LAST POST

During the summer, I finally decided to put some order in my web activity. I buyed a new domain and started a wordpress blog there. Thus, this blog won't be updated anymore. Please go to

http://domenicoquaranta.com

if you'd like to know something more on my recent activity.

Domenico Quaranta

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CALL: PIXXELPOINT 2009 - ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST

ENTRY FORM (PDF): http://www.pixxelpoint.org/entryform2009.pdf
DEADLINE: September 30th 2009, arrival date.
WEBSITE: WWW.PIXXELPOINT.ORG

*** *** ***

Once Upon a Time in the West

We keep on talking about “new media”, while in actually fact these media are anything but new. The Net is twenty years old, if we start counting from the advent of the Web, forty if we start from Arpanet. Spacewar!, the first videogame ever, is more or less the same age. Virtual worlds are the updated, lighter versions of a technology acclaimed as “the future” when Second Life programmers were still in diapers; social networks are the bastard sons of Fidonet. As for the computer, it is younger than Lord Byron, but certainly not than his daughter Ada.

Once upon a time there was the electronic frontier, an abandonware myth which was able to regenerate itself thanks to the continuous advance of the frontier itself. Like in space, in technological progress there's no ocean at the end of the trip. But, unlike the space race, the race to the next technology is endless, and endlessness is boring.

Yet, while we got used to innovation and the day-after rhetorics, we have never got used to the loss of the past. We look back to what was new yesterday and is trash today, and we feel a deep sense of nostalgia. Commodore 64 and 386dx. The first Apple Macintosh. Bulletin Board Systems. Animated gifs. Glittering images. Web buttons. Super Mario. Doom. Napster. Jennicam. Mosaic. ASCII art. MIDIs and MOOs. Not to mention VHS, vinyl, audio cassettes, cathode tubes, portable radios, faxes. It is the kind of nostalgia that we feel for a relative who died young, once the pain abates: you are left wondering what kind of man he would have been. Or for someone that, once grown up, does not live up to his or her promise. Sometimes nostalgia develops into historical research, and becomes media archeology. We don't look for the technologies that we once loved, but those we have never seen in action.

But in both the cases, in the artistic field this sentimental look at the past is producing some brand new, interesting stuff. Reviving dead media and obsolete technologies, retrieving and rekindling their aesthetics, making them do things they were never expected to do, and telling stories about them with other means is proving to be a sound artistic strategy – undoubtedly more so than “the exploration of the artistic potential of new media” which became the mantra of most New Media Art. This happens because, when you give up on the rhetorics of novelty, what is left on stage is the human element: the man of the past who domesticated the media, put his own life into them and was changed by them; and the man of the present, who looks back on that past with the same sentiment as the venerable Sergio Leone looked to the West.

On the occasion of its 10th Birthday, Pixxelpoint festival wants to explore this feeling. Clean out your attic, the folders you haven’t touched for years, GIF repositories, your university's warehouse, and the dumps of Silicon Valley – or its small-town emulators. Get your hands on this stuff, and send us your finds. Any media is allowed, apart from new!

Domenico Quaranta, curator


*** *** ***

Rules and conditions

1.
Pixxelpoint 2009 International New Media Art Festival will begin on December 4th 2009 in Nova Gorica, Slovenia in Nova Gorica City Gallery (Mestna galerija Nova Gorica) and it will last for eight days, until December 11th 2009.

2.
Competitors can choose between categories:
- New media installation (new media work that is exhibited in spatial arrangements)
- Computer based art (new media work that doesn’t require physical space, for example, programs, computer games, internet art, etc.)
- Digital print
- Video
- Other (work in traditional media - ie drawing, painting, sculpture, embroidery and so on - that may fit thematically or conceptually in the exhibition)

3.
Submissions must be sent free of charge to:
Pixxelpoint
Kulturni dom Nova Gorica
Bevkov trg 4
SI 5000 Nova Gorica
Slovenia

(Att. Blaz Erzetic)
E-mail: pixxelpoint2009@gmail.com

Deadline is September 30th 2009, arrival date.

4.
Works can be sent on:
- CD-ROM
- DVD-ROM
- e-mail (pixxelpoint2009@gmail.com)


Label on the media must contain the name of the author and the work. Every single work must be accompanied by entry form. Works submitted without this entry form will not be valid. In case of sending by email, attach scanned filled form or send it by fax to 00386 33 540 19. Media will not be returned.

5.
There are no software and hardware limitations.

6.
Competitors agree that their work can be used for promotional purposes for the festival Pixxelpoint and catalogue for Pixxelpoint festival.

7.
Submitted works will be selected by the curator on the basis of artistic achievement. Autors whose works are admitted to the contest will be contacted by the oragnizers.

8.
Author guarantees the authenticity of his/her work. In case that work is partially or completely not competitor’s property, he/she assures that he has all the rights and permissions to use this work.
With this statement the author frees the festival of any misunderstandings regarding copyrights.

9.
Pixxelpoint will not sell artworks or copyrights of the submitted works. The festival is meant only as exhibition and promotion for the artists.

10.
All submitted works must match the given theme ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ as described on this page.

TALK: Dal networking al Web 2.0

PANEL: Loop Video Art Fair, Barcelona

On Saturday May 30 I will be in Barcelona to take part to a round table titled "How new technologies and online participative culture affect the production and distribution of videoart". The panel, moderated by Julia Dragonovic and hosted by LOOP Video Art Fair, will see the participation of Christopher Eamon, Mike Stubbs and myself. You can find more informations here.

Below you can read my memorandum for the panel. Just a couple of rough annotations, more interesting for the links and videos enbedded...

---

IF I WERE A COLLECTOR, I'D PUT MY VIDEO COLLECTION ON YOUTUBE
Domenico Quaranta

Generally I'm not an enthusiast of so-called "Web 2.0" platforms such as Youtube.

My position about them is that they took the great networking culture of the Eighties and Nineties and deprived it of its critical potential, changing its powerful instruments into neutral, commercial devices.

Youtube's slogan is a good proof to my argument: "Broadcast yourself" changes Indymedia's "Dont' hate the media - become the media!" into a commercial for wannabe celebrities.

But here, we are not talking about Youtube per se, but about its consequences on art production and distribution - and I have to say that I'm quite optimistical about that.

THE RETURN OF THE AMATEUR

One interesting thing about Web 2.0 platforms is what has been dubbed as "the return of the amateur". This is a constant of the Net - think, for example, to the personal homepages of the mid Nineties.

The amateur does what contemporary artists usually do:

1. he produces and
2. he post-produces

... but he does it at an amateurish level. Saying that, with the Internet, everybody is an artist would be like to say that, with the invention of writing, everybody should be a writer.



Versions (2009), by Oliver Laric

This video, by Munich-based artist Oliver Laric, is a very interesting take on the kind of culture the Internet is giving birth.

Versions is also interesting because it shows one of the potentials of platforms such as Youtube for art production.

(POST)PRODUCTION

Youtube (but also Flickr, Facebook, Delicious and so on) offers an extraordinarily large pool of SOURCE MATERIAL ready to be rearranged, recycled, remixed, reused by the artists. Like most pop art, this kind of art has an ambiguous relationship with its source, incorporating both celebration and criticism:



Martin Kohout aka PASH*, Moonwalk, 2008

David Kraftsow, YooouuuTuuube, 2009

But of course, this kind of production is more interesting when it says something about the people behind the source material, their obsessions, their myths etc.

Oliver Laric, 50 50, 2007



Brody Condon, Without Sun, 2009.

DISSEMINATION

For artists, Youtube and alikes are not just means of production: they are means of distribution as well. Through them, they can make their art accessible to a wider audience. Moonwalk, for example, has been visualized 29.978 times on Youtube.

This, of course, can be useful for many purposes: not just reaching a wider and more variegated audience, but also:

- giving accessibility to historical material that is difficult to see in other ways, and thus enforcing the circulation of knowledge
i.e.: early computer art from the sixties and seventies; and, of course, most video art;

- distributing the work in unconventional ways
i.e. the media hacking strategy adopted by UBERMORGEN.COM.



UBERMORGEN.COM, Foriginal Media Hack No.1, 2006

Of course, Youtube isn't alone in this growth of dissemination and recycling. Peer to peer networks did it for a long time, and at a better quality. Of course, file sharing is illegal.



Alterazioni Video: Artists' serial killer (2008)

THE ISSUE OF COPYRIGHT

Copyright is a complicated issue, and can't be properly discussed here. My general position is that there should be some limits to piracy and sharing, but in order to find this limits we first have to agree that copyright (in the current form) is obsolete, and should be completely reconsidered.

That said, I also think that, if we take into account the cultural market in general, the art market is the last one that should be afraid of Youtube and file sharing networks. The reason is quite simple to explain. Cinema and music are still based on an “access economy”. I usually pay to see a movie or to listen to music. Of course, if I can download it for free, I will not pay any more. (This is the general argument beyond any restriction on file sharing – I have some doubts about it, but it works in this context). On the contrary, contemporary art is based on “mixed ecomomy”:
- an access economy (for the general audience);
- a luxury economy of objects and fetishes (for collectors).

If I'm just a spectator, I can see artworks for free (or paying a small amount of money) in an exhibition. Even if I see a video on Youtube, I'll keep on going to exhibitions, because the experience is fundamentally different.
What the Web can provides in this case is a brand new, deeper relationship with the artwork. When I see a video in an exhibition, usually I look at it for a couple of minutes. Showing video art is STILL a big problem. The web can give me the opportunity to see an artwork from the beginning to the end, one or more times, possibly on my bed.

If I am a collector, I'll pay a large amount of money to have the actual work, as a unique or a limited, signed edition. Of course, I will not stop buying videos because I can see them on Youtube, because what I want is not the right to see it, but the property of an artwork. The video I bought has not just a personal, but an economical value too. The more this work is seen, discussed, understood, criticized, the more its value will increase.

This is why, if I were a collector, I'd put my video collection on Youtube.



Alterazioni Video, Copy-Right No Copy-Right, since 2005

SHOW: RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting

On Thursday, May 28, I will be in Rijeka (Croatia) for the opening of the last episode of RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting. The exhibition is presented by MMSU - Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka. You can see all the press materials on the Re:akt! website.

The exhibition will feature two brand new videos, with a theoretical statement by me and Antonio Caronia,co-editor of the book RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting. This is mine one, a re-enactment in itself (indeed inspired by Janez Janša's theatrical work Slovene National Theatre):

RE:akt! - Domenico Quaranta from aksioma on Vimeo.

And here is Antonio, who is definitely a better performer than me:

RE:akt! - Antonio Caronia from aksioma on Vimeo.

At 5.00 PM, the museum will host a panel discussion featuring Domenico Quaranta, curator of the exhibition; the Italian theoretician Antonio Caronia, co-editor of the book RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting, Tomislav Medak, Sunčica Ostojć and Martina Vovk.

SHOW: Prague Biennale - Hyperlucid

I uploaded on Picasa some pictures from Hyperlucid (see post below for further informations):

Prague Biennale - Hyperlucid

TEXT: Hyperlucid

Catalogue text for the exhibition H Y P E R L U C I D - Prague Biennale 4, May 14 - July 26, 2009.

H Y P E R L U C I D Training to live in a new reality

Reality is no longer what it used to be. The media are increasingly infiltrating it, filling our dreams, which usually come when our eyes are open. Wide open. In the context of “Expanded Painting”, H Y P E R L U C I D is an exhibition of works born on the invisible edge between two different levels of reality (actual reality and media reality), and documenting the continuous transition from one level to the other. The boundaries are increasingly porous, and sometimes even the most lucid among us can't help but wonder which level of reality we are looking at in a given moment. We all experienced this feeling when confronted with the 9/11 pictures. As Slavoj Zizek wrote in 2002: “Virtual Reality [...] provides reality itself deprived of its substance, of the resisting hard kernel of the Real [...] Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being one. However, at the end of this process of virtualization, the inevitable Benthamian conclusion awaits us: reality is its own best semblance.” [1]
Instead of dealing with the virtualization of the real, H Y P E R L U C I D explores the actualization of the virtual. Media reality is reality. Media no longer produce simulacra: they produce events, history, life. The map doesn't precede the territory, as Jean Baudrillard claimed [2]; the real still exists, and the map is now part of it. The media overwhelm us with icons, brands, pixellated images of torture, wars, outrages. The hardest fight happens there. They help us to construct new levels of reality, both abstract and hyperreal, and to get used to them. Videogames and virtual worlds are our training grounds: there, through increasingly complex social and narrative dynamics, and through a photorealism which exceeds our playing needs, we forget how to recognize simulation, and we exercise our brains for the next step: the one in which, between tangible reality, simulated reality and media reality, there are no barriers anymore, but only the translucent, easily penetrable sheets of shadow theater. We took the last train to the world of Perky Pat, and there is no way back [3].

It is no surprise that videogames and virtual worlds play such an important role in H Y P E R L U C I D. It is hard for a visual artist today to escape their fascination. Eva and Franco Mattes, who were able to escape their Second Life, recently started to fight for a Half Life. If in the stylish, visionary world created in 2003 by the Californian Linden Labs they focused on identity, subjectivity and virtual life, in the ultra-violent first-person shooter (FPS) developed by Valve Software in 1998 they discovered the astounding beauty of the virtual landscape. When the spectator faces these silent “topographies”, which call to mind the sublime landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, as well as the urban atmospheres of Edward Hopper and the Magical Realism of the Twenties, she could hardly imagine that to attain this peace the artists had to fight off hundreds of aliens and human enemies. In a narrative, the scenery is usually functional to the story, and videogames are no exception. Yet, in recent games they have acquired a life of their own; or, in other words, they are no longer sceneries, they are worlds that may – between one fight and one other – surprise the virtual hero for their gratuitous beauty and seamless existence.



Unlike the Mattes, Gazira Babeli can't escape Second Life. She was born there, and there she will live her avatar life till the end, playing the role of the virus in the system – or Neo in the Matrix – with her Keatonian sense of comedy. Gazira Babeli is the living proof that the separation between the so-called “virtual” and the so-called “real” is just an error of perspective, and that we can live just one life, the second, without appearing any less “real” for that. As she says, “My art consists in experimenting in an ironic and 'pop' way with the complementary and often contradictory aspects of a 'whole world' which, despite being inhabited by 'puppets', hosts at least a million people. Real people.” Her movie Gaz' of the Desert (2007) is the mythological, almost hagiographic transcription of her life, which in the series of prints “painted d'apres Delacroix” exaggerates the romantic, bituminous light of Second Life, ironically playing with the cultural stereotypes her world relies on.



A similar irony can be found in the recent work of Miltos Manetas, which turns Will Wright's recent masterpiece, Spore (Maxis 2008), into an ambiguous garden of delights populated by hybrid creatures, apparently generated by the marriage between Walt Disney and Hieronymus Bosch. The naivete of these images, the pale, light colors adopted, and even the special technique used by Manetas in these and other prints (vibracolor print on super glossy paper) call to mind the delicate paintings of the Primitives, such as Beato Angelico and Van der Weyden. In the series Gino De Dominicis (After Spore), these implicit references mix with a declared one, to the paintings of Gino de Dominicis; while the verticality of these images – actually self-portraits – and the precarious instability of the figures on their plinths, make them similar to the saints portrayed in the side panels of a polyptych, while their snouty noses and inscrutable ambiguity place them among the strange creatures portrayed by the Italian artist.



There is no irony, on the contrary, in Gerhard Mantz's work. For years, the German artist has used software to generate synthetic landscapes able to withstand the closest scrutiny. But don't talk about hyperrealism, baby. Hyperrealism is reproduction, 3D modeling is production. Mantz's sunrises and sunsets belong to a world that was entirely created by him. They are too beautiful to be real, too realistic to be crafted. They remind us of the romantic landscape, but also Windows' custom wallpapers; Sturm und Drang meets Vista on these big canvases. As he wrote: “My starting point is never a landscape seen in reality, but an abstraction, a constructed calculation of archetypal space. This construct is then transformed step-by-step through simulated light, atmosphere, water, terrain, flora and fauna to conjure memories that translate as complex emotions rather than a specificity of place.”



But H Y P E R L U C I D is not about videogames, 3D aesthetics and so on; it is about an irritating awareness of the reality we live in, the unfriendly ability to penetrate its multiple layers. The term “irritate” is not used by chance here. The Surrealists wanted to “irritate” our perception in order to make the unconscious come to the surface. The artists featured in H Y P E R L U C I D do the same with our visual culture, in order to make these multiple layers visible. Alterazioni Video's tapestries are irritatingly similar to Alighiero & Boetti's ones, in a way that make them appear a simple work of appropriation, which they aren't. Here, Alighiero & Boetti is not referenced in a postmodern way, but is used and abused as a medium. One of the first and most dangerous computer viruses appeared in our mailbox as a romantic love letter; in a similar way, these tapestries are extremely dangerous because they are friendly and easy-to-get. They look like the same old shit, yet they are vehicles of the forbidden. Produced for an exhibition in China, they have censored information encrypted under their reassuring surfaces – information that can be decrypted using the right cultural code, or the right technical device. In the QRCODE series, for example, in order to access the information you just have to photograph one of the embroidery carpets with a smartphone and send this image to a specific decrypting software which can translate it and decodify the hidden information: and voila! access to pornographic web sites, contact information for political dissidents and activists, lists of forbidden words.



In the project Superenhanced (2009), the Austrian duo UBERMORGEN.COM address torture and its present use in both democratic and non-democratic countries, apparently presenting and promoting it with a striking visual campaign for the brand new service of “enhanced interrogation”. In the series, various forms of enhanced interrogation are played out directly by the artists and their daughters, in a kind of Kamasutra of torture that recycles media imagery directly from Guantanamo and other supermax prisons, glossing over the violence and replacing it with glamorous advertising aesthetics.



Lastly, Damon Zucconi and Shane Hope belong to a younger generation of artists interested in the vernacular of the Web, in the subcultures of techno-freaks that gather online, even though they reference them in very different ways. Damon Zucconi's works can be described as “meditations on contemporary visual culture”. He appropriates found material of any kind, usually through simple, almost fatuous means. In Morris Louis; Dalet Kaf (Horizontal and Vertical blur), for example, he appropriates a painting by Morris Louis, probably found on the Net, applying a simple editing filter to it and then printing it out quarter-scale. Pole Shift (2008) is a video which treats a landscape photograph as a three dimensional space, deforming it in a slow, hypnotic movement; in Slow Rave (2006) he slow down the video of a rave party in order to mimic its participants’ altered perception of reality. Sometimes Red, Sometimes Blue (2007) is exactly what the title says: a web page conceived as a “color field”, which changes randomly at every access. Trained as a sculptor, Zucconi is interested in what lies under the surface of our visual culture: an “underlying problem” that a little manipulation of the surface brings to the fore.



With an almost opposite take, Shane Hope seems to look for a complexity that doesn't even exist yet, belonging to a possible future or a parallel universe he may have visited... in his dreams, we would have said in the age of Samuel T. Coleridge's Xanadu; through his laptop, we should say today. The artist has developed a personal, hybrid language full of misspellings, scientific jargon, and new kinds of slang in order to describe a reality made of materials, technologies, cults and possibilities not yet explored. In his work (which he usually describes as “speculative vernacular”) he mixes molecular prototyping and assemblage, miniature sculpture and animation, futurology and retrocomputing. His Speculativernacular Blog Botherings are paintings – outsourced to Chinese painters, of course – depicting blog posts written in a kind of alien English. Because a new reality deserves another language, and another stage in the evolution of man: bringing us a human with a hyperlucid gaze on a layered reality, whose language is a man-machine hybrid slang, and whose “mother is open source.”



Even if it is part of Expanded Painting, H Y P E R L U C I D does not gather paintings in the literal sense. Here, painting is not a medium, but a cultural frame, a context of reference for the new generation of image makers. The artists collected here no longer paint, even if they sometimes still do: they shoot, they manipulate, they code, they make scripts, sometimes they fight with other virtual characters. Yet, in the end, they produce images. Images where all the layers of reality collapse. Images that, like a Photoshop image, are made of different layers. Images to be looked through. They are not about reality, like a painting by Courbet. They are not about media reality, like Andy Warhol's Car Crashes or Richard Prince's Cowboys. They are not about the map, or the territory. They are about both, because the two have become one and the same thing.


[1] Slavoj Zizek, “Welcome to the Desert of the Real”, in The Symptom, Issue 2, Spring 2002, available online at the address http://www.lacan.com/desertsymf.htm.
[2] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et Simulation, Galilee 1985. Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press 1996.
[3] Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Doubleday, 1965.

SHOW: HYPERLUCID

HYPERLUCID
Training to live in a new reality

Curated by: Domenico Quaranta



For: Prague Biennale 4
Karlin Hall, Thamova 8 - Praga 8
May 14 - July 26, 2009
Directors and General Curators: Helena Kontova and Giancarlo Politi
General Editor / Curatorial Advisor: Nicola Trezzi
Official website: http://www.praguebiennale.org/

ARTISTS: Alterazioni Video; Gazira Babeli; Shane Hope; Miltos Manetas; Gerhard Mantz; Eva and Franco Mattes; UBERMORGEN.COM; Damon Zucconi.

Reality is not the one we were used to anymore. Media infiltrate it more and more, and fill up our dreams, which usually come when our eyes are open. Wide open. In the frame of "Expanded Painting", H Y P E R L U C I D is an exhibition collecting works born on the invisible edge between two different levels of reality (apparent reality and media reality), and documenting the continuous trespassing from one level to the other. The walls in between are more and more porous, and sometimes even the more lucid gaze can't help but wonder which level of reality it is looking at in a particular moment. All of us had this feeling, in front of 9/11 pictures. Media don't produce simulacra anymore: they produce events, history, life. They overwhelm us with icons, brands, pixellated images of tortures, wars, outrages. The hardest fight happens there. They help us to construct new levels of reality, both abstract and hyperreal, and to get used to them. Finally, videogames are the places of our training: there, through more and more complex social and narrative dynamics, and through a photorealism which even overcomes our playing needs, we forget how to recognize simulation, and we exercise our brain for the next step: the one in which, between tangible reality, simulated reality and media reality there are no barriers anymore, but only the sheets, translucent and easy to pass through, of a chinese shadows theater. We took the last train to the world of Perky Pat, and there is no way to come back. H Y P E R L U C I D doesn't collects paintings. Here, painting is not a medium, but a cultural frame, a context of reference for the new generation of the image makers. Alterazioni Video, Gazira Babeli, Shane Hope, Miltos Manetas, Gerhard Mantz, Eva and Franco Mattes, UBERMORGEN.COM and Damon Zucconi, no longer paint: they shoot, they manipulate, they code, they make scripts, sometimes they fight with other virtual characters. Yet, in the end, they produce images.

MORE INFOS & DOWNLOADABLE IMAGES: http://www.domenicoquaranta.net/hyperlucid.html

CATALOGUE TEXT: http://www.domenicoquaranta.net/hyperlucid/HYPERLUCID_catalogue_text.pdf

TALK: Art and Electronic Media

On Thursday, April 30 I will be in Genova for the presentation of the book Art and Electronic Media, published by Phaidon Press in 2009, together with the author Edward Shanken. The presentation is organized by ADAC in collaboration with my PHD school, and will take place at 3 PM in the Aula Magna of the Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia - University of Genova.
Edward A. Shanken writes and teaches about the entwinement of art, science, and technology with a focus on interdisciplinary practices involving new media. He is Universitair Docent in New Media, University of Amsterdam, and a member of the Media Art History faculty at the Donau University in Krems, Austria.
The book was welcomed by Roy Ascott with these words: “It is a superb work of scholarship, marked by clarity, subtlety, and comprehensive vision. Art and Electronic Media does us all a great service. More than any other publication that I know of, it will bring our field of practice into the mainstream of art.” You can buy the book on Amazon and download a preview here.

TALK: Art & the City: Holy Fire