Issue 64 Archives • Digicult | Digital Art, Design and Culture

Wefab: Digital Fabrication In The Heart Of Milan

If you are looking to make the revolution, maybe it is worth a trial. Or, better to say, a prototype, for it is design we are talking about. To the shouts of Make the right thing, WeFab exhibition has taken place in Milan, between April 14 and 16 of 2011 (http://www.wefab.it/). Three days entirely dedicated to open design, open source design and fabbing, the home-made fabrication: activities generating a short circuit in the relations between designer's creative act, prototyping and industrial production. WeFab has demonstrated how very different steps of production cycle can collapse to a unique time and place. A time and place that accept the burden of discussing about some century of our history, from the Industrial Revolution on.... READ MORE...

Sparkle Labs. The Sparkle Of Creation

In this scenario new actors are embodying the sharing of knowledge as a full time occupation and thousands of new followers are thrilled by interactive electronics. One of these actors is worth highlighting is called Sparkle Lab, a duo of designer and teacher, Amy Parness e Ariel Churi, based in New York City. Sparkel Lab, born some years ago, is a special mix of art, craft, science and cuteness enabling the disclosure of the little engineers hiding inside all of us. Pastel colors, iced icons make us easily forget we are dealing with circuits, leds, electric threads and suddenly we learn the basis of electronics.... READ MORE...

Zul Mahmod. Singaporean Sound Art

One of the most high-profile of a sound art scene in Singapore also including figures like Yuen Chee Wai, Zai Kuning, and George Chua, Zul Mahmod sets his own sonic practice apart by using techniques in sound to explore the relationships between media including drawing, sculpture, and architecture.... READ MORE...

The Influencers 2011. Collective Dreams, Contemporary Heroes

In a world always more trapped in media tangles, where conflicts are silently solved and they adopt formats making themselves less recognizable, it is up to the artist, once again, to shed light to what went on behind the scenes, to give a wake-up call, to inspire people to revolt and to claim their rights.... READ MORE...

The Roman Spring By Stalker. Wondering Around With Lorenzo Romito

In 1995 Lorenzo Romito s one of the initiators of Stalker, an urban art lab, a multidisciplinary collective subject aimed at exploring the transformations and urban changes.... READ MORE...

Revealing Interstitial Spaces. Part 2

This essay offers an investigation into the notion of interstitial space and its creative exploration in various site-specific art practices as realised mainly with the use of digital technology. This is the second part of this three-part essay.... READ MORE...

Cae: The Spectre Of Plague. Biological Warfare, Politics Of Fear

A few months ago, Lo spettro della peste (Eluthera, Milano, 2011) was finally released in Italy (under Copyleft Licences, to copy and freely spread the contents of the book). It is the translation of the historic Marching Plague: Germ Warfare and Global Public Health, published by CAE in 2007 for Autonomedia.... READ MORE...

Notes On Online Middle East. The Infinite Potential Of The Masses

Middle East is burning. Syria is only one of the last pieces of this raging domino which exploded unpredictably from the inextinguishable flames of Tunisian and Egyptian revolution, both capable of overthrowing the existing regimes and reaffirming some old principle: the infinite potential of masses and the spontaneous political unmanageability of peoples, completely opposite to the automatic violence of authorities, which the more it ends, the faster it updates. (G. Agamben, Means Without End: Notes of Politics, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 1996).... READ MORE...

Josephine Bosma: Nettitudes. Let’s Talk Net Art

Nettitudes. Let's talk Net Art byJosephine Bosma is the latest book published by Studies in Network Cultures series, directed by Geert Lovink for Nai Publishers in Rotterdam..... READ MORE...

Transmedia. Postgraduate In Arts, Media & Design

The New Media Art Education & Research field, is one of the most dynamic and controversial fields of study and professional confrontation, at an international level, of the last few years. The possible relapse on a new generation of artists and designers, of a certain kind of theoretical, historical and critical teaching, to be possibly integrated with a more technical, instrumental and operational aspect, on the application of digital technologies (software and hardware) in a creative field, is the topic of many meeting.... READ MORE...

Manuel Lima. Mapping The Information Space

In the contemporary media scenario always more information is produced, managed and shared through digital channels, with the consequent production of a huge quantity of data which end up piling up and stratifying in the enormous container which is the Net. To trace tracks, outlines allowing to enhance - in between art and science - trends, connections or configurations within this digital chaos, is today one of the main aims of Information Visualization, and that of Manuel Lima - interaction designer, architect and researcher - is one of the most authoritative voices in the present-day research scenario on this theme. Member of the Royal Society of Arts, he was named by Creativity Magazine 'among the 50 most influential and creative minds of 2009'.... READ MORE...

Critical Fusion. Interview To Maurice Benayoun

Maurice Benayoun is one of the most experienced among digital media artists, both in France and abroad. Principally known as an interactive artist, his research course on visual art and video started from documentary experiences, as testified by his documentaries and video installations about the most influent contemporary artists in the Eighties. In 1987 he was one of the founders of Studio Z-A, one of the first examples of professional studio aimed to the experimentation of new approaches to computer-made images.... READ MORE...

Roberto Pugliese. Digital Bio-acoustics

Roberto Pugliese is a distinguished representative of what is described above. He comes from a musical academic culture, but having soon felt the limits of a single view, he then began to look for other stimuli in the field of visual arts. This should be a reason of pride for the visual field, so often denigrated and abused, and moreover it helps to underline the need to mix different points of view.... READ MORE...

Voluptuous Data. Matias Del Campo And Span Architects

Talking about design and architecture with Matias Del Campo (SPAN Architects, with Sandra Manninger) opens the mind toward an unexpected miscellanea of technology and romanticism. It clarifies that the work of those that, like SPAN, are developing new paradigms in material production through architecture act in a world where the combination of technology and sensibility has yet to be questioned and investigated. As Del Campo himself states, in this field we have just scratched the surface: everything still has to be imagined, discovered and defined.... READ MORE...