Research Public Meeting
Abstracts

Roy Ascott
Planetary Collegium's Presentation

Wolfgang Fiel
The schizophrenia of the space in-between
With Althussers (1982) conception of an aleatoric materialism any purpose has been substituted by the immediate presence of unprecedented circumstances with causality been bent over the aleatoric nature of the surface. It is this „surface of events“ - the realm of urban public space - which ought to be equipped with dynamic and transitional patterns of discoursive and materialistic ecologies. Events will be created - individual incidents or accidents - resistant towards any generalised description or classification a priori, magical or cruel moments in ordinary everday life. Altering the perception of space in the course of an unfolding event, this concept is opposed to the traditional notion of the architectonic as something static and immutable.

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Paolo Atzori
Mediterranean Maps
In this particular historical moment it is fundamental to overcome stereotypes and misunderstandings that characterize the mutual relationship between the Islamic and Western worlds, mainly breaking the reciprocal cultural isolation. A consistent way to approach the problem is to create communication and shared knowledge channels between these cultural realities, taking a clear position against the ideological conflict between West and Islam, North and South of the world, and reaffirming the values of mutual respect and diversities' confrontation.
*Mediterranean Maps* consists of a multicultural and interdisciplinary grouping of scientific and cultural institutions of the South and North of the Mediterranean, aimed to research and give expression to a mutual knowledge space: A multicultural, hyper-textual and dynamic Atlas of the contemporary Mediterranean rim that could be continuously updated and freely consultable on line.
The group will include artists, scientists and cultural operators, whose mission is to bridge the knowledge gap between North and South of the Mediterranean area. Each partner will propose a specific research/action plan creating a sub-network in different locations and promote the formation of multimedia teams of young professionals, located in every major area covered by the action.
During the development of the researches/actions, all individuals and institutions belonging to the different sub- networks will communicate online in a transversal way through the "collaborative platform" specifically designed for this project to archive different kind of documents: Texts, notes, graphics, pictures, interviews, short video reports, graphics, maps, archive images, sounds, etc.
MAP-MAKING
Until a few years ago, cartography representation has been exclusively static. The project *Mediterranean Maps* envisions a cartographic model that could integrate dynamic processes and automatic sampling by the application of information technology to the data patterns relative to geographical and cultural representation.
The maps represent a contemporary view of the Mediterranean area visualized by a digital interface that will enable access and supply indications on possible knowledge courses on a digital sea, navigable in linear and transversal ways. THE LABORATORY BOAT
A geographical route on the Mediterranean basin will be drawn to represent the physical link among the different researchers and participating countries. Significant ports will represent the local attractors, where specific actions and special public events will take place at the landing of the boat.
The boat, equipped with advanced communication technologies, will host a crew of multimedia and communication experts, scientists and artists, writer and poets, and will originate the map-making process of the Mediterranean Sea. The journey is an exploration, a re-discovery of this region.
The travel itself will be a source of data coming from observations of the natural environment, concerning, for example, biology, fluid dynamics, ecology, but also social relationship on a mobile micro-environment. The boat will perform a transversal data collection, traveling along a course unifying all participating Mediterranean ports.
This lab-boat, besides being a creative and research forge, is a logistic support to install the public telematic stations (or lighthouses) in the ports. These stations will become the material places from where to launch the data on lines and where to freely join the net global information. TELEMATIC LIGHTHOUSE
It is a public wireless interzone for global networking communication implemented on a transportable architecture, planned with environmentally conscious design that minimizes sustenance or resource consumption. Its main purpose is to give shape to the process of communication characteristic of the information age, where communication equals transportation of the mind, establishing dedicated channels of the "MED MAP" network. Its equipment and architecture will be used also for displaying the public event.

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Domenico Quaranta
Come i videogame stanno trasformando l'arte contemporanea
In Synopsis (2005), il filosofo italiano Fulvio Carmagnola individua una sensibilità estetica legata all'avvento dei nuovi media; e il teorico dei media Lev Manovich lavora da cinque anni a un libro, intitolato Info-Aesthetics, che tenta un confronto serrato tra l'estetica del modernismo, figlia della civiltà industriale, e quella dell'informazionalismo, figlia della società dell'informazione.
I videogame hanno un ruolo decisivo nell'avvento di questa nuova "estetica dell'informazionalismo". Dirò di più: sono convinto che i videogame siano in grado di condizionarne le forme e le declinazioni, di arricchirla con le proprie icone e i propri simboli. In altre parole, che la Game Aesthetics sia una parte importante dell'Info-Aesthetics.

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Simona Caraceni
Virtual Musems: The Language of a New Medium
In this years we have seen a lot of experiences of museums that used technology for several purposes. After the first experimentations, we face a new borderline in approaching virtual museums: the database marries the interface, and conceives a new idea of virtual space.Starting from the theories of Manovich, I analyze the concepts of virtual museum, space and the re-mediation of an “old” medium: the videogame.

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Paolo Pedercini
Simulazioni radicali per un nuovo pensiero ecologico
Potenzialità del medium videoludico di stimolare un approccio di tipo olistico a problematiche sociali, politiche, economiche e soprattutto ecologiche. Per affrontare questioni riguardanti la sostenibilità ambientale e sociale delle modalità di produzione e consumo del tardo capitalismo è necessario uscire da quella "crisi di percezione" teorizzata da F. Capra: un persistere del vecchio paradigma di pensiero moderno che predilige la causalità lineare e il riduzionismo meccanicistico. Il videogioco gestionale, ovvero la simulazione per finalità ludiche di un'attività economica, è un oggetto mediale che consente al giocatore di familiarizzare in maniera del tutto intuitiva con processi e meccanismi di alta complessità, e lo spinge a considerare il modello simulato come un insieme integrato piuttosto che una serie di parti separate. Il medium può quindi facilitare la popolarizzazione di strumenti concettuali finora riservati alle elites intellettuali e scientifiche.

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Adrian Guzman

Steve Piccolo
The Museum of Sounds (and all that others stuff)

Ale Guzzetti
Tecnica curiosa: prospettive transmodali dell'arte elettronica

Derrick De Kerckhove
Institutions and Social Software as Cognitive Architectures

Federica Timeto
A tool is a myth is a tool
New media feminist art from a postcolonial perspective
My presentation focuses on the way feminist artistic strategies in the field of new media confront issues of technology and gender from a postcolonial perspective. I will take into consideration three examples of artistic activity – the subRosa collective’s Refugia, Ursula Biemann’s video-essays and Prema Murthy’s Mythic Hybrid – in which the use of new technologies as mediums goes hand in hand with a fundamental critical position, that is: how can we consider the technologies of gender from a transcultural approach and leave the technologies of technology unquestioned? One possibility comes from setting aside dichotomies and from considering the mutual reshapings of gender and technology. The role of feminist cultural practices, then, is that of employing both technological tools and myths in order to give way to the shifting boundaries where “myth and tool mutually constitute each other” (D. Haraway).

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Tatiana Bazzichelli
Women Digital Communities in Europe
Practices on the border between art and hacktivism
The project consists of research about women digital communities in Europe that are part of international, critical new media culture and activism. Focus of research are countercultural and avant-garde new media practices at the border of hacking, art and activism realized within international communities of women, or within particular digital communities where women play an important role. At the same time, the research connects the field of countercultural media experimentation and feminism with the more institutional field of women's studies and gender research in Europe.
Technology is still predominantly identified as male. The subject of women hackers and artists will be used to deconstruct this association and investigate the all-pervasive power of technology from a cyberfeminist point of view. From a gender perspective, it is desirable to not only investigate gendered identifications of technology, art and activism, but also trace the creation of new cultural languages and new social practices from a practical feminist experience in new media.
The project should accomplish the following:
(a) research, from a women's studies perspective, countercultural women communities in the Internet which operate at the border of artistic, political and technological activism by investigating their gender politics and the gender issues they reflect and have brought up;
(b) investigate in turn to which extent these issues could broaden the scope and the critical tools of gender studies, in other words, what women studies might learn from women digital communities and artistic-technological activism.
Through the demand of a higher proportion of women in technology, it becomes important to connect women themselves and create a networked research project which brings together artists, hackers and theoreticians from all parts of Europe.
The European countries on which my research project focuses have been the centers of the net cultural developments in the past ten years.
Since many years, feminism has been both a practical and a theoretical movement. Cyberfeminism raises a similar issues: Does cyberfeminist practice have connections to gender and women research? Is it possible to consider digital communities platforms where women can work on cultural identities and play with cultural symbolism? Or is this merely a utopia, all the more as the digital divide is deepening?
There often exists a gap between academic research and experimental art practices. The first one present high expertise in gender research and education, the second ones show high creativity in media, technology and the development of alternative forms of communication. Bringing these worlds together means to develop a policy-relevant research, exchanging experience and knowledge also between Eastern and Western Europe. This research might culminate in a up-to-date directory of people involved in the field of women's studies and new media culture which could be discussed through international events and conventions.

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Antonio Caronia
The Cyborg's vote: are Digital Elections true Democracy

Franco Marineo
Invisible visual effect
This paper focuses on the crisis experienced by cinematic media in the era of synthetic images, after the collapse of filmable reality .The keyword Interactivity hardly applies to the relation between a film and its audience. The new devices related to visual special effects never reach the point of interacting with the viewer’s experience. Avoiding a naïve return to the ontology of images, I will analyze Kubrick’s 2001:A Space Odissey, Cronenberg’s M.Butterfly and Woo’s Face/Off trying to show how the majority of visual effects today must rely on the indispensable effort of a meaning-generating gaze. As is the case in contemporary visual arts, the spectator is required to fill the missing spaces of the text. Rather than predetermine the paths which audience attention and reaction will follow, cinematic interactivity could become an attempt to connect mind elaborations, giving the audience the freedom of movement through the spiralling voids of images, beneath the surface of the plot, almost touching the specificity of the language itself.

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Giacomo Verde
Hacker Teatro: esperienze di tecno-teatro low tech

Pier Luigi Capucci
Communications and the senses in the information society
Speed, simulation, remote presence, telecommunications, are some of the main topics of the information society. Our senses are often enhanced by or reproduced into the technological devices. But is this true for all of them? For instance it seems that the sense of smell does not fit well into the current mediascape. Are we entering into an anosmic future or should we rethink the olfactive information?

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Andrew Quinn
Toward immersive environments

Franco Bolelli
Mondo globale, esseri umani globali
Il nuovo mondo connesso e globale come condizione atmosferica potenzialmente ideale per la crescita di esseri umani globali. Nessun bisogno di post-umano: niente è più connesso, multimediale e globale dell'organismo umano. E' per espansione, non per mutazione, che si compie l'evoluzione dei nostri modelli antropologici; è in un biologico capace di abbracciare il mutamento tecnocomunicativo.
La cultura pop più avanzata e sperimentale come paradigma evolutivo.
Con il pop più inventivo noi passiamo dall' "o" della vecchia logica binaria all' "e" del connettere tutto con tutto. Il matrimonio fra sperimentazione e comunicazione come superamento tanto delle avanguardie concettuali quanto del marketing convenzionale. La comunicazione non come mezzo o tecnica ma come energia. Perché l'evoluzione è necessariamente adolescenziale.

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Mario Canali
Nuovi paradigmi artistici: istallazioni interattive tra arte, tecnica e scienza
Informatica: Il paradigma virtuale: Informazione, Tecnologie, Realtà:e Immaginario.
Astrazione e Esperienza.
Scienza. Scienza del ‘900 e nuove visioni del mondo: relatività, indeterminazione e coinvolgimento dell’osservatore. Sistemi complessi e imprevedibilità deterministiche. Cicli di retroazione e configurazioni emergenti:
Estetica. Esperienza artistica e installazioni interattive: coinvolgimenti emotivi, interfacce sensoriali, elaborazioni sinestetiche, coincidenze significative.
La forma come risultato emergente di processi di interazione.
L’Opera nuova.

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Roy Ascott
Being Syncretic: connectedness, coherence and consciousness

Dimitri Kozaris
From foundfootage to compilation movies

Amos Bianchi
Intersezioni transmodali tra testo e immagine

Donatella Della Ratta
West by Arab Media

Now more than ever artists work through cultural interfaces, the ways and means, turning to evocations of both science and mythology, technology and tradition.

The legacy of postmodernism has transformed itself in this "transmodal" transition. Today man is molded by images, hyperlinks, processors and networks. Our senses are redefined, or rather, re-oriented from a collision with emerging realities, generated by new models of our world and of our subjectivity.

New art is linked to means that introduce it to a new praxis of production that is instantly pragmatic and philosophical. It (What? Art or the praxis?) generates interactivity and the transformation of common sense, both socially and aesthetically, while reflecting on the changing nature of perception, of connectivity and of conscience.

Works produced, both concretely and mentally, are made of a stratum of conscious associations, of unconscious sensitivity, of historic scientific data, of multiform unity and gripping discourse, fully interwoven in new telematic environments. These environments can be digital or natural and biological, furnishing us with new experiences and original creative visions.

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E’ un convegno che presenta le intuizioni, le proposte ed i progetti provenienti dagli artisti e dai ricercatori del programma di Ph.D M-Node in collaborazione con la Scuola di Media Design della Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti di Milano.

Sempre più gli artisti lavorano attraverso interfacce culturali, mezzi e generi, ricorrendo all'evocazione sia della scienza che della mitologia, sia della tecnologia che della tradizione.

L'eredità del postmodernismo si è trasformata nel transito 'transmodale'; l'uomo oggi è modulato dalle immagini, dagli hyperlink, dai processori e dalle reti, e il nostro sensorio è ridefinito, o meglio ribilanciato dalla collisione con le realtà emergenti che i nuovi modelli del mondo e della nostra soggettività stanno generando.

La nuova arte è legata ai mezzi che la permettono, la realizzano, la veicolano; è una nuova prassi del fare immediatamente pragmatica e filosofica; genera l'interattività e la trasformazione del senso comune sia socialmente sia nelle dimensioni dell'estetico, mentre si riflette sulla natura mutante della percezione, della connettività e della coscienza.

Le opere prodotte, sia concrete sia di pensiero, sono fatte di uno strato di coscienti associazioni di significati, di inconsce sensibilità, di scientifici dati storici, di multiformi unità e discorsi afferenti pienamente intessuti nei nuovi ambienti telematici, digitali o naturali e biologici, fornendoci delle nuove esperienze e delle visioni creative originali.

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