Issue 46 Archives • Digicult | Digital Art, Design and Culture

Alessandro De Gloria, From Child’s Play To Serious Games

Dr. Alessandro de Gloria is a professor of Electrical Engineering and member of the Elios Group at the University of Genova. This group is involved with the design and development of serious games, which use human computer interaction technology to create gaming scenarios for educational purposes.... READ MORE...

Rip: A Remix Manifesto. A Specter Wanders In The Net

Documentaries are often boring, especially when you consume something that insistently defines itself as a "good" thing. I don't believe however that RIP: A remix manifesto (USA/2008) falls into this category, probably because they share the view of the bottom... READ MORE...

The Ethics Of Gaze: Raymond Depardon & William Kentridge

A photographer and a filmmaker, Raymond Depardon, author of what can be described as documentary fiction, was awarded the Pulitzer prize. He is the author of several reportages in countries such as Biafra, Chad, Venezuela. He is also renowned because he spent some time in 1976 at the former psychiatric hospital in San Servolo, Venice. In 1996 he shot a sort of documentary-fiction on a trip in Africa that lasted three years and on the filmmaking profession. William Kentridge was born in South Africa, an artist, whose artistic matrix is drawing, but who ranges from sculptures to animation and video installation and constantly interrogates himself on the social role of art and the responsibility of the artist.... READ MORE...

Soundclusters: Robotic Electronica

Soundclusters is 'an ensemble of four robots (violin, viola, cello and percussion) created by the multidisciplinary artist Roland Olbeter, that you 'play' through a midi controller. Through a commission by the festival Faster than Sound (UK) and Sonar (ES), the two 'sonic adventurers' Tim Exile (Warp) and Jon Hopkins (Domino) have collaborated with Olbeter (already active in the past as a set designer for some works of interactive theater for an important performance by Marcel Antúnez Roca, including aphasia from which the instrumentation of Soundclaster was created). Together the group have made a new work for this mechanical band, creating the conditions for a unique experience of co-operation between live music, man and machine, and for an exciting spectacle... READ MORE...

Sonar 2009: The Queen Mary Anne Hobbs

Mary Anne Hobbs is the undisputed queen of BBC Radio 1. Every Tuesday night from 2:00 to 4:00 in the morning, during her 'Experimental Shows' Mary Anne proposes a selection among the best new releases, ranging from dubstep to grim, from drum&bass to hip-hop up to techno and dark dancefloor... READ MORE...

Paolo Inverni: Paths Into Places Of Memory

On the 5th of June at the Mario Mazzoli Gallery in Berlin, the 'Paths' exhibition - the most recent project by the Piedmontese audiovisual artist Paolo Inverni - was inaugurated. The 'Paths' exhibition, curated by Daniela Cascella and produced by the freshly opened Berlin Gallery, will be open until the 18th of July... READ MORE...

Future Sounds Like Past Toys: Interview To Ape5 & Eraser

Ape5 is an old digimag acquaintance that we were pleased to 'meet' in various moments during the past few years so that he could tell us about his videomaking and his VJing (Interview 'Ape5 and Miki Ry', by Bertram Niessen, Digimag 02), as well as his research as a producer with the netlabel Vidaux, that contains many of the more interesting names of the live media scene in Italy ('Vidaux, Netlabels for watching and listening', by Bertram Niessen, Digimag 08... READ MORE...

The Art And The Epidemiological Criticism Of Gina Czarnecki

Gina Czarnecki is undoubtedly an conscious and sensitive artist, for the sensitive issues she courageously deals with, for her subjects, for her analysis and research methods she chose to elaborate, and for the aesthetic impact as well as the fascination of her work. This feeling is in her environmental and audiovisual work, and this feelings are even stronger when you have the chance to meet and talk to her... READ MORE...

Multitouch Barcelona. How “heat” Technology

In the last years technology has advanced in giant steps...this is not a new thing but today it seems to be a reality for everybody. Open source is now an open door that will come into all houses, exponentially speeding up creativity and development possibilities... READ MORE...

Active Imagination And Design Paradoxes

Weareable technologies are one of the most heralded examples of coexistence with new technologies in the everyday life. Whether they function as medical or sports aid, or they are used for mobile communication or sensory increase, they are part of the most wide spreaded scenery of planning and technological design... READ MORE...

Teatro A Corte 09. Art Without Borders

Summer time, Festival time. In this period of the year in Italy we witness an increasing and rising of close encounters with the theatre world. They can be more or less historical but these encounters are always meaningful and relevant. A new and modern Festival, which invested a lot in the contemporary art is the extraordinary 'Teatro A Corte' (Court Theatre), this year at its third edition. This festival is well known and qualified from all points of view and has always put the integration of arts and the enhancement of territory in the center of its activity... READ MORE...

Persepolis 2.0: Creative Support To Iran

I decided therefore to use Digicult as spokeman and create a short-circuit between some artistic and creative news and an important political event, i.e. the crisis in Iran. I wanted to make Digicult a small instrument of support, anyway without changing its roots and its cultural and editorial aim. Moreover I discovered the project Persepolis 2.0: it is a re-editing project by the graphic novel Persepolis created by the Iranian Marjane Satrapi which has had a lot of international success and offers a geographic and editorial comparison between the Iranian Revolution of 1979 (which is part of the original history) and what is happening nowadays in the Country. For this reason I decided first of all to support the project as requested, i.e. copying the Html code of the graphic tables on Digicult's homepage (all readers are kindly requested to do the same) and secondly to widespread it through Facebook. Last but not least I tried to get an interview for this edition of Digimag. It is an interview made in 24 hours, just before the publication of the newspaper, but it honours us and we hope it can be another small anchor to help the struggling Iranian people... READ MORE...

I-realize: Analyze This For A Better Future

Two days to notice unsolved problems, introduce (technological?) solutions and stimulate the creation of new disruptive start-ups in different areas of work. The event-conference I Realize - The Art of Disruption has been presented on its own website and was held on June 9-10 in the fantastic studios Virtuality Media Park in Turin. The stimulating the birth of start-up events in two days is definitely an ambitious goal. And by all appearances the goal was achieved.... READ MORE...

Vlogging, Networked Cinematic Poetics

Hegemonic systems of mainstream culture depict the World Wide Web as host to a number of large, central (but none-the-less global) sites controlled by a few corporate bodies. The names are ubiquitous for anyone trying to explore the modern media world: Facebook, Vimeo, Twitter, YouTube, and others that have either fallen by the wayside or are just bobbing below the surface of our awareness. These platforms all have their place of course, and most of us are making use of them.... READ MORE...

Ephemeral Physicality: Quantum Particles And Digital Art

Just as a quantum particle has both a virtual and a physical dimension, so does a work of digital art, which exists as both invisible code and visual display. The dual nature of matter in quantum mechanics is mirrored by the dual nature of a work of digital art. Just as a photon is both a particle and a wave, a work of digital art is both a set of instructions and the execution of those instructions. Digital art, software art, or any work of art that utilizes media as its medium- is both a set of structural relations (a system of process) and a set of discrete objects in space. This is conceptual dualism rather than physical dualism. But how does one make sense of diametriclly opposite models of the same thing without suffering a bit of cognitive dissonance? Neil's Bohr, one of the father's of quantum mechanics, points the way out: embrace the paradox... READ MORE...

Pirates At The Parliament: The Big Dream?!

In just 24 months we have witnessed an amazing increase in consensus toward our ideals across the globe. Renowned worldwide for being one of the most defiant and cheeky online centres for Peer to Peer and exchange of audio and video files, fresh from their success in the European Elections which took one of their representatives flying from the meshes of the Net straight into a political seat in Brussels, the board of Pirate Party International, the political branch of The Pirate Bay project, is euphoric.... READ MORE...

A New Center For Art & Technologies

A new Center for Arts and Technologies was born in Brescia, with the payoff of have an idea and put it into practice, to identify the personality of the place itself and of the members of it..... READ MORE...

Hackmeeting 2009: Meeting With The Debian Community

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...