Focus Archives • Page 3 of 18 • Digicult | Digital Art, Design and Culture

Is there enough time to make hyper-short films?

If 2013 was the year of the selfie, then 2014 was the year of the hyper-short film, the phenomenon of hyper-short film-making, the kind of work that is found within such platforms as Vine, Instagram, and Tout... READ MORE...

Where do we stand in Italy, with the digitization of cultural contents?

Where do we stand in 2014, especially in Italy, with the effective dissemination of digital cultural contents and the development of digital cultural markets, compared to the diffusion of traditional physical media?... READ MORE...

Digital Gestalt. About a classification of digital shapes

The influence of digital technologies on the possibilities of creating unusual morphologies and visual scenarios different from the traditional Euclidean codes... READ MORE...

Remote Encounters: a report about networking practitioners

Remote Encounters: Connecting bodies, collapsing spaces and temporal ubiquity in networked performance was a two-day international conference with performances held at the University of South Wales on the 11th and 12th of April 2013... READ MORE...

Le cyberguerre sotto i nostri occhi. InfoWar di Vito Campanelli

Sorry, this entry is only available in Italian.... READ MORE...

From browser’s cache to the human genome. Towards an extended notion of publishing

While referring to a specific professional field, the term “publishing” puts emphasis on the act of making things public. Each facet of this practice has undergone radical transformations as a result of the widespread diffusion of interconnected digital device... READ MORE...

The anonymous architecture, a globalization transporter

Over the years, technology has been seducing our domestic spaces and urban integrities with possibilities of expansion beyond traditional overviews. At the end of the WWII, military technology was already arising, inserting itself at home for necessity and altering our perceptions of space. Media and technology have dismantled any barrier near or far, expressing the inexistent lines and boundaries between countries, landscapes, events and culture. Today we find ourselves learning from every other culture, from DYI's someone posted online proving its workability or not; with open source technologies that convert our homes into micro labs for our children who suddenly become makers.... READ MORE...

Baltan Laboratories. Back to the Future: Natlab & the history of Electronic Music

The beginning of this year, after an intensive renovation and more then four decades of being closed, the historic former Philips Natlab building in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, opened its doors. The new Natlab houses three cultural organizations; a cult cinema, a film workspace and Baltan Laboratories; a lab for development and display of electronic arts.... READ MORE...

Material addicts: when open access becomes a cult

In recent years, the relationship between materials and designers has been profoundly transformed by the search for new forms of access through increasingly participatory and deep actions, progressively deeper and more participatory, by the processes of new materials’ development and their scope. Up to the 1980s, the designer’s approach to materials definition had mainly been indirect, given the clients’ mediation, serving as interface between planning requirements and the choice of the most appropriate solutions in materials terms.... READ MORE...

“Spreadable Media” by Henry Jenkins. The social value of content sharing

Spreadable Media is the latest book by Henry Jenkins, professor at the University of South California and participatory culture theorist, written together with two digital strategists Sam Ford and Joshua Green.... READ MORE...

Towards a Catalogue of Artists’ Records: Records by Artists (1960-1990)

In 1977, Germano Celant published the volume OffMedia, Nuove Tecniche Artistiche: video disco libro. In this text, recognising the pervasiveness of the record in the contemporary artistic practice, Celant wrote: “In the art of the 1960s the record took its place alongside communications media such as video, the telegram, the photograph, the book and the film […] In line with the reductive theories of the period the record contributes to the isolation of one component of art work, sound, while on the other hand it enriches the array of linguistic tools available for the task of exploding the specifically visual and pushing back the limits of the art process"[1].... READ MORE...

Shiro Takatani. The extension of visible

there is a sort of landscape full of visual and sonic inputs determining – unconsciously – our perception. Just around these minimal perceptions, boundaries of the infinitely small, are the works of the Japanese and worldwide known artist Shiro Takatani, already leader of the Japanese theatre company Dumb Type and today involved in different projects, from installation - as Frost Frames, conceived for the Kyoto Spiral Hall in 1998 and the collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto for LIFE – fluid, invisible, inaudible…(2007) – to live performances, like the recent La chambre Claire (2008) and Chroma (2012).... READ MORE...

The Spirit of Uncertainty. A few questions about Political Art

Five potters sit around a small pottery wheel. They work mainly in silence, only speaking occasionally. Their hands mould the soft earthy clay; focused they build upwards slowly but steadily. What is striking, is their commitment to the collective nature of the project. Many visibly struggle to suppress the urge to privilege their own personal creative vision. But they persevere.... READ MORE...

Challenging perception. “SIN”, the first solo exhibition of Mario de Vega

The visitors of “SIN”, Mario de Vega’s first solo exhibition (1979, Mexico City) which opened on June 20th at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City, were requested to first read a sheet with pieces of information on the installations in that exhibition, in order to then sign a declaration of having read and understood the text, of not having recently undergone a surgery operation, as well as of not suffering health problems or upset such as high blood pressure, heart problems, general hypersensitivity, panic attacks, or epilepsy.... READ MORE...

Biohackers. The Politics of Open Science. Hackers aiming at the conquest of the world of science

What do hackers have to do with BioLabs dealing with DNA mapping and testing new modifications of human life? Biohackers is a book written by Alessandro Delfanti, a scholar who studies the relationships between science and society. He tells us not only that the hacker culture has many things in common with the world of science, but also, in a more fascinating way, that the current transformations of life sciences are and will be even more characterized by a mash-up or remix (by adopting the author's own words) between the traditional scientific culture, the hacker ethics and the open access culture.... READ MORE...

“Introduzione ai media digitali”. Watching at the technology-society connection

Short History of Nearly Everything is the title of a popular science book published some time ago. But may also be the subtitle of Adam Arvidsson and Alessandro Delfanti Introduzione ai Media Digitali, a short history (150 pages) of nearly everything that an internet user or university student needs to know about the political, economic and social implications of new digital media.... READ MORE...

Cinema in the time of workflow. The digital revolution and film criticism’s Ancien Régime

In 2007, when I started my collaboration with Digicult and writing for Digimag, I discussed with its editor, Marco Mancuso, about what could be the areas of intersection between digital art and cinema. At the time I was still rather fresh from a university degree course in film studies that was largely, if not entirely, based on textbooks using a terminology that was light-years far from actual, hands-on film-making. Six years later cinema was fully digitalized, but the language of film criticism has remained virtually unchanged.... READ MORE...

A look at the present day. Laurie Anderson’s “Big Science”, thirty years later

Thirty years ago, well, thirty-one, to be more precise; “Big Science”, Laurie Anderson’s debut album, was published. If you want to talk in clichés, what doesn’t do justice to anybody, we could say that the American artist doesn’t need to be introduced: anyway, Lou Reed’s girlfriend, key player in various artistic scenes of the last decades, Laurie Anderson is a complex and an iconic personality, i.e., a child of the ‘80s.... READ MORE...