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SNLab develops projects with academia, public institutions and private industry in order to generate efficient networks that optimize interdisciplinary and creative approaches to innovation. New media, the intersections between fine arts, science and technology, regeneration projects, environmental and sustainability issues, secular society and virtual reality environments are some of the areas explored. SNLab works on the conception and development of creative content for exhibitions and media projects, collaborative synergies and the management of interdisciplinary networks.
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For several years now I have been concerned and interested in the issues related to authorship and how the changes in the practice of creative/art production affects the way in which both the author and the audience relate to the content/artwork. The problems appear to be intensified by the confusion in the use of the words interactive and participatory. The unclear definition of what it interaction and participation mean, particularly within the media and fine art productions, leaves the commentator with the onus of weeding out practices that are substandard or fall short of definitions that fluxuate between very different standards and criteria.
A common and established understanding of interaction, beyond the “press this botton or do this action” and something - generally speaking totally predictable and preapproved - will happen, has to be addressed.
In particular I am focusing on this issue in my analysis of the recent history of Italian cinema for an essay that I am writing titled The Precarious State of Italian Film: Between Nostalgia and Aesthetic Failures.
The essay will analyse a socio-political film from 2005, Il Vangelo Secondo Precario/The Gospel According to Precarious, directed by Stefano Obino, which attempted to portray the consequences of the growing phenomenon of job insecurity within the contemporary Italian labour market. The film was partly financed with subscriptions of 10 Euros that entitled each subscriber to a DVD of the film and their name in the closing credits.
The essay will focus on the movie’s failure to deliver a genuine, collective form of audience involvement within a cinematic project, and to address Italy’s contemporary social problems outside the restricted framework of an increasingly isolated and provincialized Italian society. It will compare the traditional concept of cinematic authorship in Italy with different cinematic approaches in fine arts, new media, and film: The Tulse Luper Project by Peter Greenaway, Road Movie by Frieze Foundation and Channel4 and Paulo Cohelo’s movie The Witch of Portobello made by MySpace audiences. These three international case studies will offer a comparison between the traditional Italian concept of authorship and national and international cinematic experimentation. This comparison will provide the opportunity to analyse contemporary Italian directorial approaches which, apart from collaborative ventures undertaken by directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni or the new media TV project NGVision, have not superseded traditional perspectives.
The complexity of what is participation in this context can be stressed by the increasing use of social networking tools and the delocalization of production from a central space to the periphery through the economic models of franchising and outsourcing. Although apparently a democratic system, I am becoming increasingly convinced, that this is a process of social economic exploitation that is increased by the exploitation of aspirations and often, in models of cultural production of artistic exhibitions, is serving the purpose of a hierarchical system reproducing and reinforcing its existing power structures. The example is an exhibition of 200 or 2000 images collected from around the world and composed, through a collage, in a single image. How visible is each one of the artists? How much have they benefitted from this minimal exposure, when at 1 meter of distance from the piece, their image, with no caption and proof of authorship, is leaving the field of a ‘recognizable visibility’ and disappears in the horizon of an invisible blur.
The exchange between the ‘value of content production’ and the exposure or association of an unknown name with that of a famous director is an exchange based on a ‘hope of future’ success and not on a real value exchange. Conversely, it could be argued, thing that I often do, that the experience and network of a more established director allows visibility to otherwise invisible talents. This network represents a valuable opportunity which is bartered in exchange for the value of content production.
I am convinced that social forms of networking and project participation generate social connections and provide the audience with a possibility of ‘creative interaction’ particularly in projects like The Tulse Luper Project by Peter Greenaway, Road Movie by Frieze Foundation and Channel4 and Paulo Cohelo’s movie The Witch of Portobello. I guess that an understanding of the economics of cultural bartering of contemporary online social networking is at stake, in order for the participation and interaction to be beneficial for both parties and not become just a univocal process of exploitation.
This still raises economic questions on the ability of engaging in what is quickly becoming an economy of social networking.
I will be going to Exeter this March to present a new project that I am working on. The abstract that has been accepted is titled:
Presence as Re-living and Re-contextualizing Memory: Conflict and Reconciliation from the Live to the Simulated.
The paper will analyze whether the concept of presence, within the framework of contemporary new media arts representations and interactions in virtual reality environments, could act as a platforms for artistic, political and religious peaceful expressions and engagements. The paper will discuss the possibility of reconciling diverse belief systems and create, through presence within virtual reality environments, a space of negotiation between contrasting and sometime incompatible conceptions of art, politics and religion and their cultural representations.
The research experiments will be based upon the re-enactment, re-living and recontextualization of conflicting memories in order to overcome, through the simulation of an event or an image in virtual reality environments, the impasse of social engagements in real spaces conceived as confrontational and oppositional.
The research aims to lead to a proposition for a virtual space as a platform for reconciliation, both online and offline, that will provide the framework for a concept of presence as peaceful re-enactment and re-living of memories. The case studies that the research project proposes to develop in its theoretical frameworks will consider virtual realities platforms as the spaces that offer the opportunity to represent and visualize the conflicting artistic, political and religious personal strategies of end users and provide a case study on artistic, political and religious interactions.
By bringing together interdisciplinary subjects that directly study or are related to artworks engaging with or criticizing political and religious belief systems the paper aims to generate new models and descriptions of social interactions in virtual reality environments.
Performing Presence Conference
I have just received several emails that will be making my Spring Summer schedule grueling and full of activities. I am actually very happy for it since I love to be busy and feel that things are moving along. Regarding the new blog I have great hopes for this new place digital locus. The Social Networking Lab is a place for new projects and activities that are transdisciplinary in nature and that will be realized in collaboration with a series of professionals and academics across the globe. It is a way of implementing social networking within the project of the laboratory itself.