identity in Italy: From Neoclassism to the 21st Century, Silvia Byer and Fabiana Cecchini (Eds.), Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017, p 164

86 https://web.archive.org/web/20180416163942/https://zero.eu/magazine/1-maggio-1986-la-storia-del-del- forte-prenestino/?lang=en, Accessed April 2018

87 “Informatica come nuova arma contro i proletari.” Forte’s internal communication. Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1986

88 https://web.archive.org/web/20180416163942/https://zero.eu/magazine/1-maggio-1986-la-storia-del-del- forte-prenestino/?lang=en, Accessed April 2018

89 The work of Tommaso Tozzi, as well as "Hacker art" as a practice, will be discussed in Chapters Three and Four.

90 “Ranxerox è un cyborg.” Notes from a roundtable held at Forte Prenestino on June 8, 2017 about to the history of the Punk movement in Italy. Also see Chapter One.

93

91 This detail was revealed by artist and activist, Agnese Trocchi during a recent symposium held by the NONE Art Collective in their studio in Rome, Italy. Notes from the symposium, January 27, 2018

92 Il Manifesto, “L’arte “diversa”, dall’Europa a Forte Prenestino,” May 31, 1991; Pictures of Graffiti by Blu at Forte Prenestino are widely available online, https://www.flickr.com/photos/rita- restifo/18651724684, Accessed May 2018

93 See, Street Art and Urban Creativity Scientific Journal, 2015-2016

94 Novak, David, 2015. “Photography and Classification of Information: Proposed framework for Graffiti Art,” in Street Art and Urban Creativity Scientific Journal, Vol. 1 N. 1, p 13

95 An image example of a circle “A” accompanying some writing on a wall at the end of the 1960s can be found in an article about the social unrest of May 1968 in Europe, available on https://web.archive.org/web/20180108125520/https://www.nauticareport.it/dettnews.php?idx=6&pg=4863, Accessed January 2018

96 For an analysis of the aesthetically-based notion of politics in fascist Italy, see: Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta, Fascist Spectacle, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. I have analyzed this issue in a paper presented at the TAG Conference - Name writing in public space, Freie Universität, GSNAS, Berlin, Germany in September 2017, and it was further developed in a forthcoming publication.

97 The bibliography about “Anni di Piombo” is extremely vast. For a first grasp of it, See https://web.archive.org/web/20180108123323/http://www.wikiwand.com/it/Anni_di_piombo, (in Italian), accessed January 2018

98 Images and information about this exhibition are available on FAB5FREDDY’s website, https://web.archive.org/web/20180108123136/http://fab5freddy.com/back-makin-art/, Accessed January 2018

99 Danysz, Madga, From Style Writing to Art, Rome, 2010, p 157

100 Within the milieu of graffiti, the term “writer” refers to a graffiti artist. Graffiti art starts with the practice of “tagging,” i.e. writing one’s own name or nickname or pseudonym (tag) by using only letters. Danysz, M., From Style Writing to Art, pp 14-16, p 47

101 The piece is no longer visible, but an image of it is available on https://web.archive.org/web/20180108122907/https://www.graffiti.org/rome/bolfor.jpg, Accessed May 2018. Main page; https://web.archive.org/web/20180108123012/https://www.graffiti.org/rome/rome_5.html, Accessed May 2018

102 For an interpretation of the dart inscribed in a circle, See https://web.archive.org/web/20180108122816/http://www.radioclash.it/testi/recensioni_b/posse.htm, (in Italian); For an interpretation of the rat as symbol of the urban counter-culture, See https://web.archive.org/web/20180108122654/http://digilander.libero.it/Vigatos/punk_story.htm, (in Italian), https://web.archive.org/web/20180108122607/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Fink, (in English); Some assign the making of the rat stencil into an iconic symbol to French Graffiti artist, Blek le Rat, https://web.archive.org/web/20180108122525/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blek_le_Rat, Accessed January 2018

103 Danysz, M., p 47

94

104 A less recent image is available on https://web.archive.org/web/20180109151943/https://fotografiaerrante.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/264a.j pg, Accessed May 2018

105 See previous note. It is possible to draw a comparison between a picture of this piece as per the link in note 104, taken probably around 2016, and the one taken by the author in 2018 (Fig. 33)

106 La Repubblica, “Notte Transgender a “Forte Squatter,” April 19, 1998

107 https://www.ondarossa.info/, Accessed April 2018. It is worth mentioning that “Gridalo Forte” is a word pun as “forte” means both “loud” and “fortress.” Therefore, the title of the show could mean “Scream it out loud” or “Scream Forte.”

108 “Nessuna Dipendenza” is again a word pun that means both “No Dependency” and “No Addiction.” Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1993

109 Nessuna Dipendenza, “La libertà di scegliere è ancora da conquistare,” August 1993. Archivio Forte Prenestino, Folder 1993

110 This analysis is in conversation with a lineage of scholarship of space that includes Walter Benjamin, Michel De Certeau, David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adam Smith among others. See: David Harvey: a critical reader, Noel Castree and Derek Gregory (Eds.), Oxford, 2006, pp 270-293; Lefebvre, Henri, The production of space, Blackwell Publishing, (1974) 2009

111 Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, p 54

112 Fortopìa, p 48, p 76, p 162

113 Images on this page show the visual impact of Graffiti art at Forte Prenestino, https://web.archive.org/web/20180108122331/https://traumastudio.noblogs.org/cera-una-volta-un-forte/, Accessed May 2018

95 3.

Information as an artistic medium

Although my thesis relates to a specific place and time in the history of contemporary art, information can be considered as a fundamental element of most art that dealt with the impact and consequences of electronic and digital media and that is made using these tools. Therefore, this analysis is in conversation with a long scholarship of media and technology that includes Wendy

Chun, Friedrich Kittler, Lev Manovic, Marshal McLuhan, Lewis Mumford, and others. Electronic and digital media are considered as cultural products existing under an epistemological umbrella that includes the computational metaphor, i.e. a system of cultural symbols created around information technology—from computer memory, to the invention of cyberspace, to desktop windows.1 In order to investigate how information is a constitutive factor behind art making within the context of Italian network culture, I consider the work of Tommaso Tozzi, Agnese Trocchi, and the collective of Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici, whose experience is directly or indirectly linked to several social centers.

One episode can be cited as emblematic of how successful the computational metaphor has been. In 1984, during the Super Bowl, Apple Computer released a commercial to launch the introduction of its newly produced Macintosh machine. The commercial is referred to as highly successful but its success might seem odd given that it did not show the product that was publicized or how the product functioned.2 However, Apple seemed to have captured the imagination of the viewer with something less obvious and straightforward than a literal description of a product.

Directed by Ridley Scott—who two years earlier had directed the movie, Blade Runner—the one- minute long commercial opens by showing a line of people marching along a tunnel dotted with

Telescreens: half television, half surveillance camera devices. The walking mass eventually arrives in a bigger room and everyone takes a seat in front of a large screen where Big Brother, the leader of the party who manipulates people’s perception of truth by controlling the media and other

96 oppressive means, is airing a message-command passively received by its doomed audience.

Resembling the dystopian scenario described in 1949 by British writer George Orwell in his novel

Nineteen Eighty-Four, the commercial is set in a bluish-gray light, epitomizing a rather monochromatic, dull and inexpressive present. At the same time, a female athlete in full color wearing a white top and a pair of red shorts, enters the room running from the police in a crescendo of pathos and expectations, carrying a sledgehammer that she will eventually throw at the screen successfully destroying it. A storming white light then emanates from the bursting screen engulfing everyone and everything. As suggested by the commercial, Orwell's novel became reality and the

Macintosh—here represented by the female athlete in full color—can and will liberate the masses from the yoke of Big Brother. At the time the commercial was released, some saw in Big Brother a characterization of IBM, another computer company. Unfortunately, the novel does not end like the commercial. Wilson, the protagonist, is subdued to the thought control power of Big Brother's media regime. That outcome is referenced in the meaning of the final lettering running on the screen in black text (in Apple's early signature Garamond typeface):

On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like "1984."

Throughout the following two decades after its release, the commercial won a significant number of awards. A dispute within Apple's board of directors resulted in the commercial being aired nationally only once, which added to the feeling of it representing an epiphany. Ultimately, the commercial aimed at portraying the Macintosh as a liberating force through which the injustice of the modern world will be redeemed. Interestingly, the computer is here represented as a human being. To obliterate the difference between the human and the machine is exactly the purpose of the computational metaphor.

Since the rising of the computational metaphor, the relationship between the human and the machine has been extensively discussed to the point where it is no longer possible to keep speaking of a separation between the two.3 One of the most recent investigations refers to digitization—or

97 better, to our ability to think digitally, to count, to order, and to separate—as a technical faculty through which it is possible to explain our relationship with information technology and its devices.4 To think in digital terms is a form of abstraction as much as to think in symbolic terms.

Approaching information technology from the sole point of entrance of digitation aims to insert more recent work of art into a long tradition of art making that precedes the computer. Although in conversation with this approach—that ultimately relates to human’s faculty to think abstractly—this analysis focuses on information as an artistic medium specifically in relations to its ability to act within the epistemological frame of the computational metaphor.

By speaking to human imagination and unpredictability, the symbolic system created around information technology allowed the latter to be pervasive and to dominate the discourse on technology in contemporary society. This larger set of cultural significance speaks to three main aspects of the artistic production: 1) Stemming from the experience of conceptual art, information as an artistic medium allows artists to act on the meaning of language; 2) At the same time, by relying on a tool characterized by a closed structure geared towards the production of data (which is also information), the artistic production is limited and guided by the process, an aspect that marks a significant distinction with conceptual art. In fact, artistic production is not exclusively preoccupied with an idea and with the immateriality of the work of art; 3) Due to that same structure, new media art brings along a new materiality that carries specific visual elements and results. Indeed, a new aesthetic has emerged with the use of information technologies: an aesthetic that speaks to the flatness of the screen and the sharpness of the pixels and that feeds into a narrative about the capability of machines and about presumption over their flawlessness.

Early interpretations of the work of Tommaso Tozzi, Agnese Trocchi, and the collective of

Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici as originally offered by Italian art critics, curators, and art historians framed them as part of the conceptual art experience. This early interpretation needs further analysis. Therefore, I focus on the specificity of the medium in order to shift the nexus of the discussion from the importance of Fluxus, performative art, and the happenings, to the

98 distinctiveness of using information as an artistic medium through newly available information technologies which were used to address discourses around identity, art-making, art-market, and sociability. As digital devices have become more manipulative and pervasive, and users have become less aware of and more dependent on them. Through the experience of those who initially engaged with information technology in art, it is possible to approach these devices in a more critical and analytical way as well as to determine the relationship between old and new paradigms of the artistic production.

Information as an artistic medium

Within the context of Italian social centers, new media art stemmed from a reflection and an actualization of the practice of networking. By employing the rubric of “network culture,” I have delineated a context that embodies a series of characteristics that derive from, but are not limited to, the use of information technology.5 “Network” is a term capable of taking on multiple connotations while maintaining an elusive meaning. As noted by media theorist Wendy Chun the network can be considered as a linguistic, and therefore cultural, metaphor.6 Chun explains how through a series of linguistic metaphors media become more transparent. By becoming more transparent, they tend to blend with the environment and become invisible, and their significance becomes even more occult.

In a similar way, network is used as a metaphor for interconnectivity, sociality, or simply the

Internet.

Media theorist Marshal McLuhan had successfully anticipated how pervasive our relationship with technology can be. Recent scholarship seems to suggest that such a pervasiveness can be linked to the rubric of the digital as preceding even the computer.7 The rationality of thinking digitally stems from a Heideggerian approach to technicity which translates in “ratio as a technical process.”8 In Chromatic Algorithms, Carolyn L. Kane notices that:

99 By exteriorizing and ordering ourselves in and through our tools, artifacts, and various form of technical memory, we always have a relation to calculation and thus to technology that is not merely “external or contingent”… but rather essential and intrinsic.9

In other words, the digital is within us.10 However, I consider this reading too univocal. Although calculation has accompanied human history throughout, currently it is only through digital devices that it can successfully track and predict human behaviour. Therefore, the relationship between human and digitation as referring to its condition in contemporary times, cannot be preceded by a priori calculation that occurs without reference to its digital apparatus. There must be some element of pervasiveness that makes that relationship relevant now. Second, narrowing the discourse over information technology to calculation exclusively seems to stem exactly from a mechanic forma mentis, from a machine if it were, that turns away from unpredictability and imaginative abstraction. In other words, the latter seems as a rather positivistic approach to the matter.11

I suggest a different reading of the relationship between the human and the machine close to the approach to technology theorized by American historian and philosopher of technology Lewis

Mumford. Mumford noted that since the Enlightenment, our relationship with tools has been considered as defining our very nature as human beings due to our ability to make and use tools.

Contrary to that narrative, Mumford affirms that instead “symbol-making leaped far ahead of tool- making,” meaning that our relationship with tools is significant so far as we can apply symbolic value to this relationship.12 By applying symbolic value, these tools, and most importantly, the constructed or concealed metaphors that surround them, speak to our imaginative environment far more than our ability to think digitally—even though, both aspects ultimately relate to a tendency towards abstraction. To further this analysis, it is relevant to refer to Information theorist Philip

Agre’s observations on data trackability.

Indeed, an important development of digital media is to have turned information into data.

Pre-digital media did not have the ability to track user information because the degree of interaction was limited to the on-off button, even though their transmissions occurred through a network. At the time that McLuhan writes, media can be defined as a type of top-down technology through

100 which the beholder receives information passively. It is undeniable that such technology represented a significant shift in the behavior of the beholder. Such a shift might be difficult to measure, but certainly the ability of electronic-age media to reach a larger audience, and in a faster way than previous media (print), had an impact of society and individual consciousness.

Nonetheless, as digital interaction generates data and makes it trackable, a current re-definition of media should describe it as a type of technology through which the beholder interacts with information, generates data, and in return, gets tracked through this very interaction. Data is not only used as a commodity, but also as a tool to systematically predict interaction.

In his article, “Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy,” Agre describes two cultural models of privacy: the surveillance model, and the capture model.13 According to Agre, the

“surveillance model derives from historical experiences of secret police surveillance,” and it implies data recording. What is more relevant to this discussion is the capture model: “a ‘linguistic metaphor,’ a way of translating activities into grammars of action for computers to track them.”14

These grammars of action affect two kinds of participants:

1) People imposing the grammar;

2) People upon which the grammar is imposed.

If we think of the capture model as a linguistic metaphor that affects the reorganization of human activities in order for the computer to track them, it is clear that this model is a socio-technical model as well as a politico-technical model. According to Agre, the capture system is ingrained in a metaphor of human activity as a kind of language. And, it operates in an historical context where conflicts over the production of knowledge occurred. By reflecting on a possible scenario in which the production of knowledge is driven by data, Agre poses the following questions:

1) What would a total reorganization of all spheres of life in accord with the capture model be like? 2) What would become of data in this imaginary world?

He clarifies that captured information–-i.e. data captured, retained, and possibly retrieved and distributed–-is not the only information possibly exchangeable in a computational system, but

101 certainly it is the one that best serves its use as a commodity.15 This process makes the information

‘visible,’ i.e. trackable, therefore quantifiable, sellable, and it well suits a market-based industry.

Captured information is constituted by a dual relationship to human activity because it is a product, and it is representation. However, the transformation of which Agre speaks, that is, the reorganization of human activities in order to capture information, encounters problems, such as technical or economic miscalculation and the resistance of the participants. In other words, unpredictability. Therefore, it is no longer a matter of whether media is an extension of humans

(McLuhan), but rather, which one of the possible extensions are predictable by media.

Since digital devices have turned information into data that carries an exchange value— which means it can generate profit—information as an artistic medium constitutes the structure of artwork (binary language); the product (data and coding); and the meaning (representation). By utilizing information as an artistic medium, artists operate on unpredictability and give information yet another form of representation. As Agre put it, captured information is not the only information exchangeable via digital media while media extension of man can take on multiple forms. The appearance of information technology does not have to lead towards the forms and use currently employed. There are cultural, economic, and political reasons for a technology to emerge when it does, and to impact the society at large.

The significance of using these tools lies in the cultural references they carry with them, and how these cultural references are perceived, reiterated, or disrupted. This is precisely what the iconic phrase pronounced by McLuhan, “the medium is the message” speaks to.16 However,

McLuhan’s analysis is based on a deterministic approach to technology while new media artists in

Italy tried to imagine and employ information technology beyond any deterministic bias for they considered information technology as a cultural product, therefore adaptable and malleable. A deterministic approach sees tools as neutral objects, and their effects on human behavior as a mere consequence of their functionality. On the contrary, a non-deterministic approach considers technology as a cultural product, and its development and effects on society as stemming from

102 cultural, economic, social, and political factors. The relevance of the artistic experience of Italian new media artists lies precisely in trying to unleash the potential of information technology in creating an alternative model for user engagement and art making.

Berlin-based art critic and curator, Tatiana Bazzichelli defines the whole system of communication, interaction, political and artistic experimentation, online and offline presence that happened in the Italian social centers as an artistic phenomenon based on networking and the network. As mentioned in Chapter One, she argues that Italian cyberpunk not only had specific characteristics due to its political connotations, but also that “making the network” was a form of political art in itself.17 A shift occurred in the art making process that no longer focused on the making of an object but rather on the practice of personally and collectively intervening in the creation of an artistic product.18 Bazzichelli labelled the artistic experiences of 1990s as emerging from the counter-cultural milieu as “Activism-Hacking-Artivism:” Activism speaks to the political connotation of art; Hacking to the tools employed; Artivism to the art making in itself .19 Although,

Bazzichelli rightly highlights the importance of the collective aspect of activism, hacking and artivism, often a sole artist was the main initiator of a project, as in the case of Tozzi. Following

Bazzichelli’s emphasis on the process, her characterization of new media art remains under the rubric of conceptual art. However, her analysis seems to look at the practice of networking as relational, linking her interpretation to the theory of relational aesthetics as elaborated by Nicolas

Bourriaud in 1998.20 Bourriaud writes:

Relational art [is] an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space.21

Bourriaud is concerned with the relational realm investigated by contemporary artists as a political issue. He is referring to what came to be called “the social turn,” i.e. the departure occurred in artistic practices no longer concerned with “a passive process of presenter-spectator.”22 Indeed, artists and activists operating through social centers in Italy are interested in relations, which occurs through and by information. In Tozzi’s words, on the one hand:

103 The work unfolded as a critique to the art system. [On the other] that same work took on a relational dimension.23

By transforming or reacting to their intended meaning, and by disrupting their purposes, many artists act on information technology’s potential to be a vehicle for cultural and political transformation. For instance, Tommaso Tozzi intended the use of information technology as an effort to hack communication systems online as well as offline. As mentioned, in Tozzi’s artistic practice the attitude of hacking moved to art, “as a proposal for and as a non-destructive form of information and communication democracy.”24 Information as a medium is the key through which meaning, significance, metaphor, and structure is carried out and functions in new media artistic practices. Through software, artists can create virtuality anew, and they allow users to interact with that virtuality. As mentioned in Chapter One, Tozzi’s online platform, Virtual Town TV, aimed to create a new virtuality for users to interact with.

One of the consequences of this interactivity is described by Bazzichelli. She defines media as tools through which artists assimilated and reused the language of the communication industry to ironically subvert meaning in order to infiltrate and disrupt the control of media over society and individuals.25 In Bazzichelli’s analysis, media have fully entered the individual, and vice versa.

Individuals are conscious of their augmented human dimension and through it, they operate within the system of communication to create artistic interventions. In a way, the subjects of Bazzichelli’s text are the cyborgs of Donna Haraways’ manifesto that have embraced their hybrid existence as human-machine. While information is running through them, they move in and out of the network sphere, i.e. cyberspace.26 Therefore Bazzichelli’s text speaks to McLuhan’s initial intuition of the extension of human through media, which has been finally accomplished. In conversation with

McLuhan’s theories, Italian critic and curator Francesca Alinovi, once wrote:

Our mind is in the electronic micro-processors, our memory is in the computers, our imagination in the images transmitted by the mass-media. Then everything enters mysteriously into our bodies, and here it gets filtrated, molded, modelled.27

104 Alinovi was a forward-looking art critic and curator, who collaborated extensively with the Neon

Gallery in Bologna, and whose lucid analysis of contemporary art reached many young artists at the time. In her essay, “L’arte MIA” (My art) she summarizes the relationship between art and technology as follows:

“L’arte MIA” [intended as a personal approach to art] is therefore the art of the creativity of a single person who connects to other individuals in order to extend and to potentiate themselves, indefinitely.28

This extension was initiated with analog devices, and completed through digital devices that—as media scholar Lev Manovich points out—can no longer be distinguished from their predecessors for they all share a computational programming language. Perhaps, the remaining questions are whether media still means media and whether human still means human.

Another important element under consideration is “time” intended as the ability of media to make things instant, and as a consequence, the possibility to alter our perception of time and space.

This aspect is directly linked to the transmission of information. It affects our relationship to everyday life, and to some important factors such as labor. By subverting the use of the machine through hacking and other practices, artists aim to disrupt the modern vision of a techno-evolution and to voice their concern for a future-less present, a dimension described as a perpetual contemporaneity.29 This constitutes a difference between a modern and a post-modern approach to technology. Franco “Bifo” Berardi—a Marxist theorist and activist and a relevant figure of the

Italian counter-culture whose political experience dates back to the movements of 1977 and earlier—affirms that the contemporary appears as an age preoccupied with the present, whereas modernism can be considered as an age preoccupied with the future. In his Post-Futurist Manifesto

(2009), he writes:

One hundred years ago, on the front page of Le Figaro, for the aesthetic consciousness of the world Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the Manifesto that inaugurated the century that believed in the future. In 1909 the Manifesto quickly initiated a process where the collective organism of mankind became machinic. This becoming-machine has reached its finale with the concatenations of the global web and it has now been overturned by the collapse of the financial system founded on the futurisation of the economy, debt and economic promise. That promise is over. The era of post future has begun.30

105

By relating to modernism and at the same time departing from it, Berardi speaks of a technological turn that is connected to a transformation of the conditions of labor, which affects the system of life that originally emerged within the nation state in the modern period. Berardi affirms that our collective body turned into a machine while the promise of the future refers only to the economic sphere, and it is a promise based on debt. More interestingly, he affirms that due to this lack of future, the only temporal frame we can refer to is the present. Berardi is concerned with the conditions of labor modified by the advent of technology, the relocation of industries, and the relationship between the global and local market. These conditions are particularly significant in the context of social centers in which artists and activists operated in post-1989 Italy. Although

Berardi’s post-future era refers to the 2008 financial crisis, his political observations well suite a certain organization of labor, and as consequence, of leisure time, as intended since the late 1970s and early 1980s. Such an organization of labor has been under scrutiny by forms of political organization that emerged mostly from the political discourses developed by Antonio Negri and others.31 As discussed in previous chapters, art made in social centers speaks to these changes and transformations through performative elements based on the use of information technology.

When information technology started to be used among artists and activists in social centers, it acted as a springboard to actualize a capillary and rhizomatic network. As mentioned, these artistic experiences where originally framed as stemming from conceptual art, as well as a continuation of some artistic intents as elaborated by the historical avant-gardes. In particular, from the latter they borrowed the concept following which art can be part of everyday life and does not necessarily belong to museums or dedicated institutions. Narrowing the distance between art and life, a practice first advocated by the avant-gardes, was certainly one of the goals of artists such as

Tommaso Tozzi and Agnese Trocchi. According to them, through activism such a goal could be achieved. In addition, as Tozzi enunciated in his Hacker Art manifesto, artists and activists saw in these tools the opportunity to communicate with people everywhere through a “communication

106 [that] was not driven by the intent to sell a product,” rather “by a genuine research for the common good.”32 According to some, the anti-capitalist attitude characterizing Italian new media art was one of the reasons that led to its marginalization within international art historical narratives.33

However, through activism, new media artists have highlighted crucial aspects of information technology around which current media theories and narratives are developed: the hybridization of our body, virtual travel, the constant presence of a controlling superstructure, and the emergence of a self-centered spectacle.34 The following section delves into the work of those artists preoccupied with the consequences and the applications of information technology.

In Agnese Trocchi’s work, the process following which information is received, propagated, used, and manipulated remains central. Originally from Rome, Trocchi starts working with information technology at Forte Prenestino. Initially, she was involved with the collective that ran the fanzine Torazine, which was made at Il Forte. When AvANa was founded, Trocchi joined in, and that experience significantly informed her work as part of the collective of Candida TV.35 The work of Agnese Trocchi reflects on the extension of humans that occurred via digital devices. The starting point of Trocchi’s production is the assumption that there is no longer a distinction between the human and the machine. For Trocchi our body has been manipulated by technology, including medical technology, and it is impossible to consider ourselves outside of the mechanic environment in which the human and the machine co-exist and co-penetrate one another.36

In one of her collaborative projects titled, Identity_Runners (1999), Trocchi uses the web to open up the possibilities of interaction between words and images in the cybersphere, trying to undo the logic of the traditional page. This openness, multiplied click after click on her online project, translates into a kind of fictional writing that overcomes linear meaning, and challenges the narration’s continuity.37 Identity_Runners (1999) is about Cyber Feminism and the politics of identity as a social construct. In Trocchi’s work language has a fundamental role. Trocchi often disrupts the linearity of narration and meaning to subvert the logic of structure. Identity_Runners speaks to the practice following which meaning is obliterated. Her approach converses with the

107 fanzines produced at Forte Prenestino and elsewhere throughout the 1980s and 1990s, in which words and images are divested of their original context and juxtaposed in order to generate new meanings. By clicking along and interacting with Identity_Runners (1999), one might encounter the following text:

“GoodMorning I am DiscorDia and my strategy is not dialectic but catastrophic Carry the situation to its own limits I administrate to myself chemical molecular structure to observe the physiology of brain I walk on the domain of reality with injured foots This is an evil story Bad story Story of pain Discordia is a monster It is a terrible story but it is also a story of beauty and hope Do what u will should be the whole of the law Discordia is living in the desert Under an erupting volcano By the seaside She believes in no-law Discordia walks in your brain sabotages your brain”

The practice of altering the meaning is extended from language to images. Trocchi often uses saturated colors as in videos produced for Candida TV, or blurred images as in the backdrop of

Identity_Runners’s website. Identity_Runners was made in collaboration with Francesca da Rimini, an artist and activist based in Australia, and Diane Ludin, an artist and writer. Francesca da Rimini is considered one of the pioneers of “net.art,” and her work is featured in the Net Art Anthology initiatives launched by Rhizome in 2017.38 The work of Trocchi as well as the work of other new media artists and activists based in Italy remain outside of the international art historical narratives, in particular, in the English-speaking countries.

The work of Tommaso Tozzi—considered a pioneer of Hacker art—touches upon the co- habitability of the human and the machine.39 Among the artists under consideration is perhaps the one who demonstrated the strongest link to conceptual art and to modernism, due to the use of manifestos in his writings, his role as initiator of many collaborative projects, and his volunteer job as an archivist of new media art instances. These aspects will be discussed in the following chapter.

108 Trained at the Art Academy in Florence, during his school years, Tozzi made graffiti throughout Florence’s urban area. The subject of Tozzi’s early graffiti was a hybrid figure defined by him as a vampire.40 It had a simplified nose-less face, with x-shaped eyes and two long fangs.

Later, he “stopped doing graffiti with spray paint and started to make digital graffiti, within the telematics nets.”41 He documented his own production, often signed with the pseudo-name “Zedo &

Wz,” and published photographs of graffiti in his self-produced fanzine titled, “Bambina Precoce”

(Precocious Child) (Fig. 47).42 The fanzine had a subtitle “art fanzine to hang on the wall” that referred to its function as elaborated by the artist. “Bambina Precoce” consisted of photocopied sheets of paper, 8,3 x 11,7 inches, that Tozzi hung throughout Florence, hoping to spur people’s response and engagement. He defined “Bambina Precoce” as an “open and participative” fanzine.43

Early in his career, Tozzi often performed with Giuseppe Chiari, a member of the Italian

Fluxus.44 Further, his work has been exhibited extensively in Italy, and it overall speaks to the specific relationship between new media art and activism. A fascination with the computer has characterized his artistic production early on. In an interview, he reveals that while he was concentrating on the study of conceptual art, he started to experiment with information technology, and he became interested in a possible “social use of the artistic practices.”45 One of the first representation of Tozzi’s artistic research was a project realized for a solo exhibition at the Neon

Gallery of Bologna, curated by Roberto Daolio, that can also be described as a disruptive work as it subverted the very meaning of the exhibition. The exhibition did not appear as a solo show of

Tommaso Tozzi rather as a promotional exhibition of the gallery itself in which the artist—who was presented as the curator of the show—had installed a video publicizing the name of the gallery.

During the video, an apparently still image featuring the lettering “Neon – galleria d’arte” (Neon –

Art Gallery) was alternated with subliminal messages such as “Ribellati” (Rise up) or “L’arte ti condiziona” (Art has an influence on you). The messages were shown only for a 4/100 of a second, therefore not long enough to be consciously perceived by the viewer. Tozzi affirms that his research

109 stemmed from a reflection on the role of the exhibition site on the beholder’s perception of the work, as well as from an attempt to escape the official channels of art’s distribution.46

Tozzi has often worked around the idea that the body can take another form, or no form, in cyberspace. This concept was illustrated in the project Virtual Frankenstein (1996), presented by a collective called Strano Network (Strange Network) one of the first BBS in Italy, which he funded with Stefano Sansavino in 1993.47 Later, Virtual Frankenstein was presented under the title Virtual

Body, and finally as Strange Day - Progetto Telematic Identity. Virtual Frankenstein is a subject made of multiple monitors. Each monitor displays a live feed transmitted by a user connected with the installation via communication technology and not located in the space where the monitors are installed. Relevant to Tozzi’s work is the possibility to deconstruct the body and re-build it as a collection of virtual body parts. As the body is electronic, Virtual Frankenstein is indeed a cyborg.

The initial title might also refer to how communication through the network happens as fragments.

For instance, when a picture is sent (or a moving image, for that matter) the file is broken in pieces and transmitted through an available channel. The pieces are re-composed at the end of the transmission once the file reaches its final destination. Hence, there is a direct analogy between breaking up a body via information technology and how information travels in pieces.

New media artists like Tozzi and Trocchi have worked around the conflict between the use and the significance of information technology, while artists such as the Giovanotti Mondani

Meccanici (GMM) have explored the practicality and the limits of making art with newly available tools. Recognized as the first maker of a computer-based comic strip, GMM orbited around the same Florence-based milieu of Tommaso Tozzi and Strano Network. The trio was initially formed by Maurizio Dami, Antonio Glessi, and Andrea Zingoni. The original group was formed only by the last two, while Maurizio Dami joined later. In a recent auto-biographical video Roberto Davini,

Loretta Mugnai, Marco Paoli, and Giancarlo Torri are also mentioned as members.48 GMM have been active since 1984. In 1985, their work was featured at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, as well as in the exhibition “Anni Ottanta” curated by Italian art critic Renato Barilli. In 1986, they made a

110 TV series titled, "Le Avventure di Marionetti," aired on RAI UNO, the main channel of RAI (Italian

National Broadcasting Company). The eleven episodes, made with computer graphic technology, were aired as part of a TV show called, "Non Necessariamente" (Unnecessarily). The series received recognition during the U-Tape Festival in Ferrara—a festival of new media art organized by the Centro Video Arte at the contemporary art museum of Palazzo dei Diamanti. Throughout the

1980s and 1990s, GMM participated in numerous exhibitions and festivals, and realized electronic moving images for theatre displays, television programs, and fashion firms such as Pitti Immagini and Gianfranco Ferré.49

Their first electronic comic strip appeared on the magazine Frigidaire with which they collaborated in 1986 (Fig. 48).50 GMM’s work was characterized by a positive—and if we consider the latest developments of information technology, one could say, naïve—approach to technology.51

In their words, they

Utilize newly available technologies in a warm and passionate manner… Today, we are asked to reinvent our philosophical, artistic, scientific, communicative, and life heritage. To take up this challenge means not to fear globalization for we have multiple worlds, multiple visions, more feelings, more creative energy.52

GMM is not only the name of the trio but also the name of the characters with “cylindrical eyes” that animated their comic strips, their videos, and their installations. Their characters are violent anti-heroes, and there is no redemption in their actions or consequences for their wrong doing. They are “replicants” similar to the ones appeared in the movie Blade Runner.53 In the comic strip, the female protagonist, Ella is raped by the trio and is shown ingesting amphetamines to forget a love delusion. The three “replicants” feel no remorse for abusing Ella. Their main concern is that she might have AIDS.

The strip was characterized by overly saturated palette and pixelated images. This was partially due to the limitations of the tool, although it served the intention of using visual elements that could be considered to be representative of a world belonging exclusively to the computer sphere, and emerging from its generative new reality where “the pencil has been replaced by the

111 bit.”54 Although carrying the illusion of a faster and more efficient way of doing things, the use of newly available technology resulted at times in complicated and slow procedures.55 Through a convoluted process that combined analog and digital technologies, GMM were able to make each scene of their comic strip entirely on the computer. Then, they photographed the screen of their

Apple 2 with a film camera and printed out photographs of the 54 digital vignettes. The latter were assembled on a poster board, the dialogues typed in, and the final product was submitted to

Frigidaire to be considered for publication. It comes as no surprise that Frigidaire published the work ignoring the violence against Ella. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Frigidaire was publishing comics strips by Tamburini. Tamburini’s main character Ranxerox often acted violently against his under-age female partner portrayed as a drug addict. In this sense, the content of some of the comics published in the magazine Frigidaire can be considered controversial. GMM’s artistic career has since moved almost exclusively within art and film festivals while crossing over to television, theatre, and performance.

From a visual art point of view, the language of social centers in the early 1980s resembled the spontaneity and irreverence of what was produced in the context of the 1977 movements, in particular following the work of artists such as Pablo Echaurren.56 For a list of the many artists who have participated in the cultural and social milieu of new media art and alternative art venues in

Italy in these years, I point to two publications without repeating here the work done by others: the first one, by Marco Deseriis and Giuseppe Marano titled, Net.Art: Arte della Connessione, was published in 2003; the second one, by Tatiana Bazzichelli titled, Networking, the Net as Artwork, was published a few years later. In both instances, new media art is considered to be as part of the artistic developments that first grew out of the historical avant-gardes of the early twentieth century and, around the end of 1960s, germinated in Fluxus and Situationism. It is plausible that since new media art was a novelty at the time, it benefited from a direct connection to both the historic avant- gardes and the well-consolidated tradition of conceptual art. However, new media art in Italy and

112 elsewhere came with specific characteristics that differentiated it from conceptual art and are investigated in the section that follows.

Conceptual art and digital media aesthetics

When new media art was first exhibited in Italy, the institutional approach was to categorize it under the rubric of conceptual art. For instance, in the text Networking, the Net as Artwork,

Tatiana Bazzichelli defines new media art in direct conversation with the historical avant-gardes of the early twentieth century and later with Fluxus and Situationism around the end of 1960s.

Certainly, the experience of Dadaism, Futurism, and thereafter Fluxus and Situationism, are fundamental artistic precursors to new media art. As mentioned, some artists had direct artistic lineage linking them to members of Fluxus. However, new media art acquired a peculiar materiality lent by the specificity of the tools utilized. Although the idea and the role of the artist are still crucial to the work, by employing information technology, artists entered a new sphere of possibilities and limitations. Their work is preoccupied with newly available tools, their potential, their metaphors, and their materiality. Even though the transmission of information does not produce an object, concerns about the translation of this transmission into visual or material results, is part of the work of new media art.

In order to clarify this further, I refer here again to Bourriaud and to his distinction between relational art and conceptual art. In particular, he writes:

The work process no longer has any supremacy over ways of rendering this work material (unlike process art and conceptual art, which, for their part, tended to fetishize the mental process to the detriment of the object).57

Speaking of materiality in new media art seems like a contradiction in terms, since the new media artwork was time-based and ephemeral. However, within the context under consideration, the visual properties of the work are important factors. There is not only an informational and computational metaphor, but also a visual metaphor or a series of visual metaphors that speak to virtuality, virtual reality, or real-virtuality. The visual presence of these works is certainly due to the immature

113 technology that favoured saturated colors, straight lines, pixelated images, and a certain flatness and sharpness of representation (Fig. 48). In addition, in the case of information technology, the process is driven by the machine and the coding language must follow exact parameters in order to deliver any results. This is such a prominent aspect of digital media that some artists work with glitches, which are the errors or flaws in the coding language that allows for the work to deliver unexpected visual results and unpredicted machine behavior, within the range of possibilities imposed by the device.58

By considering information as an artistic medium, I am then arguing for a connection between relational aesthetics as intended by Bourriaud and new media art as stemming from the

Italian scenario. Due to the visual, formal, and functional characteristics of new media art, I extend my argument to the emergence of digital media aesthetics, which marks yet another difference between conceptual art and new media art. By the rubric of media aesthetics, I refer to the formal elements that characterize art appearing on and made through a digital screen: an art that speaks of the culture of the screen.

This analysis is concerned with an age dominated by the aesthetics of flatness, sharpness, and juxtaposition of elements within or around the form of a screen, or what Bourriaud calls “the age of the screen.” Bourriaud writes that “the appearance of a major invention... alters the relationship between artists and the world.” By paraphrasing, it could be said that the appearance of the screen has altered methods of representation. Regardless of the level of sophistication of an application’s algorithms, the aesthetic of interfaces affects both the artist’s and the user’s perception. As a result, a specific system of representation is in place first when engaging with specific graphic design software, and second when using what artist Janet Zweig called an “imaging device” of any kind.59

In his essay, Thinking Color and/or Machine, German media theorist Friedrich Kittler reminds us that “we are never as in control of our technological objects as we would like to think.”60 Nonetheless, artists work at mastering the computer as a medium in the same way they do

114 with any other medium-driven art making process. Some claim that building complex, interactive works of art takes the digital media artist back to an era before the pre-manufacturing of artist’s supplies, because of the necessity of collaborating with other individuals–the so-called experts–and of experimentation.61 However, the novelty of new media does not lie in experimentation. When visiting an artist’s studio, one finds that re-elaboration or manipulation of existing technologies is always in play. It was there before the pre-manufacturing era and it continues to be there. What has changed–besides the medium, currently made of a computing language–is the nature of the interaction between artist and device, human and machine, which involves human consciousness as well as cultural conventions.

In her essay, “Computer Imagery: Imitation and Representation of Realities,” Beverly Jones pointed out that:

Computer-generated images, objects, and events have existed a short time relative to theoretical stances that are embedded in them… selection of images and modes of presentation are made by the creator, and these selections are inherently related to aesthetic and technological conventions established within the culture of the creator whether or not the creator is consciously aware of these conventions.62

In other words, borrowing from French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s statement according to which contemporary culture producers are “within the sign,” artists making computer-mediated art cannot refrain from being within the digital aesthetics of representation.63 Media theorist Anne-Sophie

Lehmann noted that “the continuous effort to recreate traditional materiality in virtual environments does not restrain the development of tools and material of an essentially digital nature, without precursors in non-digital domain.”64 Therefore, early computational devices borrowed visual clues from the existing world. However, they come with their own set of properties that are representative of the flatness and sharpness of the screen and of the limits and possibilities of coding.

Algorithms and data allow digital objects to be reproduced instantly and potentially ad infinitum with the same numeric characteristics. Pixilation plays an important role in a computer- simulated representation. As described by Manovich, a single digital image can consist of millions of pixels. A pixel contains only one color, no shadow or reflection, which is why digital color can

115 look so sharp, but also so flat. In addition, simulation of shadow and reflection seem to be extremely difficult to cope with for digital devices. Image resolution plays a fundamental role, then as it quantifies the number of pixels an image is made of and determines the degree of fidelity of image simulation. Although current technology allows users to control and modify how light behaves on a surface to mimic the natural world, light and shadow are still broken down into a number of flat-colored pixels. Moreover, these kinds of effects are extremely demanding in terms of image information, and when transferring files, even if at the speed of light, the journey might result in loss of information—which, as mentioned, travels “in pieces”—and digital objects may not maintain their reliability.65 This is particularly true when files are saved as JPEGs (for images) or

MPEGs (for videos). A computer-based representation is programmed to be mimesis, but can only achieve simulation. In addition, representation varies from device to device due to the quality of the screen and the transferring mode of image information.66 And yet, differences in digital images are largely ignored. When facing this instability on the screen–although we acknowledge that we are looking at two different iterations of the same image–we disregard this detail and continue to believe in the infallibility of computer visual reproduction. Computing language devices have their own virtual reality which includes specific visual characteristics. Therefore, on the one hand, artists who work with the computer as their main mean of production have the opportunity to modify their product through a large range of sophisticated applications or by manipulating the software. On the other hand, the computer retains control over representation as well as certain instability. These characteristics are endemic of digital tools and constitute the aesthetic of digital media. Following the unification of media under the umbrella of a univocal computational language, the visual performance of digital tools has marked a shift in the visual paradigm from the analog to the digital.

In conclusion, I have argued that Information is endemic in the work of media art and it is the condition of the genre.67 New media tools are cultural products and they are part of an epistemology of information technology from which the relationship between humans and machines

116 is inextricable. Ontologically, information technology has therefore changed our behavior irreversibly. As the distinction between old and new media has been obliterated by the digital language (Manovich), the studies on media effects on humans are mostly concerned with how dependency from the media and interactivity has had a greater impact on our relationship with these tools and on our consciousness. Further, throughout its development, information technology has favoured user interaction trackability, an aspect that has recently spurred relevant concerns from governments in the United States and Europe following the Facebook data scandal.68 However,

Agre has demonstrated that unpredictability remains an obstacle to a certain development of information technology that is exclusively geared towards a data driven relationship between the human and the machine. Perhaps this unpredictability is what speaks the most to the impossibility to frame the relationship between humans and machines as exclusively related to calculus.

Concerns around the horizontal use of the Internet were at the core of Hacktivists’ debates held in social centers in the 1990s.69 By working with all aspects of a networked society and its tools—such as the hybridization of our body, virtual travel, the constant presence of a controlling superstructure, and the emergence of a self-centered spectacle—artists who were drawn to working in social centers have highlighted a sense of unsettlement that relates to the human-machine relationship. Through an investigation both of information as an artistic medium and the specificity of the tools employed, I have highlighted how new media art emerging within the context of Italian social centers depart from the tradition of conceptual art. At the same time, I have investigated how a new aesthetic emerged through the use and the characteristics of digital tools. New media art brings along a new materiality that carries specific visual elements and results.

Although it remains impossible to speak to the entirety of new media art production in Italy in the period under consideration, the production of Tommaso Tozzi, Agnese Trocchi, and the

GMM has served as an example of the range of work that was produced and, most importantly, of its relationship to information technology, with which is what these artists have been mainly concerned. Initial display of new media art in Italy was somehow problematic, due to curatorial and

117 technical difficulties that will be investigated in the next chapter where I analyze issues related to presenting and preserving digital art. This analysis looks at digital curatorship, institutional approaches and opportunities to write about and present digital art, which take into consideration the specificity of the medium. Further, the next chapter delves briefly into the exhibition history of new media art in Italy in the 1980s and 1990s.

118 NOTES

1 The computational metaphor refers to the “psychological metaphor” according to which the computer and the human relationship should be seen as a symbiosis rather than as a prosthetic relationship. The “psychological metaphor” is attributed to two computer scientists: Vannevar Bush, who refers to it in his essay “As we may think,” (1945) and to J.C.R. Licklider, who refers to it in his essay, “Man-Computer Symbiosis” (1960). Castellucci, Paola, Dall’ipertesto al web. Storia culturale dell’informatica, Laterza 2009, p 82

2 The commercial is often referred to as “iconic” in the media. See, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/apples-iconic- 1984-ad-25-years-later/, Accessed April 2019

3 The shift from considering the human and machine as separated to considering them as co-penetrating one with another was emphasized in a recent series of meetings held at the art studio of the Rome-based collective, NONE. In particular, during the first meeting, it was clarified that the approach to an investigation of the issue revolving around the domination of the machine in contemporary art and society, was no longer based on a distinction between natural and artificial. At the meeting were Tatiana Bazzichelli, Agnese Trocchi, and Valerio Mattioli (who is part of the collective of Forte Prenestino and he is involved with various projects about art and technology) among others. Notes from the meeting. Rome, January 27, 2018

4 This approach stems from an interpretation of the theory of technology by German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, which is characterized by a technological determinism. The technological deterministic approach is the one following which the relationship between man with technology is dominated by the latter. Therefore, any interaction with technology is technologically driven. Cfr, Heidegger, Martin, The question concerning technology, 1977

5 See, Chapter One.

6 See, Chun, Wendy H. K., Programmed Visions. Software and Memory, The MIT Press, 2013

7 Media art historian, Carolyn L. Kane speaks extensively about this approach to calculation as stemming from an Heideggerian reflection on the ratio as a technical process. Kane L., Carolyn, Chromatic Algorithms. Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code, The University of Chicago Press, 2014, p 14

8 Kane, C., ib., [Emphasis original]

9 Kane, C., ib., [Emphasis original]

10 As noted by Carolyn Kane, technological determinism and media specificity are generally analogous. Even though, I rely on information as a structure of digital media—therefore I refer to its medium specificity—I also consider it as a component that speaks to meaning making, and therefore is not prescribed within the medium exclusively.

11 By a positivistic approach, I consider here the 19th century science-based approach to the knowledge of nature according to which natural phenomena can only be explained through logic, reason, and data analysis as gathered through machines. I refrain from criticizing or opposing the scientific method. Simply, I wish to emphasize that it is based on scientific conventions. As noted by Daston and Galison in their article, "The Image of Objectivity," such positivistic approach is the same that helped to construct the concept of mechanical objectivity in opposition to human subjectivity. In this regard, an investigation that interprets the relationship between humans and machines through the lenses of digitization or calculation seems to stem from a very similar approach as the one that generated the concept of mechanical objectivity. Cfr, Daston, Lorraine, and Galison, Peter, "The Image of Objectivity." Representations, no. 40, 1992, pp 81-128

12 Mumford, Lewis, “Tool Users vs Homo Sapiens and the Megamachine,” in Philosophy of Technology, co-ed. By Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek, 2014, p 382

13 Agre, Philip, Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy, in The Information Society 10:2, 1994, pp 101–127

14 Agre, p 109

15 Agre, p 113

16 McLuhan, Marshall, “Introduction to the second edition,” in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964

119

17 Bazzichelli, Tatiana, Networking, the Net as Artwork, Aarhus University, 2009, p 25

18 Bazzichelli, T., p 20

19 See, Chapter One, and http://www.strano.net/bazzichelli/engcom_stampa.htm (February 2002) Accessed April, 2019

20 Cfr, Bourriaud, Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics, Les presses du réel, 1998

21 Bourriaud, Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics, Les presses du réel, 1998, p 14

22 As noted by Dutch visual artist and curator Jeanne van Heeswijk, the communication presenter-spectator “has been entirely appropriated by the commercial world.” Cited in, Bishop, Claire, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, Verso, 2012, p 11

23 “Se nella prima dimensione il lavoro svolgeva una funzione di critica del Sistema dell’arte, nella sua seconda dimensione lo stesso lavoro assumeva invece una dimensione di tipo relazionale.” From an interview with the author. Florence, July, 2016. (All translations my own, unless otherwise specified).

24 The definition of Hacker art by Tommaso Tozzi is available in English in Bazzichelli, T., 125-6 and in Italian on https://web.archive.org/web/20180717163759/https://avana.forteprenestino.net/hackerart.htm, Accessed July, 2018 [Emphasis added]

25 Cfr, Bazzichelli, Tatiana, Disrupting Business. Art & Activism In Times Of Financial Crisis, co-edited with Geoff Cox, Autonomedia, 2013

26 Haraway, Donna, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, in ‘Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature,’ New York, Routledge, 1991, pp 149-181

27 “La nostra testa è nei micro-processori elettronici, la nostra memoria è nei computer, l’immaginazione nelle immagini dei mass media, ma tutto poi rientra misteriosamente nei nostri corpi fisici, ed è li che viene alla fine filtrato, plasmato, modellato.” Alinovi, Francesca, “L’Arte MIA,” in ITERARTE, n. 21 (1981), p 46

28 “L’arte MIA è dunque l’arte della creatività del singolo, che si collega a tanti altri individui, autonomi, per ricavarne un allargamento ed un potenziamento indefinito di sé.” [Emphasis added] Alinovi, Francesca, “L’Arte MIA,” in ITERARTE, n. 21 (1981), p 47. Francesca Alinovi died tragically in 1983. I was lucky to encounter her work not only in libraries, but also through the memories of her friends and the artists who felt touched by her intellectual acumen and her art historical approach. Among these people are Gino Giannuzzi of Neon Gallery and Tommaso Tozzi, who I thank for sharing their stories with me.

29 This analysis stems mostly from observations by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi about labor in relation to time. Further, it stems from a reflection over the category of the “contemporary” as emerged in recent art historical discourses. References can be found in Agamben, Giorgio, “What is the contemporary?,” in What is an Apparatus, Stanford University Press, 2009; Hal Foster as well as Miwon Kwon in Questionnaire on “The Contemporary,” October 130, Fall 2009, and in response to that, David Clark in Field Notes, Issue 1, 2012.04. Also, Smith, Terry, What is Contemporary Art?, University of Chicago Press, 2009. See also the introduction.

30 Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’, Manifesto of Post-Futurism, http://eipcp.net/n/1234779255?lid=1234779848, Accessed July, 2018

31 See Negri, Antonio, Insurgencies, Constituent Power and the Modern State, University of Minnesota Press, 1999

32 “La possibilità di comunicare attraverso i media con gli altri luoghi in cui la comunicazione non era confezionata con l’unico scopo di vendere un prodotto, ma per una genuina ricerca del bene comune.” From an interview with the author. Florence, July, 2016. Please note, the English sentence is not a literal quote of the Italian, as the translation has been adapted to the text. – See also, Chapter One.

33 See, Deseriis, Marco, and Marano, Giuseppe, Net.Art, the Art of Connection, Shake Edizioni, 2008, and Bazzichelli, T., Networking, the Net as Artwork.

34 A recent exhibition framed these aspects as part of the crucial transformations occurred with the advent of the Internet, which is considered as a prominent cultural factor effecting art making in all mediums in the past three decades. See, “Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to today,” ICA/Boston, Feb-March, 2018 120

35 See, Chapter Two.

36 See, note 3.

37 http://www.newmacchina.net/idrunners/discordia/disvir.htm, Accessed July, 2018

38 https://anthology.rhizome.org/a-cyber-feminist-manifesto-for-the-21st-century, Accessed July, 2018. I have used here the name net.art, rather than Net Art, to refer to the very early stages of this practice. In 1995, according to the recount of artist Vuk Cosic, “net.art” was randomly phrased by a computer in an email he received whose lettering was wrongly converted into a series of incomprehensible ASCII characters. Deseriis, M., Deseriis, M., and Marano, G., Net.Art, the Art of Connection, pp 14-15

39 See, Deseriis, M., and Marano, G., Net.Art, the Art of Connection; Bazzichelli, T., Networking, the Net as Artwork, and Tanni, Valentina, Net Art (1993-2001), Thesis Project, Università La Sapienza, Rome, Italy

40 “Elaborai una figura [che] ricordava un vampiro.” From an interview with the author. Florence, July, 2016

41 “Poi ho smesso di fare graffiti con gli spray ed ho iniziato a fare graffiti digitali, dentro le reti telematiche.” From an interview with the author. Florence, July, 2016

42 “Bambina Precoce” fanzine has been recently featured as part of the exhibition, “Street Art – Bansky & Co. in the Urban Form,” Palazzo Pepoli, March-June, 2016 Bologna, Italy

43 From an interview with the author. Florence, July, 2016

44 On the relationship with Giuseppe Chiari, Tozzi affirms: “[He] tried to make me think of and understand the artistic context around us. His works of art and his happenings were fundamentally pedagogical [it was an art] that wanted to spur awareness.” From an interview with the author. Florence, July, 2016

45 “Da qualche anno stavo studiando a fondo l’arte concettuale, gli happening e stavo iniziando a sperimentare gli incroci possibili tra arte e media tecnologici. In particolar modo la mia ricerca verteva verso un uso sociale delle pratiche artistiche.” From an interview with the author. Florence, July, 2016

46 “Da una parte vi era la considerazione post-dunchampiana, post-concettuale e di area semiologica sull’influenza del contesto espositivo sul significato dell’opera; dall’altra parte vi era invece la ricerca di un operare artistico che potesse evadere i circuiti di diffusione dell’arte ufficiali.” From an interview with the author. Florence, July, 2016

47 Virtual Frankenstein was a happening created by Tommaso Tozzi that employed information technology. The installation was presented in occasion of Telematica libera in libero Stato, an event curated by Strano Network and held in Scandicci (Florence) in 1996 - https://web.archive.org/web/20180202123154/http://www.tommasotozzi.it/index.php?title=Virtual_Frankenstein_1_(19 96), Accessed July, 2018

48 The video was made available to me by Antonio Glessi, member of GMM.

49 Material made available by Antonio Glessi.

50 The magazine Frigidaire is discussed in Chapter Two.

51 I am referring in particular to aspects of information technology such as the surveillance system as well as the selling of personal data. See, BBC, “Facebook Scandal. Who is selling your personal data?” July 17, 2018 - https://web.archive.org/web/20180717133323/https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44793247, Accessed July, 2018

52 “Utilizza in maniera calda e passionale le nuove tecnologie …Oggi ci viene richiesto di reinventare il nostro patrimonio filosofico, artistico, scientifico, comunicativo, vitale. E accettare la sfida significa non avere paura del mondo globale, perché noi abbiamo più mondi, più visioni, più cuore, più energie di creazione.” From a biographical note made available to me by Antonio Glessi.

53 Directed by Ridley Scott, the movie was released in 1984.

121

54 L'Unità, "Sogni elettronici al bar tabù con i replicanti ultimo modello," April 17, 1984. Trans.: “Electric dreams at the Bar Taboo with the last version of replicants.”

55 For instance, Tozzi remembers that in the 80s and 90s, if he wanted to communicate via information technology "the simple procedure of setting up and connecting via modem was convoluted and slow." From an interview with the author. Florence, July, 2016

56 Rome-based artist Pablo Echaurren produced comics and drawings for the news outlet Lotta Continua and the magazine A/traverso. His work was recently featured in an exhibition titled, “Il Piombo e le Rose. Utopia e Creatività nel Movimento 1977”, held at the Museo di Roma in Trastevere, Exhibition catalogue, Roma: Postcart, 2017. Also See, Chapter Two.

57 Bourriaud, N., p 47

58 As clarified by Carolyn L. Kane, the “aesthetics of interference” has characterized many artists working with both analog and digital media. As elaborated by Friedrich Kittler, this expression refers to “a set of stylistic techniques that intentionally deploy machine noise, distortion, and clashing elements.” See, Kane, Carolyn L., Chromatic Algorithms. Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code, The University of Chicago Press, 2014, p 176

59 An imaging device is any device with a screen. Quote in Ascott, Roy, A Turning on Technology, http://www.scribd.com/doc/23611542/A-Turning-on-Technology-by-Roy-Ascott, Accessed July, 2018

60 Kittler, Friedrich, “Thinking Color and/or Machine” in Theory Culture Society, Vol. 23 (2006), p 40

61 Lehmann, Ann-Sophie, “Invisible Work: The Representation of Artistic Practice in Digital Visual Culture” in Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice, Bristol, 2009, p 33

62 Jones, Beverly, “Computer Imagery: Imitation and Representation of Realities,” in Leonardo, Supplemental Issue, Vol. 2, Computer Art in Context: SIGGRAPH '89 ArtShow Catalog (1989), p 32

63 Derrida, Jacques, Signature, Event, Context, Baltimore, 1977

64 Lehmann, “Invisible Work: The Representation of Artistic Practice in Digital Visual Culture,” p 40

65 Manovich, Lev, Language of New Media, 2001, p 40

66 Kane, Carolyn L., “Programming the Beautiful. Informatic Color and Aesthetic Transformations in Early Computer Art,” in Theory, Culture, and Society, Vol. 27, Issue 1, (2010), 73-93, p 88

67 The expression “condition of a genre” is borrowed by Rosalind Krauss as used in her essay on video and medium specificity. See, Krauss, Rosalind, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissim,” in October, Vol. 1 (Spring, 1976), 50-64, p 50

68 “Data is the new oil” – BBC, “Facebook Scandal. Who is selling your personal data?” July 17, 2018 - https://web.archive.org/web/20180717133323/https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44793247, Accessed July, 2018

69 I discussed the concerns around the use of information technology in social centers in Chapter Two.

122 4.

Exhibiting the digital

In this chapter, I investigate exhibition opportunities for new media art in Italy in the 1980s and the 1990s. The chapter is divided into two sections. In the first section, I explore how new media art was presented to the public via institutional venues such as the Venice Biennale and the

Quadriennale in Rome as well as contemporary art galleries, artist-run spaces, and festivals that prompted and promoted new media art. In the second section, I explore the online archive of artist and activist Tommaso Tozzi. Due to the shortage of institutions devoted to the conservation of early new media art, this online platform constitutes a document of undeniable importance that gathers the experience of artists and activists as it occurred within the Italian network culture of the late

1980s throughout the 1990s.

In section one, I briefly mentioned two exhibitions that took place in New York City in 1970 that dealt with the theme of art and technology: “Software: Information Technology: Its meaning for Art,” held at the Jewish Museum; and “Information,” held at the Museum of Modern Art.

Reasons to go back to these exhibitions are mainly that their opposite approach to art and technology have been resonating with the field of digital curating since. In a recent lecture as part of the Media Art Festival in Rome, Italy, curator Sarah Cook pointed to “Information” as the exhibition that marked the separation between conceptual art and new media art. According to

Cook, such a separation is no longer a concern as new media art is now seen as not necessarily contingent to its technology. Cook is referring to more recent and current work in which artists already conceptualize the result of their practice as transitory, and as something that can easily adapt from one version of a software to the next.1 My study of Tozzi’s website in the second section of this chapter, will delve into the matter even further.

In the first section, I consider the experience of the Electronic Art Festival of Camerino, a joint venture between the public University of Camerino, in the region of Marche, and tech-

123 companies interested in the potentialities of employing new technologies in art. As noted by

Christiane Paul, “the history of technology and media science plays an equally important role in

[new media] art’s formation and reception.”2 It is therefore relevant to consider that one of the main events featuring new media art was the conference “L’Immagine Elettronica,” held in Bologna throughout the 1980s, which, in a similar way to the Electronic Art Festival of Camerino, was sponsored by hi-tech companies and attended by scientists and humanists alike. Last, I focus on some of the activities of the Centro Video Arte, an art organization based in Ferrara, active between

1974 and 1994, that operated as a hub for Italian and international artists experimenting with new technology, video, and computer art.

Attention is posed on numerous and fragmented exhibition opportunities in order to re- evaluate the experience of early new media art in Italy, and to investigate how this novelty was presented to the public at the time. Often, exhibition settings and layouts resulted in difficulties in viewer’s interpretation and experience. Curatorial models for new media art were a concern for museum and gallery curators, and the experimental aspects of both the artwork and how it was proposed caused an uneasy response from both the public and the critics. This was due in part to a divisive approach to new media art. On the one side, many critics, art historians and curators interpreted new available technology simply as tools that marked a continuation of the long-live relationship between art and science. On the other side, new media art curators, artists and activists, were convinced that these newly available tools marked a paradigm shift and had a greater impact on artistic practices.

As noted by Cook, “new media art has flourished with the support of smaller media-specific organizations.”3 This was no different in Italy where along more institutionalized organizations, such as the Centro Video Arte, social centers took on the role of new media art laboratories.

However, the differences and peculiarities of social centers as alternative art sites possibly represented one more riddle to solve in the intricate relationship between the art world and new media art, due in part to the political connotations of the work. As a result, the artistic production

124 occurred within the Italian network culture struggled to enter a broader art historical narrative. Last, this exploration reveals that no plans were put in place by any institutions or organizations in Italy for preserving new media art throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Hence, in the second part of the chapter, I explore Tozzi’s attempt to preserve the memory of the artistic experiences and experimentations with new media in the period under investigation.

By considering the significance of making an archive, this analysis is in conversation with recent scholarship, from Wolfang Ernst to Sven Spieker, that considers the tradition of information accumulation as stemming from modern bureaucratic practices, and focuses on the relevance of the absence—i.e. the importance of considering what it is not preserved—and the role of the maker. At the same time, in line with current curatorial discourses on exhibiting the digital, from Sarah Cook to Christiane Paul, I investigate the possibilities of displaying new media art in light of its obsolescence and of the technical difficulties it presents.

The exhibition context

Two exhibitions are important precedents to frame the practice of presenting and interpreting new media art prior 1980s. They both took place in New York City in the 1970 within a few months from each another: “Software: Information Technology: Its meaning for Art” at the

Jewish Museum and “Information” at the Museum of Modern Art. According to philosopher

Charlie Gere, the exhibition “Information” took on the conceptual part of the work and left out the technology linked to the computer.4 In addition, even if most of the artists included in the two shows were the same, “Software: Information Technology: Its meaning for Art” featured technologists and engineers, while “Information” did not. This detail is important in light of the consideration that “Information” is the exhibition that registered in the art world and it spoke to an approach following which the museum was consolidated as a venue for conceptual work while the computer was excluded from the realm of art. According to Gere, the curators of “Software:

Information Technology: Its meaning for Art,” interpreted the future of art as “a means of engaging

125 with the concepts, technologies, and systems through which society was increasingly organized.”5

At the same time, Gere affirms that:

The apogee of this thoroughly utopian project also represented the beginning of its demise, and the replacement of its idealism and techno-futurism with the irony and critique of conceptual art.6

This demise started to be seen within the exhibition at the MOMA, where information as a cultural phenomenon was considered and discussed, but the specificity of the medium was deliberately ignored. As highlighted in the exhibition catalogue:

Those [artists] represented are part of a culture that has been considerably altered by communications systems such as television and films and by increasing mobility. Therefore, photographs, documents, films, and ideas, which are rapidly transmitted, have become an important part of this new work.7

The making of the catalogue can also be interpreted as a way to reinforce the idea behind the work, rather than the medium. Any challenges posed to the museum and to the viewer by conceptual art could be part of how, through the institution, the work could encounter the beholder. For instance, as a response to the question “how would you like your work to be represented in the catalogue?” each artist ultimately created an additional work of conceptual art. The page dedicated to Walter

DeMaria featured an article by the Time magazine that talked about him; Joseph Beuys had pictures of his work and performances; Hans Haacke proposed a survey for the visitors regarding certain social issues; Joseph Kosuth reinstated his theories of art. In other words, the work was concerned with information as the “the focus of production in the West.”8 However, tools, devices and their technical specificity found no space for an in-depth investigation. As noted by Gere, artists themselves “evinced an increasingly distanced and critical attitude toward technology.”9

By the end of the 1970s, the radical motivation against technology had lost his grip and several initiatives investigating the theme of art and technology emerged, among which was Ars

Electronica.10 In Italy, as noted by scholar Francesca Gallo, the atmosphere around newly available technology was permeated with words such as “Renaissance” or “Electronic Resurgence,” in particular with the occasion of the Electronic Art Festival of Camerino. 11 In 1986, the Venice

126 Biennale gave much attention to a renewed interest in the relationship between art and science: a thematic umbrella under which the latest developments in the field of communication technology were featured. The title of the Biennale was indeed “Art and Science,” and opened to the viewer with a visual representation of a subatomic particle network, setting the stage for a visual travel into a techno-futurism that had been abandoned in the previous decade (Fig. 49). The network was shown on three luminous walls of a fully reconstructed room, a replica of the one in which the

Italian scientist and Nobel laureate, Carlo Rubia had used in Geneva, Switzerland. There, in 1985, as part of the project “UA1,” he had tracked subatomic particles after the collusion between matter and antimatter.12

The 1986 Biennale explored how technology had partnered with art throughout centuries, and featured work inspired by the study of alchemy as well as computer art. In particular, at the

Corderie dell’Arsenale, a section titled, “Tecnologia and Informatica” (Technology and Computer

Science) was dedicated to how communication systems intertwined with art through a series of technological tools (Fig. 50).13 Artist and activist Roy Ascott—who participated as both a curator and an artist—pointed out that new media art had extended its practice into telematic networking through videotext, telefax, videodisc, and Slow Scan Television, through which viewers could communicate with other users worldwide while seated in the physical space of the Corderie.14 The network metaphor was the path along which the viewer could move from Rubia’s room to the cyberspace. Samples of communications previously elaborated by artists were hanging on the wall as well as on a large table in the center of the exhibition space, while computer generated images were projected on two big screens overseeing the installation site.

Ascott presented “La Plissure du Text,” which was precisely an example of distant communication through the computer, although according to him, the project “passed without comment in the art press.”15 However, from a review of the Italian art press, it seems that this section had gathered much attention, but the majority of critics were not enthusiastic about the intersection of art and information technology. Even though a local paper called the installation

127 “one of the most interesting sections” of the whole biennial, in the same outlet, another editor disapproved of the fair-like look of the Corderie.16 Artist, critic, and art historian Gillo Dorfles, who was considered one of the most important commentators of contemporary art in Italy, wrote that,

The only problem is not to confuse the technological equipment with the artistic result…we run the risk to be in awe with the technical possibilities of the medium without considering the truly artistic results.17

Enrico Filippini in the art section of La Repubblica, one of the main Italian dailies, echoed:

Except for the scarcity of tools and ideas, what should be the realm of information and technological invention is a pure and simple realm of indiscernible noise.18

An exception to these rather aloof comments appeared in the press was represented by Claudio

Carlone’s reviews.19 Regarding information technology, Carlone spoke of “a new container for art,” in which the “artist is surpassed, overwhelmed, perhaps powerless [as] the gap between the possibilities of the tools and creativity is almost unbridgeable.”20 It remains unclear whether any of these commentators tried to sit at a desk and interact with the machinery on display (Fig. 51).

Nonetheless, the installation happened within the context of a biennial largely dedicated to the latest developments in communication technology, was supported by adequate equipment and had a curatorial approach that was clearly stated by Roy Ascott, as well as Don Foresta and Tom

Sherman—who co-curated “Tecnologia e Informatica”—in their catalogue essays.21 Most importantly, Ascott highlighted that the medium had a fundamental role in the making of the work, in his words:

What matters is not only the process of interaction, but also the mediation that occurs through the computer, which suggests a paradigm shift in the very nature of art.22

As demonstrated by the press reactions, the possibility for a paradigm shift was not perceived as such. Reasons were several. On the one hand, the practical difficulties that still characterized the use of the computer and the understanding of its functionalities for the audience compromised the perception of the work.23 On the other hand, even though, the installation took place within a biennial that purposely looked at the theme of art and science, the approach of the main curator of this edition of the Biennale, Maurizio Calvesi was to frame technology as part of the ongoing

128 artistic exploration as stemming from the avant-garde, and in particular from Futurism, as he, himself stated.24 Calvesi also affirmed:

On the one hand, “Art and Science” will uncover the limits of technology in art in its more flagrant forms. On the other, it will show how art imaginary also uses obsolete forms of science such as alchemy.25

In other words, the overarching interpretation by Calvesi was to insert these new instances in art as part of an ongoing relationship between art and science that stemmed from medieval alchemy, and reached all the way to the contemporary.26 As noted by Maria Grazia Mattei, at the beginning of the

1980s the “official culture was totally disinterested in new artistic expressions and in the use of the computer outside of the sphere of labour.”27 Therefore, even though, the 1986 Venice Biennale was an opportunity to showcase these new instances in art, the work was framed as belonging to a progressive evolution ingrained in history.28 This was evidently in contrast with the approach of the curatorial team of “Tecnologia e Informatica.”

For a different approach to the work, it is necessary to look at the circuit of festivals that, along with social centers, offered a valuable vitrine for experimental work. A small group of curators have been preoccupied with presenting new media art to a growing audience and to frame it in its own terms.29 Within this group were Valerio Eletti, who collaborated to the section

“Tecnologia e Informatica” at the Biennale, and Lola Bonora, founder of the Centro Video Arte in

Ferrara.30 Valerio Eletti was involved with the Electronic Art Festival of Camerino, in the region of

Marche, Italy, that run from 1983 through 1990. Lola Bonora, who had founded the Centro Video

Arte in 1974, also held courses of video art at the New York University in Venice, and collaborated with Palazzo dei Diamanti, a contemporary art center based in Ferrara that currently hosts the archive of the Centro Video Arte, which folded in 1994.

The Electronic Art Festival was initiated by the city of Camerino with the collaboration of the local university. It received support from tech-companies, among which Apple, and CGE –

Computer Graphic Europe, as well as from private entrepreneurs, such as Alfredo Bini, who was a film producer. Thanks to these collaborations, the festival was able to fund experimental work such

129 as the one presented by artists Franco Angeli, Giulio Turcato, and Alighiero Boetti in 1984.

According to Gianni Blumthaler—curator of several editions of the festival along with Valerio

Eletti, Rinaldo Funari, and Vittorio Fagone—there was no structure in place to train artists to work with the computer for commercial purposes as the first school program of this kind inaugurated at the beginning of the 2000s at the Brera Art Academy in Milan.31 Therefore, it was precious to receive support from tech-companies although they tended to engage only with well-known artists.

A considerable amount of the work on view at the Electronic Art Festival of Camerino was dedicated to the intersection between computer art and television. RAI, Italy’s national broadcasting company, allowed artists to experiment with new technology made available by CGE company.

These experiments were then featured as part of the Electronic Art Festival or included in television shows such as “La Pittronica,” (“Paintronic”) in which artist Emilio Greco demonstrated how to paint with recently released computer software.32 As mentioned, in addition to artists, the festival was an opportunity to know the work of humanists whose research revolved around the theme of art and technology, such as Mario Costa— a philosopher of media, who had been also in touch with

Lola Bonora—and Antonio Caronia, a writer orbiting around the milieu of the Italian counter- culture.33 In 1989, the organizing committee of the Electronic Art Festival changed and it seems as the initial idea to fund the making of new artworks—that was carried out for several editions—was abandoned. Finally, in 1990, the festival folded.

Although short-lived, the Electronic Art Festival of Camerino represented an important point of convergence for artists, curators, and everyone interested and involved in new media art in

Italy in these years. It brought together established and emerging artists, and it tried to reach out to the public in alternative ways. For instance, in occasion of the 1984’s edition, a closed television network was installed throughout the city of Camerino, taking the festival outside of its traditional sites of Palazzo Ducale and the Rocca dei Borgia.34

Along with the festival of Camerino, the Centro Video Arte in Ferrara, contributed in enhancing the debate around art and technology. In particular, two main events favored the

130 encounter between the general public and new media art at the Centro Video Arte: one was the U-

Tape festival, which presented work in several media, although produced elsewhere; the other was

Video-Set, which was entirely dedicated to site-specific installations to be realized within the spaces made available at the Palazzo dei Diamanti (Fig. 52). The Centro Video Arte contributed to launch the career of several young artists who, at the time, were experimenting with video and other media.35 The role of the Centro Video Arte was to accompany new media along the transition “from the phase of the astonishing to that of customary.”36 Lola Bonora tried to make the public familiar with new instances in art for almost two decades through which the Centro Video Arte featured countless Italian and international artists, including Fabrizio Plessi, Giulio Paolini, Alfredo Pirri,

Joan Jonas, and Bill Viola, among others.

In particular, among the artists whose work is under investigation, the Centro Video Arte featured repeatedly the Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici (GMM), who received a special mention in the 1985 edition of U-Tape for:

The entirety of the production throughout the year; for their lively creativity in the field of computer art, through which they demonstrate the promising resources of the digital image in creating characters and narrations.37

Further, in 1986, artist and activist Giacomo Verde—who has collaborated with Tommaso Tozzi in many occasions—participated in Video-Set with an installation titled, I˚ Video-Totem Est-Etica

Antica-T-Astro-Fisica (Fig. 53).38 In a letter sent to Lola Bonora, Verde describes the installation as:

The first of a series of works as part of a project for an aesthetic research dedicated to the anti-catastrophic or to the disaster.39

Verde is here referring to the work of Renè Thom and his catastrophe theory, which look at phenomena characterized by a strange and sudden change of behavior. Verde is fascinated with the idea that an apparent negative phenomenon, the catastrophe, can lead to a positive result. In the letter to Lola Bonora, he speaks of a “constructive posi-negativism.”40 Works by Verde were featured at U-Tape in 1985 and 1986 as well.

131 Despite the profuse efforts of the Centro Video Arte in promoting a dialogue between the

“official culture” and new technologies, still in 1986, Vittorio Boarini in “La Repubblica” defined the organization as a “little known art center.”41 At the same time, Boarini highlights how U-Tape was a competitive international festival and how in Italy these new forms of expressions lacked proper consideration, while they received conspicuous funding in other countries.42 Generally, the reviews were characterized by a positive attitude towards the activities of the Centro Video Arte.

However, renowned art writer Mario de Candia—who considered U-Tape as “the only moment of dialogue and documentation of these artistic activities in Italy”—had defined the work on view as amateurish, fragmented, lugubrious, difficult to pinpoint within a specific genre.43 Lola Bonora seemed to answer to this and similar comments in a letter dated January 9, 1987 in which she confessed that the festival went over budget and continued: “I let you imagine the bliss of those who try hard and with passion to eliminate these types of initiatives as they are meant for a minority of elitists… blah, blah, blah…”44

In several occasions, the Centro Video Arte tried to make clear to its detractors that artists did not have a naive approach to technology, their production was not about an “extreme technical rigidity,” but rather:

Artists use the electronic tool with sensitivity and intelligence, in order not to celebrate its alleged miraculous role in a fetishizing way. Instead, they want to unravel the original assumptions of these “modern marvels,” the human implications of the new “magic” powers of the image.45

The Centro Video Arte brought Lola Bonora to collaborate with “L’Immagine Elettronica,”

(Electronic Image) in occasion of which she was able to commission installations by artists such as

Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Nam June Paik.46

“L’Immagine Elettronica” was an annual conference dedicated to information technology.

Along with scientists, engineers, and scholars, “L’Immagine Elettronica” featured tech-companies and businesses, and it received considerable financial support from the city of Bologna, and the region of Emilia-Romagna. The art exhibition usually took place at the Galleria Comunale in

132 Bologna. When the financial support from the city languished, Bonora was able to transfer the art exhibition at the Venice Biennale, under the umbrella of the Cinema Festival. Due to its connections with the market and the business world, “L’Immagine Elettronica” received much attention in the press, while U-Tape or Video-Set were often considered marginal events. In an interview, Lola Bonora lamented the difficulties faced by stating,

You have to fight…against the ignorance of the so-called experts, “critics” who only recently discovered this art form and who are suspicious about everything that moves toward it. People working in this field are accused of xenophilia. Although, [the reason] we go as pilgrims to foreign countries [is] their approach to videoartists.47

It is relevant to notice that, when held in Venice, “L’Immagine Elettronica” was not part of the visual arts biennial, rather it was presented under the department of “Cinema and Television entertainment,” which partnered with the conference in Bologna.48 However, it was not unusual for artists to be featured at the visual arts biennial in Venice as well as at “L’Immagine Elettronica.”

For instance, in 1986, as part of the Biennale curated by Maurizio Calvesi, artist Fabrizio

Plessi—who exhibited extensively at the Centro Video Arte—was selected for the Italian pavilion.

As mentioned, Calvesi’s approach to new technology was far from believing that any paradigm shift was in the making. Although Plessi was not new to the Biennale where he had exhibited in

1970, 1972, and 1978, to be included in the Italian pavilion was certainly a significant moment in his career.49 A few weeks before the inauguration of the Biennale, Plessi was defining the details of his participation in “L’Immagine Elettronica” with Lola Bonora. A controversy spurred as Plessi asked Bonora to remove his installation titled, “Mare di Marmo” (Marble Sea) fearing retaliation from the Biennale’s commissioners (Fig. 54). With the publicity fresh off the press featuring

Plessi’s name and work, Bonora refused to de-install the work. She also reassured Plessi that he had nothing to fear. Although a misunderstanding among Bonora and Calvesi had compromised their working relationship years earlier, she guaranteed Plessi that Calvesi was a “prepared and attentive” man, and no consequences would follow.50 Indeed, Plessi’s work was featured at both “L’Immagine

Elettronica” and at the Biennale that year, although the two venues offered a very different

133 approach to his work. While Calvesi inserted it within his linear narrative of the relationship between art and science throughout history, Bonora was pushing for the work to be received as a new language in art.

Other relevant opportunities were offered to new media artists by galleries in Bologna,

Rome, and Milan. For instance, between 1986 and 1987, at the Rotonda in Via Besana, in Milan, critics Renato Barilli and Flavio Caroli curated Besana Ottanta, “an organic program of art exhibitions… dedicated to new artistic instances in Italy and abroad.”51 In 1987, as part of Besana

Ottanta, Barilli curated “Art and Computer,” an exhibition in collaboration with VTR – Video

Technology Research, and RGB – Computer Graphics, two companies based in Milan. In the exhibition catalogue, Barilli highlights that the “computer excludes the external reality.”52

According to Barilli, art made through the computer differs from other media insofar as a person in front of a computer is alone, invested in their own “mental processes.”53 Therefore, a computer- generated image does not reproduce reality as video could do. In addition, Barilli notices the peculiarity of pixel-based images that he calls “tiles of a post-modern mosaic.”54 He affirms that on the occasion of “Art and computer,” artists were pushed to take the computer to its limits in order to verify whether it was already “competitive, alternative, satisfying.”55 At the Rotonda della Besana,

Barilli seems to welcome an investigation on the potentialities of the computer in art. Although, in

1991, on the occasion of the exhibition “Anni Novanta” (The Nineties) –that took place both at the

Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna and at the Musei Comunali in Rimini—he decides to include new media art in the section “Concetto e Scrittura” (Concept and Writing), thus emphasizing the conceptual reference of the work without mentioning the technological component. The exhibition ended up drawing a fictional line between “Anni Novanta” and “Information.”

“Anni Novanta” was co-curated by Roberto Daolio, and included artists Maurizio Cattelan,

Mario Dellavedova, Jessica Diamond, Vik Muniz among others. Tommaso Tozzi exhibited

“Hacker Art BBS,” an installation made of a computer, a keyboard, a mouse, a telephone, and a print out of the indistinguishable lettering “ribellati” (rise up) (Fig. 55). By looking at the

134 installation image, it is possible to see that the computer monitor is facing down. Therefore, it was impossible to actually interact with the BBS even though the telephone wire was plugged into the wall, and the phone was connected to the computer as to suggest its functionality. In an interview,

Tozzi clarified that he had decided not to allow the content of the BBS to be seen in the gallery as he did not want it to be “contemplated aesthetically.” Rather, he wished for the viewer to use the

BBS relationally, and outside of the gallery space.56 The social and political possibilities of Tozzi’s work seems to apparently prevail over an investigation of the technical implications of information technology.

Roberto Daolio, whose knowledge of Tozzi’s work had brought the artist to be featured in

“Anni Novanta”—was mostly inclined to present the phenomenon of new media art as belonging to the fragmented culture of post-modernism. In one of the essays accompanying Tozzi’s work, Daolio wrote:

Through the homogeneity of a constant and simultaneous flux, communication society absorbs and regenerates the process through which we recognize reality. The simple actualization of an information procedure is not sufficient to re-compose the fractured models of its aesthetic hegemony.57

Daolio is interpreting the effects of information technology as engrained in the transformation occurred in society that inevitably involved artists and art making. Although he is inclined to see the artistic experience of the late 1980s and beginning 1990s as fundamentally distinct from the tradition of modernism, Daolio doesn’t seem to be preoccupied with any paradigm shift in art due to information technology. Rather, he considers its use as a de facto phenomenon of these years, as an expression of contemporary culture and its production.

Daolio taught cultural anthropology at the Academy of Fine Art in Bologna, and he had curated several shows that included Tozzi’s work or interventions. He was also an editor of the magazine Flash Art, and orbited around the Neon gallery in Bologna, that had been active since

1981. Tozzi had been in touch with the Neon gallery through the critic Francesca Alinovi, who attended some of the art initiatives led by Tozzi at the Pat Pat Recorder, a Florence-based space he

135 founded. Alinovi introduced the work of Tozzi to Gino Giannuzzi, founder of the Neon gallery.

Giannuzzi and Tozzi’s curatorial initiatives were then presented at the D’Art room – Nuovi luoghi dell’arte, an art space curated by writer Alberto Masala in Bologna.58 Alinovi died tragically in

1983. As a consequence, the Neon gallery interrupted its activities until 1987. Daolio continued to partake in the gallery’s initiatives and to curate exhibitions there after it re-opened.59

The scouting conducted by Francesca Alinovi and Roberto Daolio, who both collaborated with Renato Barilli, brought artists such as Tozzi to be featured in “Anni Novanta.” Although “Anni

Novanta” presented Tozzi’s new media art to a large audience, the exhibition was ultimately a survey of new instances in art that included a significant number of artists. The show was not intended to focus on new media art exclusively or to propose any new readings of the use of information technology in art. At this point, the transformation of artistic practices that took place through newly available tools seemed to have been simply interpreted as inevitable.

This type of approach seemed to have characterized how La Quadriennale presented new media art during its XII edition held in Rome in 1996. La Quadriennale is a contemporary art exhibition that has been occurring almost every four years since 1931.60 Conceived to showcase only Italian contemporary art—in opposition to the Venice Biennale, that has always exhibited international artists in international pavilions—due to financial difficulties and a series of intricate political circumstances, La Quadriennale was not always able to maintain a regular calendar or to invest in a consistent artist scouting.61

In 1996, La Quadriennale featured many artists working with new media including Maurizio

Camerani, Alfredo Pirri, Grazia Toderi, Tommaso Tozzi and the team of Studio Azzurro, among others. This edition was a continuation of the 1992 edition, and it was titled “Ultime generazioni”

(Latest generations). A significant work on view was an installation by Milan based new media art group Studio Azzurro titled, “Tappeto sensibile” (Sensitive carpet) or “Coro” (Chorus).62 The novelty of the installation was that instead of being the viewer to interact with the electronic object, it was the electronic object to react to the viewer through motion sensors. The viewer could walk

136 over a floor of projected bodies. The projected bodies will be activated by the viewer motion and move in return. New media art had entered its next phase. The viewer no longer needed to voluntarily interact with the work as information technology devices collected new type of information and re-acted accordingly. In addition, the viewer did not need to be aware of how the technology worked or where it was located. The carpet was a familiar meeting point that embedded technology and hid its functionality through a metaphorical behaviour that has become the characterizing feature of current digital devices.63 The shift had finally occurred.

In conclusion, although fragmented, Italy had a lively art environment that included international institutions plus many galleries and alternative exhibition venues. As a result, numerous events featured and promoted new media art. In 1994, finally the internet as we know it today, namely the World Wide Web, was also included among the possible mediums within the new media art realm. However, as noted by Sarah Cook,

Internet-based art was not considered by the international mainstream art world until its inclusion in Documenta X in 1997, and even then, the new media art community considered the static, offline, and office-based presentation a failure.64

Therefore, once again, the mainstream art world seemed to have struggled in dealing with new media art throughout, from the emergence of computer art to the advent of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s. In Italy, the novelty of the tools employed, the involvement of the market in promoting these tools, and the reluctance of an art world in evaluating their artistic potential and significance disentangled from the well-established narrative of art and science, did compromise the reception of new media art.

As mentioned, a general skepticism toward information technology was due to its intrinsic connection to both the business world, and to military technology.65 However, it has been successfully proven that information technology— in particular, the one that has had the largest impact on our current behaviour in relation to "smart" devices—developed as much in military strategic rooms as in university laboratories, and additionally, thanks to the collaborative exchange

137 of open source platforms.66 Due to information technology’s connection with entities foreign to the art world, experiments in new media art were seen as not belonging to the artist’s studio. Even though tech-companies collaborated with artists in order to make computers usable to them, the computational language is not exclusive to art, rather it is shared across new media. Software engineers adopted artist’s tools as metaphors for user-friendliness while common use of computational devices has relegated new media to the sphere of entertainment and utility. On the one hand, these factors have informed the work of artists involved with new media. On the other, they have prevented some critics from investigating new media art in its own terms.

It seems plausible, then that as soon as technology became slightly more available, experiments in new media art happened in social centers where the practical world of the market, its means, and therefore, of labor, has been part of the ongoing conversation or struggle with society, and its forms of cultural representation. Advocating for no distinction between art and life, artists and activists orbiting around Italian social centers welcomed the use information technology tools, reflecting on their potential and limitations while the “official culture” seemed to have been divided into two strains of thought: those who interpreted new media art as part of a long relationship between art and science; and those who interpreted the language of new media art as a novelty that could result in a paradigm shift in art making. The latter seemed to have had not enough resources and tools to build off the numerous appointments in which new media art was featured, and as a consequence, were not able to preserve the work for future research. Therefore, for the most part, the work is unavailable. An exception is represented by Tommaso Tozzi’s personal website, tommasotozzi.it.67 Tozzi has been diligently archiving information on the artistic experiences as occurring within the Italian network culture of the 1980s and 1990s as well as a version of the original work, whenever possible. From now on, I refer to Tozzi’s online platform as both a website and an archive. Even though, by his own admission, his website is concerned with documenting not with preserving, due to the process of selecting, collecting, categorizing, digitizing, and labeling

138 that went through the making of the site, the latter can be surely considered as an archive.68 An investigation of his meticulous work occupies the following section.

Case study: the archive of Tommaso Tozzi – tommasotozzi.it

This investigation of Tommaso Tozzi’s archive includes a brief history of its making along with an analysis of curatorial aspects related to the digital artwork. In this section, I propose a model for a possible use of this archive for exhibition and research purposes. Finally, I am including extracts of an interview conducted with Tozzi related to his practice of networking, that can be characterized as a process of documenting, distributing, and making available open online platforms. Tozzi’s interview provides insights into his background as well as his cultural, political and artistic references.

History of Tozzi’s archive

Born in 1960 in Florence, Italy, throughout his career, Tommaso Tozzi worked on a vast series of collective initiatives based in squatted social centers and artist-run art spaces, as well as institutional venues. Early in his career, he started to capture these initiatives as well as his own art interventions either in photographs or on video. While a student at the Fine Art Academy in

Florence, Tozzi was making graffiti and urban art, whose pictures he then published in his fanzine

“Bambina Precoce.” In 1991, he edited the text “Opposizioni ‘80,” a volume dedicated to the

Italian counter-culture of the 1980s. Along the lines of the art graph of “Cubism and Abstract Art” exhibition by American art historian and first director of MOMA, Alfred H. Barr, Tozzi inserted a graph at the beginning of his book representing the connections between artistic genres, new media, science, and politics (Fig. 56).69 The graph includes those artistic practices engaging with communication technology devices such as the computer, the fax, the telephone, and the Videotel.

Tozzi became familiar with these devices, and in particular with the Videotel, through his father,

139 who worked as an engineer for SIP, Italy’s nationalized communication company. It was SIP that introduced Videotel in the early 1980s.70

When Tozzi started to work with information technology, his process of documenting that began with his fanzines continued. Later, he uploaded on his website the videos of his performances, his happenings, and the events in which he presented his computer-based projects.

The material he had documented became the core of his online archive.71 In 2004, before creating his website, Tozzi initiated another online project called Wikiartpedia that received an Honorary

Mention at the Ars Electronica Festival of Linz, Austria in 2009. In 2012, Wikiartpedia became

EduEDA, The Educational Encyclopedia of Digital Arts.72 While Tozzi’s website is reasonably only about Tozzi’s work or work in which he is directly involved, EduEDA is an encyclopedia of new media arts and an open research platform for networks about technology culture.73 The main goal of EduEDA, as expressed on its website, is

To create a national and international network of people and institutions in order to collectively promote and disseminate digital arts.74

EduEDA is a collective effort with numerous media partners and supported by both the Fine

Academy of Art in Carrara and in Florence. EduEDA runs on a platform called MediaWiki, the same utilized for Tozzi’s personal website.75 As illustrated by Tozzi, in order to maintain the collective character of EduEDA, it was necessary to adopt an open source software that allows everyone to contribute. EduEDA does not contain artwork, but links to websites of artists or institutions that store artwork, as well as links to artwork’s profile page, at times with still images.

As Tozzi became more familiar with the MediaWiki platform, he adopted it to make his own website.

Digital curatorial aspects

Others have discussed digital curatorship at length, giving many possible solutions to display digital work. I refer here in particular to Christiane Paul’s curatorial models for digital art as

140 illustrated in the text “New Media in the White Cube and Beyond.”76 Further, I refer to artist and media scholar Jon Ippolito’s characterization of digital work in relation to the possibility of reproducing or simulating obsolete technology. In general, I endorse a case-by-case approach to the artifact following which a strategy of display and conservation is carried out, whenever possible, in collaboration with artists and makers.

While working first on Wikiartpedia, and later on EduEDA, Tozzi continued to update his own website; a process that is still ongoing. For the most part, Tozzi’s website is an archive of reproductions. That means that much of his early work of performances, and other artistic interventions, went through a process of digitization. The work that was entirely or partially digital, has been unified under the same computational language. Borrowing from a digital art categorization as illustrated by Jon Ippolito, the work on Tozzi’s website can be divided into two types: “reproduced” and “duplicable.”77 Ippolito writes:

We chose the term “reproduced” for any medium that loses quality when copied, including analog, prints, photographs, film, audio, and video… In contrast, we reserved the word “duplicable” for media that can be cloned.78

In regard to Tozzi’s artistic practice, “reproduced” work consists of videos of performances, happenings, or events that were transferred onto a digital format, and then uploaded on his website.

The label of “reproduced” also applies to videos that record work by Tozzi originally elaborated through telecommunication tools which are no longer available, such as Videotel.79

Instead, “duplicable” work consists of those projects that were born digital. These works can re-live as a simulation by using a software that acts like the “old” version of the work. Most of

Tozzi’s work made until early 1990s currently lives on his website as a reproduction. However, some of it, could be technically simulated. The process through which these projects can be re- enacted follows the same concepts of early browser simulation platform such as oldweb.today, which allows users to surf the web as if they were still using a 1994 version of Netscape

Navigator.80 The work that Tozzi made after 1994 is still available online.81 There is no need to simulate the later work, although it could be updated. The temporal distinction is important as

141 around 1994, the World Wide Web became available and BBS along with other forms of telecommunication technology such as Telefax and Videotel became obsolete.

Specifically referring to new media art, Ippolito had also pointed out that “new media artwork must keep moving to survive.”82 In many cases, in particular in regards to software,

“moving” means to change file format in order for the work to run on the next version of whichever platform is hosting it. Therefore, Tozzi has been working on a meticulous work of “moving” or adapting the material in order to make it available in a digital format. Tozzi found a solution to the problem of instability of the work which new media art scholars, curators, and of course, artists, know is embedded in the very nature of this art form.83 By documenting performances, happenings, and events related to the BBS, Tozzi ended up preserving the work and he found himself applying methods of conservation similar to the ones employed by the Variable Media Project as illustrated by Ippolito.84 However, even though the possibility to duplicate digital work is intrinsic in the computational structure of the work itself, to duplicate a work does not exclude for the latter to be visually different each time. As noted by Ippolito,

The aesthetic issue involved in emulating peripherals or pacing are just as daunting as the technical ones; the programmer you hire to emulate the display may end up deciding such critical visual elements as color depth, screen resolution, and tempo.85

As I argued in Chapter Three, digital devices come with their own set of visual references and qualities.86

Further, this transformation comes at the expenses of the context in which the work originated. It must be taken into consideration that the archive of Tommaso Tozzi ultimately represents only one of the many possible ways to categorize the experiences gathered and it shows only one version of the artistic and cultural context cited. As noted by Sven Spieker, the "archive does not record experience so much as its absence.”87 For the many initiatives included in Tozzi’s archive, many went lost or missing. Even though, Tozzi’s practice is often collective, and many names are mentioned in the artwork’s profile page, he remains the sole initiator of the archive.

142 Nonetheless, a spirit of communality and sharing characterizes Tozzi’s artistic practice as well as the efforts that went into the making of his repository. For instance, “Hacker Art BBS” was,

An instrument to exchange messages, files—artistic or non-artistic—on a daily basis, at no cost, without filters, and available to everyone.88

It comes as no surprise, then that Tozzi’s website is created under a creative common license, which means that although some rights might be reserved, for the most part, the site can be copied, transferred, adjusted, and preserved by taking its code and adapt it to other digital platforms.89

Of course, Tozzi is aware that making the archive was a chance for these artistic instances to survive their own obsolescence. He affirms that “critics, gallerists, and collectors that supported

[his] work did not know how to connect to the internet and they were not in touch with the international net art scene.”90 At the same time, he recognizes that using the Italian language might have been an obstacle for his art to be seen and understood elsewhere. For instance, “Hacker Art

BBS” as presented in occasion of the exhibition “Anni Novanta,” continues to go unnoticed and it remains unmentioned in the international art historical narrative on net art, along with his project of netstrikes, which he started in 1995.91 The recent Net Art Anthology launched by Rhizome at the

New Museum has almost entirely bypassed the experience of Italian net art with the exception of

“Life Sharing” by Eva and Franco Mattes, aka 01.ORG (2000-2003).92

The last aspect to consider is how Tozzi describes the work. Each piece, listed in alphabetical order under the label “Main Projects,” is assigned a series of categories such as: title, author, year, technique, location/site, website, description, images (if available), collection, artistic genre, bibliography, webliography. According to media archeologist Wolfgang Ernst, “description remains exterior to the essence of things.”93 On the one hand, by categorizing the work, Tozzi excludes details such us “duration” or “date” (which can be more precise than “year”). On the other hand, what alternative is there that allows for a more inclusive form of categorizing? Is it possible to avoid labelling altogether?

143 In the last section of this chapter, I discuss a possible approach to Tozzi’s archive to allow for further research on and exhibiting of this type of work. The proposal stems from Tozzi’s work and the material made available by him. Considering the lack of institutional support—at least throughout the 1990s—for collecting and preserving new media art, his archive remains a fundamental source.

Researching and exhibiting the archive: a proposal

This proposal aims to acknowledge Tommaso Tozzi’s tremendous work of documentation and preservation while highlighting the shortcomings of such an operation conducted without proper institutional support. Whether or not this proposal manifests as an actual project, I consider it necessary that a current version of the site be kept as an additional tile in the technological history of the Italian network culture. As noted by Christiane Paul, “writing an history of new media and preserving the art itself will require new models and criteria for documenting and preserving process and instability.”94 The scenario of new media art is fragmented and these new models and criteria seem to be inevitably instable, transitory, and multifarious. What would it be a way to display Tozzi’s work and to remain true to his artistic practice?

In order to formulate a proposal to use the material made available by Tozzi for research and exhibition purposes, I take into consideration two factors:

1) Tozzi’s material can be divided into “reproduced” and “duplicable;”

2) An element of the work is unreproducible, namely the context in which Tozzi’s artistic

experience took place, specifically for the two decades of 1980s and 1990s;

That being said, I compiled a list of changes to apply to the archive’s current structure. The areas to change or add are the following:

1) Description of the work;

2) Format of the available files;

3) Search feature;

144 4) Tagging;

5) Usability of the content.

Description of the work

It is relevant to consider the significance and implications of Tozzi’s description of the work. Descriptions are lacking, and as noted by Ernst, they limit the knowledge of the object under scrutiny. If, on the one hand, the work should have more specific labels, including details such as

“duration,” “date,” and the “coding” of the original work (if available); on the other hand, adding more labels will not solve the problem of a description-based approach to the work. In other words, the cultural bias that travel with language remain. However, the purpose of adding more details about the work is to give an opportunity to the researcher or the beholder to have as much information as possible to start an investigation, and perhaps to implement the description.

Format of the available files

The “reproduced” work on the site should be updated into a more current and web-friendly format that can allow for an online exploration of the content on different devices. This is partially possible as some of the videos currently on Tozzi’s website are available also on YouTube. I am not contending that the latter is the proper platform to use, but I am arguing for a video format supported by multiple devices. In addition, it should be possible to browse the content by file type: video, images, text, and so forth. Whenever possible, old files should be kept and made accessible.

Search feature

The search feature should be improved by including possible topics or categories through which the site’s content can be retrieved. These categories should be, for instance: authors, collaborative projects, performances, publications, and so forth. The current search box is useful, but it implies that the user already knows what to look for. Instead, suggested categories can be

145 utilized by a first-time user to navigate unknown content. In addition, the search result should not appear as a Google search type of results. In fact, when a search is too generic, the results are too many to actually browse. For instance, by searching “video,” one must go through 161 results. In alternative, search results could be clustered into sub-categories such as: video-installation; video- conference; video-presentation (no artwork), and so forth.

Tagging

Entries should contain tags (searchable keywords). Some examples of tags could be: social center, gallery, museum, art fair, biennial, and so forth. It could be helpful to have a page to display a network of relationships between a tag and items containing it. For instance, the tag “social center” could be the node around which the name of all the social centers listed in the site are shown. By clicking on one of the name listed, another network will take shape. In this new network, the name of the social center is the node and the items listed around it will be all those related to it, such as artists, artworks, events, and so forth.

Usability of the content

This feature can be particularly useful for exhibition purposes. A platform such as the one elaborated thus far, should also enable the friendly use of its content by exhibition makers. While putting together a new media art exhibition, it should be possible to borrow existent projects from an online repository with proper acknowledgement of the artists involved. This feature could lead to the making of a shared new media art platform from which any institutions could borrow (download or present via internet browsing) the work for the length of an exhibition. At the same time, shareable content should allow for user participation. Such a platform would then serve the much larger function of preserving, presenting, and researching new media art experience as occurred in

Italy in the 1980s and 1990s.

146 The difference between this platform and EduEDA will be that it will have more than just links to existing resources as it would include the work or a simulation of it in whichever available format. The difference between this platform and Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology, will be that Italian new media art could finally have a repository and its history could be studied, enhanced, scrutinized. In order to serve this purpose, the platform should be available in multiple languages.

Last, I contend that the disturbing office-like aspect of early new media art exhibitions will no longer concern exhibition makers. It is plausible to consider that, for the most part, viewers are familiar with information technology and will be more inclined to explore simulations of early new media artwork. The technological and temporal distance between current devices and the ones employed in the 1980s and 1990s may serve well an exploration of the latter in a gallery or museum setting due to the visual clues through which the viewer might be able to see the old devices as an ancestor of more recent apparatuses, among which the screen.

Extracts of an interview with Tommaso Tozzi

VF: I noticed that overtime some of the pages on your website were updated, changed… in particular, the page dedicated to the project “VTTV -Virtual Town TV” features two images representing different versions of its interface, both dated 1994 (Fig. 57).95 …This process of preserving both images in a way nullifies some characteristics as typical of software, in particular the possibility to overwrite. As a consequence, the mechanism following which content can be deleted is inverted, which reveals your intent to preserve. On the one hand, Net art and other forms of new media art—including the “art as network”—deals with the possibility of erasure (or the impossibility of recording), mostly due to technology obsolescence. On the other hand, in line with existent artistic experiences such as Fluxus, some artists embraced object’s impermanence and the impossibility to preserve the work. This way of making art could also help to escape the commodification of the artistic product. How would you reconcile your practice of “art as

147 network” with the making of an archive, which records your art-related experience, and in a way, allows for object permanence?

TT: Part of my artistic practice is based on the process of gathering and spreading material either mine or others’. This is similar to what I did through the fanzine “Bambina Precoce,” through the alternative venues I managed, through my art projects made by using an answering machine or a

BBS. One way to create a network was by sharing a list of participants, like the practice of Mail art, through which collages of work by other artists were also shared. Italian Punk fanzines stemmed from an international network of fanzines in which concerts were documented along with situations regarding subjects involved. Some of the people involved in graffiti claimed that others should have not covered somebody else’s graffiti with their own tags. However, those were still ephemeral marks, intended to wear out and to be deleted due to their illegal status. This tension toward collecting, documenting, and preserving spread across different sectors and phenomena. For instance, EduEDA is a collection of information that is little know in Italy. The site promotes a new type of culture that might require some time to be received. To make those stories available has a strategic value within the cultural panorama that has a tendency to exclude them from the dominant process of historicizing. EduEDA website preserves but, like mine, it is also always in the making.

They become bigger and bigger, the quantity of material in them increases, and documents are modified, if necessary, in order to be complete. EduEDA changes constantly thanks to the contribution of users (a system similar to Wikipedia’s).96 My site changes through my additions and modifications to its existent pages…

The artistic movement that includes happening (like Fluxus) rises at a time still characterized by the debate between figurative and abstract painting… Happening replaced the practice of representation with the event. [Artist] Edward Kac affirms that online networks generate a short circuit between event and representation as they are both.

By their very nature, digital archives are different from the analogue ones. A digital archive can be turned into a center for promotion and distribution, rather than for preservation. My site records, but

148 it does not preserve… It is evident that I am not able to preserve the relationships that my BBS users established among themselves. I am not able to preserve their emotions and intentions. When happenings were taking place, this was already a well-known problem. An event was recorded by taking photos, shooting films in 16 mm, but people were aware that the event had occurred and it was not preserved. The issue is that I believe the event in itself was not the artwork. The event was part of the work of art, it helped to initiate a process of awareness, to experience some emotions through which participants changed, but the work in itself had started before the event and continued afterward, through time and space. My site becomes a work of art when somebody like you make it part of their own experience… But, to define whether my site… can be considered a work of art is a problem that concerns the dealer rather than the viewer…

VF: Overtime, we have seen a radical transformation of information technology. Could you trace the path of this change in relation to your art practice? Is technology a tool through which you make art or does it constitute the purpose of your art? I am referring to the latest developments in terms of systems of control, surveillance, data collecting that a certain rhetoric of sharing contributes to enhance (social media). How would you position your art in reference to these phenomena?

TT: In terms of aspects such as functionality and usability, it is clear that [information] technology has been revolutionized and offers way of usage that were unreachable before, and its use is extremely more intuitive. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, if I wanted to communicate with someone [through information technology] the procedure to set up and to connect via modem was slow and elaborate.

Some forms of online communication were not accessible to the average user.

In terms of aspects such as the aesthetics, perception of other users was limited and very different.

Space was limited and time was different. There were fewer possibilities of expression, they were complex and extremely slow. Studies on Computer-mediated communication at that time reveal

149 that, considering their methodological limits, these reduced communication possibilities caused changes in interpersonal relationships.

Development in new technology opened the cyberspace to a social dimension with new potentialities that were nonexistent up to that point. We are at the dawn of an anthropological shift that modifies our perception of time and space, at an individual level as well as at a social level.

Under the lenses of universalism and global utopias, the opportunity to break the frontiers and to get to know the other, can help us to embrace diversity… but a problem emerges… when universalism becomes globalization… Information society is characterized by this constant contradiction between a universalist tension and surveillance anxiety. Within the sphere of communication technology, modern society experiences this schizophrenic ambivalence between democratic improvement and elitist control…

The end goal for me in my art was never technology per se, rather a social transformation…

At the same time, I find reductive the idea to use a device exclusively as a mere appliance… We know that [information technology] “appliances” are changing us at an anthropological level. The quality and substance of our way of thinking, of our sensibilities, of our relationships with others are different due to our use of them…

How could I then look at technology in my art as a simple tool?

Using these tools has changed significantly my everyday life, I can’t consider them as mere tools only, nor for myself, nor for my artistic practice…The problem presents itself when the structure of the machine tries to separate people, when the machine drives people toward suspicion, rather than toward unveiling [knowing the other] …

Social media, intended as the platform developed by multinational corporations… have turned the possibility of unveiling into the possibility of control and deceit. Rather than favoring a communication about how to be, they favor a communication about how to appear…

Me, and others, have tried to make interfaces that could escape this logic. But it is not sufficient to work only on the interface. It is necessary to change the economic aims of those who produce and

150 manage [information] technology. This brought me, through my art, to get closer to the counter- culture movements and strategies. But for this change to occur it is necessary to work on relationships... it is necessary to enter the space that separates people from one another.

In conclusion, I have analyzed Tommaso Tozzi’s archive in order to provide a proper characterization of its content in line of more recent scholarship in digital curatorship, and to propose a possible use of it for future research and exhibition purposes. Tozzi’s material—which I have framed according to Ippolito’s suggested categories of “reproduced” and “duplicable”— consists of a vast collection of work that speaks to the context of a network culture as occurred in

Italy in the 1980s and 1990s. Stemming from the work of documenting and preservation that Tozzi did throughout the years, I have suggested the making of an online platform that will include a more accurate description of the work, and tailored search and tagging features. Most importantly, this proposed platform should offer the possibility for others to use the content for exhibitions in order to enhance an exploration and further research of early new media art in Italy.

151 NOTES

1 Notes from lecture, “Rethinking curating,” at the Fine Art Academy in Rome, Italy, as part of the Media Art Festival, May 18, 2018 - It seems relevant to clarify that in regards to the art under investigation here, medium specificity is seen as a valid approach to understand the phenomenon as occurred in the Italian art historical context of 1980s and 1990s, and its aesthetics. The analysis of new media art contingency was not adopted by either artists or institutions during the 1980s.

2 Paul, Christiane, New Media in the White Cube and Beyond. Curatorial model for digital art, University of California Press, 2008, 5

3 Cook, Sarah, “Immateriality and Its Discontents. An overview of Main Models and Issues of Curating New Media,” in New Media in the White Cube and Beyond, p 29

4 Gere, Charlie, “New Media Art and the Gallery in the Digital Age,” in New Media in the White Cube and Beyond, pp 18-19

5 Gere, p 19

6 Gere, ib.

7 Information, Edited by Kynaston L. McShine, Exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970

8 Gere, p 20

9 According to Gere this was due to “the artists’ refusal to collaborate with industry…a suspicion of systems art, cybernetics, and computers because of their roots in the military-industrial-academic complex and their use in the Vietnam War; and, finally, difficulties in collecting, conserving, and commodifying such work.” Gere, 20. See also, Sherman, Tom, “Amare la macchina è naturale,” in catalogo 42. Esposizione internazionale d'arte La Biennale di Venezia: catalogo generale, Volume 2: Arte e Scienza. Biologia, Tecnologia e Informatica, 1986, Venezia : La Biennale, Milano, Electa, 1986, p 43

10 The first Ars Electronica was held in Linz, Austria, in 1979. According to their website: “ART, TECHNOLOGY and SOCIETY remain the philosophy of this platform,” https://www.aec.at/about/en/, accessed July 2018. In addition, in 1985, Lyotard curated the exhibition, Les Immatériaux at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, France, “which was intended to show the cultural effects of new technologies and communication and information.” Other events followed throughout the 1980s and 1990s mainly in Western Europe, Japan, and the U.S. For a comprehensive list, see, Gere, Charlie, “New Media Art and the Gallery in the Digital Age,” in New Media in the White Cube and Beyond, pp 20-21

11 “Rinascimento” and “Risorgimento Elettronico” were used to describe what was happening with newly available information technology. While the reference to Renaissance may be clear to many, “Risorgimento” is a period in the modern Italian history that refers to a series of wars occurred throughout the 19th century to unify the country. Francesca Gallo referred to these expressions in occasion of a recent conference dedicated to the Electronic Art Festival of Camerino. Conference notes, “Memorie della Computer Art in Italia. Il Festival Arte Elettronica di Camerino,” MLAC, Museo Laboratorio Arte Contemporanea, La Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome, Italy, October 20, 2017

12 Archivio Storico ASAC La Biennale di Venezia, f. 160 - A.V. 160. 1986.1

13 The term “Informatica” stems from the French, Informatique, and refers to Information technology. http://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/informatica/, accessed July 2018

14 Ascott, “Art, Technology, and Computer,” in 42. Esposizione internazionale d'arte La Biennale di Venezia: catalogo generale, Volume 2: Arte e Scienza. Biologia, Tecnologia e Informatica, 1986, Venezia : La Biennale, Milano, Electa, 1986, p 33

15 Ascott, Roy, “Distance Makes the Art Grow Further,” in Art at a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet, edited by Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark, MIT Press, 2005, pp 292-293

16 “Alle Corderie il fascino della tecnologia e dei grandi,” La Nuova Venezia, June 29, 1986; Filiberto Menna in La Nuova Venezia, June 29, 1986

152

17 La Nuova Venezia, June 29, 1986

18 La Repubblica, June 29-30, 1986

19 See also, Corriere della Sera, July 2, 1986

20 “Babelica Biennale,” Il Manifesto, July 1, 1986; and “Arte via cavo,” Il Manifesto, July 26, 1986

21 The section “Tecnologia and Informatica” had a laboratory component that was called “Ubiqua – Il Network planetario dell’arte” (Ubiqua – the art planetary network). The laboratory was put together following an idea of critics and artists: Roy Ascott, Don Foresta, Maria Grazia Mattei, Tom Sherman, and Tommaso Trini. See, 42. Esposizione internazionale d'arte La Biennale di Venezia: catalogo generale, Volume 2: Arte e Scienza. Biologia, Tecnologia e Informatica, 1986, Venezia : La Biennale, Milano, Electa, 1986

22 42. Esposizione internazionale d'arte La Biennale di Venezia: catalogo generale, Volume 2: Arte e Scienza. Biologia, Tecnologia e Informatica, 1986, Venezia : La Biennale, Milano, Electa, 1986, p 33

23 See for instance how slow the process of printing or making a computer comic strip was for the Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici as illustrated in Chapter Three.

24 “I futuristi furono i primi ad introdurre la tecnologia nell’arte.” (Trans.: “Futurists were the first to introduce technology in art,”) Calvesi is here referring to the “fotodinamiche” by artist, Anton Giulio Bragaglia. Quote in La coscienza luccicante: dalla videoarte all'arte interattiva, Ed. by Paola Sega Serra Zanetti e Maria Grazia Tolomeo, Exhibition catalogue, Gangemi, Rome, 1998, p 55

25 Calvesi quoted in La nuova venezia, May 22, 1986

26 The exhibition included manuscripts dedicated to alchemy from the medieval times along with, as mentioned, the latest developments in nuclear physics. See, 42. Esposizione internazionale d'arte La Biennale di Venezia: catalogo generale 1986, Venezia : La Biennale, Milano, Electa, 1986

27 “La scena agli inizi degli anni ottanta era dominata da un totale disinteresse da parte della cultura ufficiale per le nuove espressioni artistiche e per l’uso dei computer in un’area diversa dal mondo del lavoro.” Mattei, Maria Grazia, Correnti Magnetiche, Exhibition catalogue, Castello di Rivoli, Rivoli, Italy, 1985, p 9

28 Mattei, p 9

29 Mattei, p 9

30 Lola Bonora had also collaborated with Dario del Bufalo who orbited around the VideoArt Festival of Locarno in Switzerland, which was a location actively preoccupied with showing video and computer art in these years. For instance, in 1985, Enrico Cocuccioni, artist and founder of Il Pulsante leggero (an organization that investigated the role of technology in art) presented his “Computer Art Manifesto” at that festival in Locarno. Notes from the conference “Memoria della Computer Art in Italia. Il Festival Arte Elettronica di Camerino,” held at MLAC, Museo Laboratorio di Arte Contemporanea, Università La Sapienza in Rome, Italy, October 20, 2017

31 Gianni Blumthaler worked for the CGE - Computer Graphic Europe. He was responsible for the creative sector of the company and invited artists to experiment with computer graphic technology. Conference notes, “Memorie della Computer Art in Italia. Il Festival Arte Elettronica di Camerino,” October 20, 2017, MLAC, Museo Laboratorio Arte Contemporanea, La Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome, Italy. See also, “L’arte elettronica in scena a Camerino,” La Repubblica, October 20, 1987, http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/1987/10/20/arte-elettronica- in-scena-camerino.html, Accessed July 2018

32 The show was aired in 1985.“Ora c’è anche la Pittronica,” La Repubblica, February 2, 1985, http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/1985/02/02/ora-anche-la-pittronica.html, Accessed July 2018

33 Antonio Caronia will later collaborate with Tommaso Tozzi and Giacomo Verde—who exhibited at the Centro Video Arte—in the making of a mailing list, called “Arti-Party.” Bazzichelli, Tatiana, Networking. The Art as Network, Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, 2008, p 135 (note 14)

153

34 Gallo, Francesca, “Le “nuove immagini” nella prospettiva postmoderna 1983-1985,” lecture as part of the conference, “Memorie della Computer Art in Italia. Il Festival Arte Elettronica di Camerino,” MLAC, Museo Laboratorio Arte Contemporanea, La Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome, Italy, October 20, 2017

35 The Centro Video Arte exhibited work of several generations of Italian artists, some of them still emerging at the time, and others already established, among which: Adriano Abbado, Maurizio Bonora, Maurizio Camerani, Mario Canali, Giorgio Cattani, Vittorio Mascalchi, Enzo Minarelli, Fabrizio Plessi, and many more. Archive of the Centro Video Arte, U-Tape 1985, fasc. 583, b. 27 and fasc. 584

36 Marco Meneguzzo in the catalogue of VideoSet 1988. Centro Video Arte. Video Set 1988. Fasc. 593. (Translations my own) 37 “Per l'insieme dell'opera prodotta nell'ultimo anno; perché nell'attuale vivacità creativa nel campo della computer art, dimostrano di quali e promettenti risorse possa essere dotata l'immagine digitale nel costruire figure e narrazioni.” Letter from Lola Bonora to Ing. Guglielmo Steinhausen of the Bosch Blaupunkt in Milan. Archivio Centro Video Arte. U-Tape 1985. Fasc. 584 (Translations are my own)

38 Tozzi organized the first Netstrike in 1995. Netstrike is a form of boycott that consists of coordinating for a large group of people to connect to a website at the same time. The large amount of connections usually results in the website malfunctioning or crashing. See, http://www.tommasotozzi.it/index.php?title=Netstrike_(1995), Accessed July 2018

39 “Il I˚ Video-Totem Est-Etica Antica-T-… è la prima opera artistica del progetto di ricerca per un’estetica anti- catastrofica o della catastrofe.” Letter from Giacomo Verde to Lola Bonora. Archivio Centro Video Arte. Video Set 1986. Fasc. 590 (Translations my own unless otherwise specificied)

40 “[Il] “salto catastrofico” [è] per me affascinante in quanto, ribaltando alla radice il valore della catastrofe si giustifica il superamento del conflitto positivo-negativo a favore di un nuovo ‘posi-negativismo costruttivo’.” Letter from Giacomo Verde to Lola Bonora. Archivio Centro Video Arte. Video Set 1986. Fasc. 590

41 "L'arte elettronica di cinque pittori. Videoinstallazioni esposte a Ferrara - A proposito di "U-Tape": l'attività decennale di un centro poco conosciuto," La Repubblica, January 2, 1986 (Trans.: The electronic art of five painters. Video-installations exhibited in Ferrara – About “U-Tape:” ten-years of activity of a little-known art center)

42 Boarini laments “l'arretratezza istituzionale del nostro paese in questo specifico settore artistico che all'estero si esprime in manifestazioni prestigiosissime e in ricerche ampiamente finanziate." (Trans.: “The backwardness of Italian institutions with regards to this artistic field, which in other countries includes prestigious events and properly funded research.”) "L'arte elettronica di cinque pittori. Videoinstallazioni esposte a Ferrara - A proposito di "U-Tape": l'attività decennale di un centro poco conosciuto," La Repubblica, January 2, 1986

43 “L'unico momento che nel nostro paese si offre di confronto e documentazione degli esiti italiani in campo videografico,” La Repubblica, January 4, 1987; “Siamo ancora al bla-bla elettronico - Analisi, non troppo ottimistiche, sullo stato di salute della videoarte, alla rassegna U-TAPE di Ferrara,” La Repubblica, December 22-23, 1985 (Trans.: This is still about the “Electronic blah-blah-blah” – A not-so-optimistic analysis about the pulse of videoarte at the U- TAPE festival in Ferrara)

44 “Ti lascio immaginare il sollazzo di quanti si adoperano sistematicamente e con grande impegno e passione per eliminare attività come queste che si rivolgono ad una minoranza elitaria … blà, blà, blà.” Lettera di Lola Bonora a Mario (Convertino?) Archivio Centro Video Arte, U-TAPE '86, 1986, Fasc. 585

45 "Altro che tecnicismo esasperato. Altro che ingenua fiducia nella tecnologia! Gli artisti usano con sensibilità ed intelligenza lo strumento elettronico, ma non certo per celebrarne feticisticamente un presunto ruolo miracoloso. Semmai per svelare gli originari presupposti di queste "moderne meraviglie". I risvolti, del tutto umani, dei nuovi "magici" poteri dell'immagine.” Enrico Cocuccioni in the catalogue of U-TAPE 1986. Archivio Centro Video Arte, U- TAPE '86, 1986, Fasc. 585

46 Archivio Centro Video Arte. L’Immagine Elettronica, 1986, Fasc. 629; and 1988, Fasc. 641

47 "Si deve lottare - afferma Lola Bonora - con l'ignoranza dei cosiddetti esperti, "critici" che solo da poco hanno scoperto questa forma d'arte e che guardano con sospetto a tutto quanto si muove in tale direzione. Chi opera nel settore è tacciato di esterofilia, ma il peregrinare all'estero è dovuto semplicemente al diverso atteggiamento che in altri Paesi si ha nei confronti dei videoartisti." Lola Bonora quoted by Marco Gardenghi in his article, “Tra video e cinema nasce la nuova arte. L'Immagine Elettronica a Bologna,” Il Resto del Carlino, February 18, 1986

154

48 Along with the department of Cinema of the Venice Biennale, the Cineteca of Bologna, an organization dedicated to film and cinema, co-organized L’Immagine Elettronica. Archivio Centro Video Arte. L’Immagine Elettronica, 1985, Fasc. 627

49 Mellotti, Massimo, Vicende dell'arte in Italia dal dopoguerra agli anni Duemila, Milano, 2017, 173

50 Letter of Lola Bonora to Fabrizio Plessi. Archivio Centro Video Arte. L’Immagine Elettronica, 1986, Fasc. 628

51 Barilli, Renato, Arte e computer. Milano, Rotonda di via Besana, aprile- giugno 1987, Exhibition catalogue, Milan, Electa 1987

52 Barilli, p 10

53 Barilli, p 10

54 Barilli, p 12

55 Barilli, p 13

56 From an interview with Tommaso Tozzi, Florence, summer 2016

57 Daolio, Roberto, “Il re crede di essere nudo,” in Strategie, Exhibition catalogue, Neon Gallery, Bologna, 1990

58 From an interview with Tommaso Tozzi, Florence, Summer 2016

59 Sinigaglia, Caterina, “In via di apparizione,” in Roberto Daolio. Aggregati per differenze (1978-2010), Postmediabooks, Milan 2017, re-published on http://www.artribune.com/editoria/2017/12/aggregati-per-differenze- libro-roberto-daolio/, Accessed August, 2018

60 La Quadriennale was established in 1927, but the first exhibition was held in 1931, https://www.quadriennalediroma.org/la-quadriennale/storia-3/, Accessed August 2018

61 The history of La Quadriennale is long and fragmented. It is impossible to do justice to this institution here, and unfortunately it is beyond the scope of this chapter. For preliminary information, See https://www.quadriennalediroma.org/la-quadriennale/storia-3/, Accessed August 2018, and Politi, Giancarlo, “Biennale, Triennale, Quadriennale,” Flash Art, June-July 1996, p 128; “Quadriennale ritorno con polemica,” La Stampa, June 8, 1996; Tonelli, Antonello, “La Mummia (Prime impressioni a proposito della XII Quadriennale),” Il Marsupio, December 1996, pp 7-8

62 The installation is called “Tappeto sensibile” in the archive of the Quadriennale, but it is titled, “Coro” on the website of Studio Azzurro. Cfr, http://www.quadriennalediroma.org/arbiq_web/index.php?sezione=archivi&id=107955&ricerca=; http://www.studioazzurro.com/index.php?com_works=&view=detail&work_id=4&option=com_works&Itemid=22&la ng=en, Accessed August 2018

63 See, Chun, Wendy H. K., Programmed Visions. Software and Memory, The MIT Press, 2013

64 Cook, Sarah, “Immateriality and Its Discontents. An overview of Main Models and Issues of Curating New Media,” in New Media in the White Cube and Beyond, p 20

65 As mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, Gere attributed the refusal of technology by conceptual artist in the 1970s to its implication in the US government military campaign, in particular in the Vietnam War. In addition, in Chapter Two, I highlight how Italian activists were concerned about the use of a technology for the same reason. See, Gere, 19 and Chapter Two.

66 See, Castellucci, Paola, Dall’ipertesto al web. Storia culturale dell’informatica, Bari, Laterza, 2009

67 http://www.tommasotozzi.it/index.php?title=Tommaso_Tozzi, Accessed August 2018

68 “Il mio sito documenta, ma non conserva.” From an interview with Tozzi, Summer 2016

155

69 The graph by Alfred H. Barr is available on the MOMA’s website, https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_2748_300086869.pdf, Accessed August 2018

70 From an interview with Tozzi, Summer 2016

71 http://www.tommasotozzi.it/index.php?title=Tommaso_Tozzi, accessed August 2018

72 http://archive.aec.at/prix/, and http://www.edueda.net/index.php?title=EduEDA_- _The_EDUcational_Encyclopedia_of_Digital_Arts, Accessed August 2018

73 http://www.edueda.net/index.php?title=EduEDA_-_The_EDUcational_Encyclopedia_of_Digital_Arts, Accessed August 2018

74 http://www.edueda.net/index.php?title=EduEDA_-_The_EDUcational_Encyclopedia_of_Digital_Arts, Accessed August 2018

75 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki, Accessed August 2018

76 Paul, Christiane, New Media in the White Cube and Beyond.

77 Ippolito, Jon, “Death by Wall Label,” in New Media in the White Cube and Beyond, p 118

78 Ippolito, p 118

79 http://www.tommasotozzi.it/index.php?title=Studio_Oggetto_-_Videotel_(1989), Accessed August 2018

80 Oldweb.today is a project by Rhizome, http://oldweb.today/, Accessed August 2018

81 See, http://www.strano.net/, Accessed August 2018

82 Ippolito, Jon, “Death by Wall Label,” in New Media in the White Cube and Beyond, p 106

83 Paul, Christiane, New Media in the White Cube and Beyond, p 6

84 According to Ippolito, “the Guggenheim’s variable media task force conducts interviews and workshops with artists based on a questionnaire that asks which aspects of a work may change and which may not.” Ippolito, Jon, “Death by Wall Label,” in New Media in the White Cube and Beyond, p 117

85Ippolito, Jon, “Death by Wall Label,” in New Media in the White Cube and Beyond, p 110

86 See the section on digital aesthetics in Chapter Three.

87 Spieker, Sven, The Big Archive, MIT Press, 2008, p 3

88 From an interview with Tozzi, Summer 2016

89 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/, Accessed August 2018

90 “I critici, galleristi e collezioni che supportavano il mio lavoro non sapevano collegarsi in rete e non erano in contatto con quella che di li a pochi anni sarebbe diventata la scena della net art internazionale.” From an interview with Tozzi, Summer 2016

91 At the same time, another BBS called The Thing, founded by Wolfgang Sthaele around the same time than Tozzi’s Hacker Art BBS is often cited as part of the history of Net art as well as the netstrike conducted by Ricardo Dominguez since 1998.

92 https://anthology.rhizome.org/, Accessed August 2018

93 Ernst, Wolfgang, Digital Memory and the Archive, Minnesota University Press, 2013, p 153

94 Paul, Christiane, New Media Art in the White Cube and Beyond, p 6

156

95 Virtual Town TV (VTTV) was a BBS with a graphic interface made available by Tozzi in collaboration with Strano Network. VTTV allowed users to have an email account, to exchange information, to upload content, and to interact with the several areas of the BBS among which a library, a science museum, an art museum. http://www.tommasotozzi.it/index.php?title=Virtual_Town_TV_%281994%29, Accessed August 2018

96 At some point, Tozzi wanted to donate Wikiartpedia to Wikipedia. The process was difficult and ultimately, unsuccessful. Tozzi explains the reasons in an interview available on https://www.frontieredigitali.it/online/dalle-ups- degli-anni-60-allopen-content-il-progetto-wikiartpedia-ne-parliamo-con-tommaso-tozzi/, Accessed August 2018

157 Conclusion

This research has been concerned with how artists and activists orbiting around

Italian social centers used information technology to make art while acting politically. As noted, social centers emerged as a result of the formation of the Autonomist concept of the refusal of labor that had brought part of the younger generation of the 1970s to disentangle from labor-centered rhetoric. The latter had driven the political struggle of the previous decades, but had lost its grip on a generation that considered factory jobs lifeless. As noted by artist Nanni Balestrini in his prescient novel published in 1971, obtaining a job in the factory, which had been the Italian blue-collar dream up to the late

1960s, was seen as a bleak life perspective in the 1970s.1 Participants joined social centers for their commitment to sociality more than to their politics even though concerns remained regarding the conditions of labor modified by the advent of technology, the relocation of industries, and the relationship between the global and local market.2

After the folding of the ’77 Movement, caused by a targeted police campaign and a series of special laws, large Italian cities such as Rome or Milan were left with vacant political headquarters, fugitive activists, police repression, and a heroin epidemic.3

Between the end of the 1970s and the early 1980s, the Italian state imprisoned or forced to flee whoever still intended to carry on the “armed fight” (lotta armata) that came to characterize the so-called years-of-lead (anni di piombo). Social centers represented an alternative way for youth to congregate, different from the political parties’ headquarters that had attracted them previously. These sites transitioned from refugium peccatorum of political outcasts into aggregation places that anticipated the future. Social centers (centri sociali) came to represent both a symbolic and a physical space to regenerate.4 By

158 departing from existent ideologies as conveyed by traditional political parties, and by utilizing these sites to conduct experiments in the artistic and political realm, artists and activists thought about ways to mobilize as well as to make art that was preoccupied with nation-wide protests against globalization, de-nuclearization, LGTBQ rights, women’s rights, immigrant rights, and the legalization of cannabis.5

From a visual and artistic point of view, the language of social centers in the early

1980s resembled the spontaneity and irreverence of what was produced in the late 1970s.6

Social centers adopted the 1970’s practice according to which the protest had to be colorful and joyful in opposition to militancy and even though participants came from all sides of the Italian left—from Autonomia to the Communist party, from anarchic movements to Socialism—artists kept alive the practice of détournement typical of the

Situationist International, and rejected the society of the spectacle. “The revolution had to be a party” could no longer be their motto for any revolution attempts had been severely repressed by the Italian state. However, their intervention could still rely on actions full of irony, dark humor, and sarcasm.7 Throughout the years, social centers consolidated their presence as sites open to non-identical subjects where it was not mandatory to embrace a specific political identity in order to join in. Their existence was, and still is, a social adventure. Social centers occupy those corners where the State often does not reach; they flourish within the interstices of bureaucracy; they mediate at a local level and reach out at a national and international level.

In Italy, between the 1980s and the 1990s, social centers’ collectives were able to creatively offer opportunities to think of and actualize new types of community. By blending political activism and artistic experimentation, sites such as Forte Prenestino (Il

159 Forte) in Rome and the Cox18 in Milan, were able to promote independent cultural production spanning from music to visual art, from food to performance. As noted, their mission, organization, management, status, and operations varied from region to region, but they remained at the nexus of an artistic research that embraced information technology and believed in the Internet as a vehicle for a horizontal and grass-root activism. Since 1986, the numerous events happening at Il Forte were made possible by a gradual compartmentalization. They were proposed and brought to completion by separate groups active within the fort that managed their own spaces and calendar, independently but in accordance with the overall self-run management.

Forte Prenestino has not only been a space of political activism per se, but also a relational space: a space defined by the internal relations between human experience and their surroundings, including the objects, the decorated walls, the shape of its corridors, the tunnels, cells, ceilings, courtyards, and so forth.8 These relationships are most visible on the walls of Forte Prenestino, which are covered in graffiti, stickers, stencils, tags, and texts. Through this action of mark-marking, Forte’s goers have expressed the need to intervene on this space to make effective the change that occurred with the occupation.

Throughout this analysis, I interpreted Forte Prenestino’s transformation through the lenses of the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, who affirmed that without change in social space there is no change in society. In other words, space is where changes take form and manifest themselves more prominently to the viewer.

At the same time, I have highlighted how Forte Prenestino has been perceived as a “stumbling rock in a river,” isolated from its surrounding. Perhaps its participants have been cornered by a revolutionary stunt that did not materialize outside of its fortified

160 walls or its imminent proximity. Many of the accounts included in the self-published volume, Fortopìa, define Il Forte as “an island,” “a planet,” and have lamented its isolation.9 Perhaps, in order to establish an interconnectivity that seemed so frail, artists and activists ventured out into the cyberspace taking their networking experience into the web as soon as the latter became available. For the past thirty years, Forte Prenestino has been a place to congregate, where to learn skills, to make art, and to act politically. It has provided for services that public institutions lacked, and through a constant mediation with local institutions, it has become a feature in the peripheral neighborhood of

Centocelle as well as a national landmark. By so doing, Il Forte has been constantly challenging the very notion of periphery while contributing in turning the network into a political and an artistic practice.

Due to the importance of the network as a political and an artistic practice, I have argued that information—a constitutive element of new media art—offers a point of entry for a multifold interpretation of such a practice. Berlin-based art critic and curator Tatiana

Bazzichelli affirmed that “making the network” was a form of political art in itself.10

“Making the network” refers to the specific characteristics of the whole system of communication, interaction, political and artistic experimentation, and online and offline presence that occurred in the Italian social centers. I have paired this interpretation with earlier research in relational art by Nicolas Bourriaud, and focused on the properties and structure of what made the network possible, that is, information.

The digitalization has turned information into data that carries an exchange value—which means it can generate profit. Therefore, information as an artistic medium constitutes the structure of artwork (binary language); the product (data and coding); and

161 the meaning (representation). Information as a medium is the key through which meaning, significance, metaphor, and structure is carried out and functions. The relevance of recognizing information as an artistic medium allows for an interpretation of the work by the Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici (GMM,) Tommaso Tozzi, and Agnese

Trocchi as revealing of the potential, limits, and implications of making the network

“social.” In particular, by transforming or reacting to media’s intended meaning, and by disrupting their purposes, these artists acted on information technology’s potential to be a vehicle for cultural and political transformation. In order to infiltrate the technology, artists operated on unpredictability and gave information yet another form of representation. By so doing, they convey the possibility to exchange other types of information not geared towards user tracking (data). And, they clarified that information technology does not have to lead towards the forms and uses currently employed.

A discussion on information as an artistic medium and on the specificity of the tools employed by the above-mentioned artists led to investigations of two additional aspects of new media art, namely, how it departs from the tradition of conceptual art, and how it brings along a new materiality that carries specific visual elements and results.

These two points are interconnected. Due to the visual characteristics of early new media art, which is embodied by the representation of data on a screen, the ephemerality of this practice does not lie in the “tendency to fetishize the process” (Bourriaud), but rather by the intrinsic obsolescence of the medium. The visual presence of those early artworks was due to the immature technology that favors saturated colors, straight lines, pixelated images, and a certain flatness and sharpness of representation.

162 Perhaps, due to the visual naivety of early new media artworks, Italian critics had warned “not to confuse the technological equipment with the artistic result” (Dorfles).

Initial display of new media art in Italy was somehow problematic, due in part to curatorial and technical difficulties along with issues related to presenting and preserving digital art. Finding alternative fortunes, artists and activists continued to swing from underground culture to the mainstream in an art environment that presented them with the opportunity to be included in exhibitions held at international institutions, national museums, and local galleries. It is known that Internet-based art was not considered by the international mainstream art world until its inclusion in Documenta X in 1997, and even after that dealing with new media art left curators with a sense of uneasiness.11

In Italy, its reception was also compromised by the novelty of the mediums, the involvement of the market in promoting and sponsoring the making of electronic tools, and the reluctance of an art world in evaluating their artistic potential and significance disentangled from the well-established narrative of art and science, according to which artists are old-time alchemists. In addition, a general skepticism toward this type of technology lingered, due to its intrinsic connection to both the business world and to military technology, even though, it developed as much in military strategic rooms as in university laboratories, and additionally, thanks to the collaborative exchange of open source platforms.12 Indeed, the computational language is not exclusive to art, rather it is shared across media (Manovich). Part of the Italian art world rejected new media art due to its detachment from being just about art and art making, along with the assumption that the common use of computational devices has relegated new media to the sphere of entertainment and utility, exclusively. These factors were welcomed by artists as an

163 opportunity to investigate these tools and to elaborate on their properties, whilst some critics read them as an obstacle against a thorough analysis of new media art in its own terms. It seems plausible, then that as soon as technology became slightly more available, experiments in new media art happened in social centers where the practical world of labor (rejected or fought for) as well as that of the market and its means, have been part of the ongoing conversation or struggle with society, and its forms of cultural representation.

Even though the Electronic Art Festival of Camerino, or the Immagine

Elettronica in Bologna had spent much energy in promoting new media art, they were not able to preserve the work for future research and, in many cases, the work is unavailable.

This has been partially due to the intrinsic obsolescence of new media. As file forms and software availability is linked to the industry and the market, a digital medium can be incredibly short-lived. An exception is represented by Tommaso Tozzi’s personal website, tommasotozzi.it, whose making was considered in chapter four.13 Albeit, by his own admission, his website is concerned with documenting not with preserving, due to the process of selecting, collecting, categorizing, digitizing, and labeling that went through the making of the site, the latter can be surely considered as an archive.14 Tozzi has been diligently archiving information on the artistic experiences as occurring within the Italian network culture of the 1980s and 1990s as well as a version of the original work, whenever possible. In order to make this content permanently available to the public and to researchers, in Chapter Four, I suggested the making of an online platform that will include a more accurate description of the work, and tailored search and tagging features. Stemming from the enormous work done by Tozzi, this proposed platform could

164 enhance further research of early new media art in Italy, whose social-based experience, as discussed throughout this dissertation, revealed an alternative potential of information technology, not necessarily geared towards profit, surveillance, and control.

1 See, Balestrini, Nanni, Vogliamo tutto, (1971) 2013

2 In a survey published in the volume Centri Sociali: Geografie del Desiderio, it is reported that the majority of participants viewed the social centers as a place to gather and socialize. 20% of the responders to the survey considered the social centers as a place for the organization of political actions. Source: Centri Sociali: Geografie del Desiderio, xEdited by Consorzio Aaster, Centro sociale Cox 18, Centro sociale Leoncavallo, Primo Moroni. Shake Edizioni, Milan 1996, p 42

3 Leggi speciali 1974-1982, https://www.wumingfoundation.com/italiano/outtakes/cesare_battisti_2.htm, accessed January 2019

4 “I centri sociali hanno rappresentato l'unico esempio di aggregazione sociale che riuscisse a comprendere al suo interno il lavoro e il non lavoro, lo sradicamento e l'interazione, la passione politica e la sperimentazione culturale.” Il Manifesto, “Un arcipelago innominabile,” October 17, 1993

5 La Repubblica, “Notte Transgender a “Forte Squatter,” April 19, 1998

6 See for instance comics and drawings by Pablo Echaurren produced for the news outlet Lotta Continua or the magazine A/traverso.

7 “La rivoluzione doveva essere una festa.” Quote by Sanguinetti, Gianfranco, “Un orgasmo della Storia: il 1977 in Italia. Disgressioni sul filo della memoria di un ex-situazionista,” in Il Piombo e le Rose. Utopia e Creatività nel Movimento, 1977, Ed. by Tano D’Amico and Pablo Echaurren, Postcart, Rome 2017, p 32 (Translations my own unless otherwise specified)

8 A relational space is an environment lived through the relationship between the geometrical characteristic of a site (size; openness; narrowness; height…) with our own cultural and social identity, personal history, thoughts and imagination. This analysis is in conversation with a lineage of scholarship of space that includes Walter Benjamin, Michel De Certeau, David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adam Smith among others. See: David Harvey: a critical reader, Noel Castree and Derek Gregory (Eds.), Oxford, 2006, pp 270-293; Lefebvre, Henri, The production of space, Blackwell Publishing, (1974) 2009

165

9 Fortopìa, p 48, p 76, p 162

10 Bazzichelli, Tatiana, Networking, the Net as Artwork, Digital Aesthetic Research Center, Aarhus University, 2009, p 25

11 Cook, Sarah, “Immateriality and Its Discontents. An overview of Main Models and Issues of Curating New Media,” in New Media in the White Cube and Beyond, p 20

12 As mentioned in chapter two, Gere attributed the refusal of technology by conceptual artist in the 1970s to its implication in the US government military campaign, in particular in the Vietnam War. In addition, in chapter 2, I highlight how Italian activists were concerned about the use of a technology for the same reason. See, Gere, 19 and chapter 2. See also, Castellucci, Paola, Dall’ipertesto al web. Storia culturale dell’informatica, Bari, Laterza, 2009

13 http://www.tommasotozzi.it/index.php?title=Tommaso_Tozzi, Accessed January 2019

14 “Il mio sito documenta, ma non conserva.” From an interview with Tozzi, Summer 2016

166 Archives

Archivio Centrale di Stato, Rome (ACS)

Archivio Centro Video Arte, Ferrara

Archivio Forte Prenestino, Rome

Archivio Grafton9, Milan

Archivio La Calusca, Cox 18, Milan

Archivi Quadriennale di Roma, Rome

Archivio Storico ASAC La Biennale di Venezia, Venice

Istituto Storico e di Cultura dell’Arma del Genio, Rome (ISCAG)

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Webliography by artist, author or contributor

207 Whenever possible, websites were archived via Wayback Machine (www.waybackmachine.org) made available by the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/)

Ascott, Roy http://www.scribd.com/doc/23611542/A-Turning-on-Technology-by-Roy-Ascott

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Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici http://www.gmm.fi.it/Gmm/gmm2.htm

Studio Azzurro http://www.studioazzurro.com/index.php?com_works=&view=detail&work_id=4&option=com_works&Itemid=22&la ng=en

Trocchi, Agnese http://www.newmacchina.info/en/images/exhibitions.html

Tozzi, Tommaso http://www.tommasotozzi.it/index.php?title=Tommaso_Tozzi

Webliography by theme

Activism-Hacking-Artivism (exhibition) https://web.archive.org/web/20180110170835/http://www.strano.net/bazzichelli/engcom_stampa.htm

AvANa-net https://web.archive.org/web/20180110165232/http://www.forteprenestino.net/laboratori/avana

Apple’s commercial, 1984 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/apples-iconic-1984-ad-25-years-later/

ArchiDIAP (Online archive of historical buildings in Rome – a project of the Department of Architecture of the Università degli Studi La Sapienza in Rome, Italy http://www.archidiap.com/opera/forte-prenestina/

Ars Electronica, Linz https://www.aec.at/about/en/

Cd-rom https://www.britannica.com/technology/CD-ROM https://www.philips.com/a-w/research/technologies/cd/cd-family.html

Drug epidemic http://www.raistoria.rai.it/articoli/la-droga-dietro-langolo/25992/default.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20180110162225/http://www.radioradicale.it/exagora/cronache-di-droghe-e-repressioni https://web.archive.org/web/20180110162552/http://genova.erasuperba.it/rubriche/fine-anni-70-giovani-rivoluzione- eroina

208

EduEDA http://www.edueda.net/index.php?title=EduEDA_-_The_EDUcational_Encyclopedia_of_Digital_Arts

Facciamo rete (#facciamorete) https://web.archive.org/web/20190404152752/https://www.repubblica.it/politica/2019/01/11/news/_facciamorete_oppo sizione_twitter-216329909/

Facebook scandal https://web.archive.org/web/20180717133323/https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44793247

First, Second, and Third Italian Republic https://web.archive.org/web/20180429132219/http://www.iltempo.it/politica/2016/06/02/news/ecco-come-e-nata-la- terza-repubblica-1011742/ https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seconda_Repubblica_(Italia)

Forte Prenestino https://web.archive.org/web/20180110131411/https://www.dinamopress.it/news/al-forte-prenestino-la-storia-del-punk- romano/ https://www.forteprenestino.net/index.php

Frigidaire http://www.frigolandia.eu/

Graffiti at Forte Prenestino https://web.archive.org/web/20180108122331/https://traumastudio.noblogs.org/cera-una-volta-un-forte/

Hackert Art https://web.archive.org/web/20180110170708/https://avana.forteprenestino.net/hackerart.htm

Hackmeeting 2000 https://web.archive.org/web/20180110170422/https://www.hackmeeting.org/hackit00/proclama.html

Internet in Italy https://web.archive.org/web/20180110163628/http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2016/04/29/news/30_anni_di_intern et_la_timeline-138625953/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180110163855/https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Rutigliano

Investigation on Italian BBS https://web.archive.org/web/20180110163628/http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2016/04/29/news/30_anni_di_intern et_la_timeline-138625953/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180110165756/https://www.peacelink.it/diritto/a/5576.html https://web.archive.org/web/20180110165902/https://www.peacelink.it/diritto/a/3229.html

Net Art https://web.archive.org/web/20180113183135/https://rhizome.org/editorial/2015/jul/17/notes-definition-net-art/

Net Art Anthology by Rhizome https://anthology.rhizome.org/

Netstrike http://www.tommasotozzi.it/index.php?title=Netstrike_%281995%29

Oldweb.today by Rhizome http://oldweb.today/

Operaismo http://thes.bncf.firenze.sbn.it/termine.php?id=51363 https://www.alfabeta2.it/tag/mario-tronti/

Physical nomadism https://web.archive.org/web/20180110162752/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychical_nomadism 209

Radio Onda Rossa https://www.ondarossa.info/

Second Life https://web.archive.org/web/20180113181908/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life

Stazione Prenestina (Archivio Luce) http://www.archivioluce.com/archivio/jsp/schede/videoPlayer.jsp?tipologia=&id=&physDoc=13563&db=cinematograf icoCINEGIORNALI&findIt=false§ion=/

Years of lead https://web.archive.org/web/20180108123323/http://www.wikiwand.com/it/Anni_di_piombo,

210 Illustrations

Fig. 1 - Tommaso Tozzi, Happening Digitali Interattivi, 1992, cd-rom, BBS, book, floppy disk. Photo by the author.

Fig. 2 – A stencil graffiti inside Forte Prenestino, 2017. Photo by the author.

167

Fig. 3 – Agnese Trocchi, Warriors of Perception, 2001, Still from HTML loop. http://newmacchina.info/en/artworks/netart/29-warriors-of-perception.html

Fig. 4 – Tommaso Tozzi, Interattività e controllo, 1991. Happening in chat. Still from video. Source: http://www.tommasotozzi.it/index.php?title=Interattivit%C3%A0_e_controllo_(1991)

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Fig. 5 – Il Manifesto, June 4, 1994, The possible community – A map shows several social centers around Italy. Archivio Forte Prenestino

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Fig. 6 – Flyer to promote a series of events organized by Forte Prenestino in the summer of 1994 that took place throughout the neighborhoods at the periphery of Rome. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

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Fig. 7 – Decoder, Issue 12, 1998. The image (top-right) is outlined as if the viewer is looking at a computer screen while the image is being edited. Archivio Grafton9 - https://grafton9.net/

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Fig. 8 – Decoder, Issue 3, 1991? – Article dedicated to the Cyber-Punk and to Williams Gibson. Archivio La Calusca, Cox 18

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Fig. 9 – Bulletin of self- Fig. 10 – Bulletin of self-managed social center. Last managed social center. Cover. pages. 1989. © Archivio Forte Prenestino 1989. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

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Fig. 11 – The belt of forts in Rome. ISCAG, Forti di Roma, 17001, 84/F

Fig. 12 – A floor plan of Forte Prenestina, 1889. ISCAG, Forti di Roma, 17001, 84/F

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Fig. 13 – Detail of a map showing the “tenute” around Forte Prenestina. 1880 circa. ISCAG, Forti di Roma, 17001, 84/F

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Fig. 14 – Cover page of the fanzine L’URLO. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

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Fig. 15 – A poster produced for an event by Forte Prenestino along the lines of cyclostyled fanzines. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

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Fig. 16 – A poster produced for an event by Forte Prenestino along the lines of silk-screen printed fanzines. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

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Fig. 17 – Poster, May 1, 1987. Cristiano Rea. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

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Fig. 18-23 – Exhibition of graphic work by Cristiano Rea, Forte Prenestino, Rome, 2017. Cristiano Rea. Photos by the author.

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Fig. 24 – Event calendar of 1991’s art festival. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

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Fig. 25 – Map of Forte Prenestino and layout of activities and laboratories during the 1991’s art festival. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

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Fig. 26 – The underground corridors and cells during the Crack! Fumetti Dirompenti festival, 2017. Photo by the author.

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Fig. 27 – Cover page of the fanzine “Tutta Salute” featuring two figures with their heads replaced by a TV set. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

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Fig. 28 – Flyer announcing an event dedicated to Cyberpunk, Hacker Art, and the network INTERZONE during the 1991’s art festival. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

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Fig. 29 – Flyer by INTERZONE. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

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Fig. 30 – Flyer explaining how to connect to FIDO Network. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

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Fig. 31 – Poster for May 1- No Labor Day event at Forte Prenestino. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

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Fig. 32 – A manifesto referring to the kidnapping of Aldo Moro in 1978 in Rome. Source: Wikipedia (public domain), https://web.archive.org/web/20180108123418/https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aldo_moro1.jpg

Fig. 33 - A commemorative piece celebrating the graffiti artist, Tromh. Forte Prenestino, 2018. Photo by the author.

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Fig. 34-37 - Commemorative piece celebrating graffiti artist, Tromh. Details. Forte Prenestino, 2018. Photos by the author.

Fig. 38 - Another piece commemorating graffiti artist, Tromh outside of Forte Prenestino, 2018. Photo by the author.

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Fig. 39 – Flyer to announce Forte Prenestino’s radio program on Radio Onda Rossa, 1987. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

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Fig. 40 – A poster designed in occasion of the sixth year of the occupation in 1992 that shows the different laboratories and activities inside the fort. © Archivio Forte Prenestino

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Fig. 41-46 - Graffiti art in the park surrounding Forte Prenestino, 2018. Photos by the author.

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Fig. 47 – “Street Art – Bansky & Co. in the Urban Form,” Palazzo Pepoli, March-June, 2016 Bologna, Italy. Installation view of “Bambina Precoce” by Tommaso Tozzi. Photo by the author.

Fig. 48 – Still from an animation of the computer-based comic strips titled, Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici. In this particular scene, the three main characters are leaving the Bar Taboo with Ella. GMM, 1986. Courtesy of the artist.

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Fig. 49 – Computer elaborated network of subatomic particles resulting from the collision between matter and antimatter following an experiment conducted by Nobel Laureate Carlo Rubia at the CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. On display in the section “Lo Spazio” at the 42. Venice Biennale, (1986). Photo: Archivio Storico ASAC La Biennale di Venezia, f. 160 - A.V. 160. 1986.1. © Copyright Archivio ASAC La Biennale.

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Fig. 50 – View of the installation site of “Tecnologia e Informatica” at the Corderie as part of the 42. Venice Biennale (1986) Photo: Archivio Storico ASAC La Biennale di Venezia. © Copyright Archivio ASAC La Biennale.

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Fig. 51 – Picture taken probably during the set-up of the section “Tecnologia and Informatica.” 42. Venice Biennale, (1986). Photo Archivio Storico ASAC La Biennale di Venezia, f. 156 - A.V.156.1986.12. © Copyright Archivio ASAC La Biennale.

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Fig. 52 – Poster of U-Tape ’85 festival. Archivio Centro Video Arte, f. 1985 fasc. 583. © Copyright Archivio Centro Video Arte.

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Fig. 53 – Giacomo Verde, I˚ Video-Totem Est-Etica Antica-T-Astro-Fisica, (1986), preparatory sketch. Archivio Centro Video Arte. Video Set 1986. Fasc. 590. © Copyright Archivio Centro Video Arte.

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Fig. 54 – Fabrizio Plessi, Mare di Marmo, (1985). © Copyright Archivio Centro Video Arte.

Fig. 55 – Tommaso Tozzi, Hacker Art BBS, (1991). Installation view, Anni Novanta exhibition, Galleria Comunale di Arte Moderna, Bologna. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Fig. 56 – Art graph by Tommaso Tozzi in Opposizioni ’80, © Shake Edizioni, 1991

201 Fig. 57 – Screenshot of the webpage on tommasotozzi.it hosting a description of his project, VTTV – Virtual Town TV, (1994)

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