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From the catalogue: "spazio&Dum Dum"
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by Daniele Perra 		From "Flash Art", ARTSCAPE
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by Gianni Romano 		From "Il Sole 24 ore", EUREKART
Big Bang on line
by Chiara Somajni







From the catalogue: "spazio&Dum Dum"
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by Daniele Perra



Furby, a new artificial creature, is coming to us from the USA. It is an interactive toy that looks like a gremlin and can talk, play, move, and learn. Two small, powerful microchips provide its motor and language functions. If the Japanese Tamagotchi led its life caged in a display screen, thereby providing some kind of detachment, and in any case simulated a different reality with precise and limited boundaries, Furby penetrates our habitat, our daily rituals, our tangible reality, and twists our perception of the believable. Are we still capable of distinguishing clearly the boundaries between real and virtual, natural and artificial? I think that nowadays there is a combination, a union, as opposed to a juxtaposition, between the concrete manifestation of an event and its simulation. In a virtual environment such as the Cave, developed at the University of Illinois, a total immersion site consisting of three walls on which stereoscopic 3D images that can be cruised and explored by using a joystick are projected, interaction is only the most spectacular and surprising component of a gradual transformation of our perception and learning modes. Many languages, like TV, video, and cinematography, provided us with new angles, new viewpoints: think of the zoom, or the reconstruction of a fast sequence of frames, totally modified and reassembled during editing (digital and not). Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Philippe Quéau and others have been investigating for years the time paradox produced by questioning the validity and authenticity of reality, by the metamorphosis it underwent, and by the new paradigms and scenarios that were developed. We almost think it is natural to ride a bike along the virtual simulation of Manhattan, like in “The Legible City” by Jeffrey Shaw, and build a true verbal and visual story. We consider just as natural the act of brushing some plants and generate, based on our electric charge and the use of sensors, artificial agents and advanced software, a lush digital forest as in “Interactive Plant Growing” by Laurent Mignonneau and Christa Sommerer; or participating to a “monitor monitor” as in “The Search Engine”, by Shirley Shor and Aviv Eyal, in which two connected computers establish a true communication thanks to the power of actual search engines and advanced interfaces of audiovisual communication.note 1
One cannot speak of boundaries between reality and artifact: reality “is rather the result of the crossing, of the mixing of multiple images, interpretations, reconstructions that, in competition with each other, or at any rate without “central” coordination, the media distribute” (Vattimo, 1989). Art has certainly assumed a fundamental role in discovering and pointing out the many changes and the new modes of production and enjoyment determined by the technological, social, and cultural development of the so-called postindustrial society (or perhaps already postdigital), that modified art’s own essence.

Les lamentations du mur by Manuela Corti, who for years has explored, analyzed and probed new domains of artistic investigation through the use of technology and new communication channels such as the Internet, trying to re-define the traditional concepts of time and space, is the emblem of the new ways of perceiving phenomena (in this case, running water) in a habitat that is at the same time urbanized (the walls of an art gallery) and re-created. A virtual stone wall, result of a digital production, exudes “rain tears," physically invading space, and forcing the viewer to use an umbrella, integral part of the installation. It is a shower, expressed by the synthetic 3D sound of a thunderstorm, involving the spectators, together with the noise of rain on the umbrellas that, being made of plastic and fabric, produce diverse sound effects. Water, the purifying element, becomes contaminated, dirty at the contact with people, whose footprints record a real presence. The environment becomes global, inclusive, and the perception of it involves many senses. One could think of a movie set arranged in the studio, but in that case the main objective would be to create the “rain effect” and make it so natural as to hide the device, while “Les Lamentations du Mur” just unveils this subtle play between reality and artifice, to startle the visitors and make them cover and protect themselves from the water. By doing so they can see, through the umbrellas made of different fabric, some of which transparent, almost like on a screen, the projection of a stone wall crying rain tears, as if it were a sudden summer downpour. The work presupposes a participating interaction that modifies its course and development. There are some incontrollable elements, such as the real water drops and the virtual ones, the different noises depending on the number of people present, and therefore the umbrellas, humidity, water, that change constantly, thus creating an “unforeseeable sensory discomfort”. In addition, the artist wished to add to the installation an experiment in on-line communication, a parallel network art project for net surfers. During the set up of the installation, the artist will insert images, sounds, comments relative to the development of different steps of the work in real time, thanks to a digital photo camera, into Postmedia web site. The rain falling in the gallery will soak the visitors in the gallery, and at the same time those on the net. An extended work in progress, going beyond the boundaries of the physicality of the event into the planetary dispersion of the network.

Bologna 1998
note (1):The “Search Engine” is an interactive installation by Shirley Shor and Aviv Eyal,examining the man-machine relations in the digital era. Two persons are positioned in the middle of a dark space. Two PC’s are set one in front of the other, both connected to the network, and both having software allowing network searches. The computers are involved in a dynamic and animated audiovisual dialogue. Each computer asks the other to search sites based on an originating phrase. One of the computers performs a search and provides a list of sites containing the required sentence. The other computer makes a choice among the many sites. The image of the chosen site is projected, and the sentences are listed, through a mechanism of audio commands, text-to-speech technology, voice recognition, speakers and microphones. The computers exchange turns, forever repeating their dialogue, even though the viewer is invited and incited to interact and interfere in the automatic processes of the computers through verbal messages that act like viruses, disrupting their programmed activity.

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 From "Flash Art", ARTSCAPE
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by Gianni Romano



“It all started when I began taking pictures of the boys in my neighborhood. Coming home with Boo, one of those nights when you did two or three openings, we walk in front of a garage from which a crazy beat and words I never heard before come out. I peek into a car, and there are some really cool kids. I tell them that their shit works, and ask them who they are listening to...and they answer “ourselves”. I say “really? and what’s your name?” and they say: ”The Beatnuts”. Then they show me their new CD, they open it, they introduce themselves. Les had really sexy eyes and I let him know it. Moving towards my den we see three boys with tattoos and no shirt sitting on some steps. Really wild. One day I go to my friend Trons’s shop - “Nothing Else Matters” - because the Beatnuts are signing their poster. We hang out a bit, I take pictures and then I spend the rest of the day with Les. Too bad he was married...but that didn’t prevent him from trying. I kept on taking pictures of rappers. I also took pictures of bicyclist and strippers (men and women), artists friend of mine, hip-hop fashion types, graffiti makers, people named Alex, old punks from the eighties...blah blah...naked men...lots of them (even though I don’t have a story for each one of them). I also tried to take a series of pictures of naked policemen (as a reaction to “Hoods”), but I don’t like the results. There was only one that I liked from behind. However, I am not crazy for policemen, and it isn’t too much fun to be with them. That guy was the most dreadful person in the world...once he even put handcuffs on me. I think that I and my life have a lot of fun. I am intrigued by the fact that things seem to go in cycles...in an almost karmic way. Why writing? Perhaps because as a child they always give you these diaries that for a while stay with you, the ones with the little Betsy and the little lock on top.”

The way Janine Gordon describes the genesis of “Hoods” (ww.thing.net/~janine) invites us to ask ourselves an important question: is it really true that, since we live in the age of images, every new instrument of communication is indissolubly linked to them? Couldn’t the ease with which images developed their own language be the cause of the skepticism that we see today in artists toward the new instrument?

Women artists like Manuela Corti, with their important works “Hoods” and “Passages” seem to have reassigned the problem, taking what on first scrutiny seems to be a step backward. Indeed, the web sites of the two artists are almost completely devoted to writing.

Janine Gordon graduated in 1996 from New York University, and has to her credit a few collective exhibits with explicit titles: “Identity Crisis”, “Male”, or “Voyeurs Delight”. In “Hoods” you will find written pages and lots of hypertext. You can click on many words and be transported to other stories or a picture. Janine Gordon utilizes the web as a kind of diary in which she describes her days around downtown in the company of different men with whom often she plays a seduction game. The explicit sexual content of the story, however, is a source of frustration as well. From each hypertext one expects the transition from soft-core to hard-core, but the expectation is always denied by innocent portraits of these young men, or by short narrative diversions enriching our understanding of the encounter.

In the eighties we saw many works of women artists presenting text as an integral part of their work. To refresh our memory: Jenny Holzer’s electronic truisms, Annette Messager’s diaries and trophies, Barbara Kruger’s and Guerrilla Girls’ posters, Sophie Calle’s stories, Jessica Diamond’s wall drawings, Nancy Dwyer’s sculpted words...even today text is one of the particular attributes in the work of female artists, as is demonstrated by Elke Krystufek’s scribbles on her own body and by the Iranian Shirin Neshat photographs success, in which writing follows the body surface, graphically superimposing to the photographic “writing”. I think that also the use of text on the Internet should be included among the attacks to the autonomy of images. That is, text metaphorically becomes an instrument exploring the disconnection between the perceptible world and the image that should represent it. Also, in the case of coexistence between different languages, text may be a further subdirectory contributing to the success of a project by increasing its percentage of semantic ambiguity. In terms not dissimilar from the way movie images operate, the contrasting of text and image would create an area in which the spectator is invited to consider possible significant subtextscoexisting with the seduction operated by the image.
For this purpose Manuela Corti’s "Passages" represents a textual maze built in a choral manner by authors and participants, and in which the starting point is not an image but a literary text acting as framework for the development of the project. As Manuela Corti explains: “Passages was not built to reveal itself, on the contrary, it contains many hidden elements, small mysterious links that divert the visitors’ course, as if they continually had to remember something forgotten. These are my enigmatic games that not even the collaborating artists know about (sometimes they ask me why everything is so cryptic and difficult to travel over - they would prefer to give pre-eminence to their images.)”
“Passages” is built as a complex interlacing of elements, people, and operating instruments. People are invited to share a common space and enrich the starting page with their own contributions: sound, images, animation, and, naturally, text.
Daniele Perra defines “Passages” as “non-place of creation, a labyrinthine voyage with the purpose of finding new relationships, modified dialog interfaces and unexplored potential expressions.” “Passages” is built upon a constant act of “translation” by its creators, a work in which the passages count more than the statements. “Inputs seemingly enter as processed material, but in fact they remain at the critical point of transformation” (Manuela Corti)

Although the diffusion of the web amplifies the communication ability of images, the word retains enormous power. In a virtual reality where matter is absent - in which all are what they declare to be - the word takes upon itself a great importance for identity purposes. Perhaps it is necessary to remember, with De Kerckhove, that language was our first technology, the first instrument with which humankind processed information. If these women artists kept a great interest in language it is because, even today, language is presentation before being representation, and symbolic and cultural models that shaped this “presentation” during the centuries are unfailingly a product of people.

Summer 1998 Flash Art

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 From "Il Sole 24 ore", EUREKART
Big Bang on line
by Chiara Somajni



“Relena is on the train, and the train is on the grass. Beyond the grass is the city. Beyond the city huge wheat fields. Then more cities. Then the sea. And beyond the sea yet more cities. Because the earth is round, and one always returns to where one started.”
Thus begins Gianni Actis Barone’s novel “Antropoeccentrico” (Edizioni dell’Ortica Communication, Bologna 1998). Manuela Corti - born in Siena in 1959, a doctoral graduate in Philosophy of Science - chose this novel for a singular project, through which she involved some twenty artists from all over the world, fished out from the Net one by one, and never met in person. Passages (http://www.passiopea.net, where one can see also additional works by Manuela Corti) was completed for the Roman exhibit “La Coscienza Luccicante (The Sparkling Conscience)” (Il Sole 24 Ore - Sunday, September 20th). The structure of this work is determined by some passages of text chosen so as to “leave the minimum space to action and description," referring always to “the psychological framework that sustains the whole novel.”
Every Monday, for 23 weeks, four new works were introduced to the site, in addition those present. The artists were invited to take up the chosen text, translating it into their mother tongue.
Passages generated a community of artists bound only by a common project linking a rigid structure (the novel/theme) to the individual creative freedom, thus increasing the collaborative potential of the participants. A project that at the same time recovers a narrative dimension and fragments it, creating small worlds of sensation, of visual, acoustical, intellectual suggestions (the single projects) which in turn refer to each other. A sophisticated architecture exploring the possibilities of mixing art and fiction, reading and interactivity, gathering and exploiting geographically dispersed identities and cultures, result of Manuela Corti’s philosophical interest for spatial forms and interconnections.
Manuela Corti  (with whom we start again our column dedicated to creativity and new media: anybody who wishes to do so may signal their own work tosomajni.chiara@ilsole24ore.it)  sequentially made all available media her own - carefully, as a user - beginning with the photocopier to arrive, in 1990, to the computer and the Internet. Her installations tend to investigate the boundary between real and artificial, like in “Les Lamentations du Mur”, exhibited in Paris, consisting of an artificial thunderstorm projected onto a “tearful” wall, enjoyed by visitors by means of an umbrella on which drops of real water drummed. The visitors could save the umbrella, the only part of the exhibit that could be preserved, and disposed of, like the “Gifts” that Corti in a series of performances placed at the public’s disposal, thus underlining the new role of today art and artist.
Her next projects return to the Internet: an artistic, philosophical, and social investigation of the myth of Venus today, to be completed with the collaboration of the French Studio Fresnoy (an institute dedicated to multimedia); and Universal Enrizopedy, with institutions and artists from Manchester: a hypertext starting from an image (“seed of communication”) and developing on the web, thanks to the interventions of an exponentially growing number of people, self-organizing sequentially and in unforeseen ways in separate worlds, “just like a Big Bang”.

Il Sole 24 Ore - Sunday, October 25th

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Translated by Bruna Pegoraro Brylawski from NC U.S.A.