Loretta Borrelli

Libre Graphics Meeting and Interactivos?’13: Tools for a Read-Write World

Loretta Borrelli
Future Tools was the title of the 8th edition of the Libre Graphics Meeting that this year took place from April 10 to 13 at the new Media Lab Prado In Madrid. For the first time, the title of the meeting not only pointed to the search for new tools but also emphasized the need to extend the use of FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) to the wider population of users. There were lots of innovative elements this year. Among them, the most important was no doubt the fact that the meeting took place at the same time as Interactivos?'13: Tools for a Read-Write World.... READ MORE...
ArticlesDesign

Collect The Wwworld. The Artist As Archivist In The Internet Age

Loretta Borrelli
How does contemporary art fail to provide unusual perspectives on the everyday characterized by an exponential growth in the production of any kind of images and videos? What is the boundary between a digital reality consisting of archives of huge size and daily life? What aesthetics is interesting to talk about in these digital native years? These are just some of the questions to which an answer was attempted in the exhibition Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age, curated by Domenico Quaranta... READ MORE...
ArtArticlesDigimag - Issue 70, December 2011 / January 2012

Web’s Unconscious.what Does A Technical Image Say Of You?

Loretta Borrelli
It's a year since when Seth Godin, the guru of permission marketing, a highly popular theory theory that became very popular during the first outburst of speculations on the dot-com, published his ten golden rules on how to chose the right profile picture to use on social networks accounts. By following these ten simple tips on how to show one's inner self through one single image, it is allegedly possible not only to achieve the aimed economic results, but also to become quite popular.... READ MORE...
ArticlesDigimag - Issue 59, November 2010

On Facebook Again. Public And Private Spaces

Loretta Borrelli
It has lately become common to hear the name Facebook being used as a synonym for Internet. Magazines, radio and TV broadcast news on curiosities, updates and weaknesses of the platform that has at this stage achieved a position of dominance in social networks environment. We are not anymore referring to this as to the latest technologic fashion: Facebook is now a part of the daily routine for about five-hundred million web-users all over the world, a consistent majority of whom are American-based. The online service CheckFacebook provides realtime statistics on the number of logged-in users, men/women percentage, nationality and age groups going from 13-years-olds up to 65-years-olds.... READ MORE...
ActivismArticlesDigimag - Issue 57, September 2010

Gmaybe: Be Free, Be Public! What Future For Privacy?

Loretta Borrelli
You may have happened to witness the presentation of a new online service. Two young men wearing a t-shirt with the Gmaybe? logo show the exciting benefits of the new frontier of social networks. All the rhetorical promises related to technology are there: they tend to fall into four main categories: democracy, freedom, efficiency and progress. Democracy looks like what everyone will enjoy using the new technologies, thus increasing its own influence on the social environment [...] Freedom is usually presented as the absence of socially restrictive elements (Critical Art Ensemble, The Molecular Invasion. Biotech theory and practices of resistance, Eleuthera, Milano, 2006, pp38-39).... READ MORE...
ActivismArticlesDigimag - Issue 56, July / August 2010

Squatting Supermarkets: Shoptivism Narrations

Loretta Borrelli
Telling the other side of the story is the goal that Squatting Supermarkets is aiming at, an installation, a performance, a work of net art, some short stories (and one could use many more words to describe it), a coproduction FakePress / Art is Open Source, presented for the first time in November 2009 during the Piemonte Share Festival. It won the Special Project Award at this same festival and the Green Award for '0' impact technology of the Environmental Park in Turin.... READ MORE...
ActivismArticlesDigimag - Issue 54, May 2010

The Suicide Irony. Seppuko And Web 2.0 Suicidemachine

Loretta Borrelli
Talk about suicide has has hardly ever been a simple thing, and that is especially nowadays. It is a dodgy, slippery ground. it might be tolerated wether it is tackled pivoting the speech on a medical-psychoanalitical attitude, since it allows to remain in a detached, scientific standpoint. Yet it becomes extremely likely to upset many people's sensitivity, if one tries to relate the subject to contemporary thought and politics... READ MORE...
ArticlesDigimag - Issue 52, March 2010

Facebook’s Slackers

Loretta Borrelli
Imagine you have a Facebook account. It isn't difficult at all. Imagine you are Danish and live in Copenhagen and someone asks you to share a cause aiming to defend the Stork Fountain, the city symbol, which is going to be knocked down. If you were a citizien who belives in the historical identity of the city where you live, you would probably share the cause without problems and maybe you would also widespread the idea among your friends. There is only one thing: this piece of news is totally false. Nobody has ever thought to knock down the most important sightseing of the Danish capital.... READ MORE...
ActivismArticlesDigimag - Issue 48, October 2009

Hackmeeting 2009: Meeting With The Debian Community

Loretta Borrelli
On the official website of the Debian project can be read: The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system. This operating system that we have created is called Debian GNU/Linux, or simply Debian for short. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run.... READ MORE...
ArticlesDigimag - Issue 46, July / August 2009

From Cfu To Funen: Interview With Jakob Jakobsen

Loretta Borrelli
In April of this year a group of students from the Funen Art Academy , an independent academy in Copenhagen , did a tour of Italy with the objective of coming into contact with certain activist and underground Italian groups. Among the teachers who accompanied them was Jakob Jakobsen, a Danish artivist, who for some time has been involved and has elaborated practices for the liberation of artistic knowledge. In 2001, together with the artist Henrietta Heise, he founded the Copenhagen Free University, establishing it in his own apartment. This experience lasted 6 years and is what they themselves describe as being 'self-teaching'. In this interview Jakob tells us about his present and past experiences as an activist and teacher.... READ MORE...
ActivismArticlesDigimag - Issue 45, June 2009

Joe Davis E Il Capitano Achab

Loretta Borrelli
Mercoled" 29 Ottobre presso l'Anatomickal Theatre di Amsterdam ha avuto inizio il terzo ciclo di conferenze dal nome Sentient Creatures. L'iniziativa, organizzata dall'artista Graham Smith in collaborazione con la Waag Society, ha avuto come obiettivo quello di mostrare gli sviluppi pi recenti nel rapporto tra arte e scienza. In particolare il rapporto tra arte e biotecnologie  il tema centrale degli incontri di quest'anno e non poteva esserci inizio migliore di una conferenza tenuta dall'artista americano Joe Davis... READ MORE...
ArticlesDigimag - Issue 40, December 2008 / January 2009Science