About SNLab

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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Last night at the conference dinner I arrived a few minutes late and because of that I ended up sitting together with Meredith Tromble, San Francisco Art Institute. Well a fortunate coincidence since we are working on a project together.

I am getting ready to go for a coffee break after another interesting day at the Performing Presence Conference. At 6pm we are going to be teleconferencing with Ken Goldberg. The session that finished just a few minutes ago had a good paper titled “Rimini’s Protokol’s Call Cutta and the Performance of Presence” by Dr. Wolf-Dieter Ernst at Ludwig-Maximillians University in Munich, who is now sitting beside me checking his emails while I read him my post. He has written Perfoming the Matrix: Mediating Cultural Performances.

By Chance - I think I may have accidentally discovered that Facebook is censoring blog posts imported from external blogs into one’s own Facebook account by using the Imported Sites Blog/RSS feature.

The blog post was not a revolutionary one, just an analysis and a record of an act of censorship in Italy. The artwork was designed more to spark outrage that anything else. I was kind of marveling at the fact that the Italian authorities were even waisting their time by censoring it and I was expanding on some thoughts related to the confrontations between secularism and religious orthodoxy.

I have discovered that unless one deletes the incriminated post that Facebook has deemed offensive no other following blog post is accepted by the Imported Sites Blog/RSS feature. The consequence is that one has to decide if to delete the offensive blog or not to be socially connected.

The big problem is the behavioural conditioning imposed by Facebook on the blogger and the consequent censorship of topics that is automatically extended from the social networking site’s policy to the personal blogosphere. I am thinking of writing an article about all this titled: Much Ado About Nothing: When Social Networks Should Avoid Censoring.

My question is the following: is it even worth it to spend time on Facebook just to write that I had a great cup of coffee at Starbucks today?

The recent statements from the pope forbidding the use of condoms in Africa have sparked a row.

The artistic response to the pope’s comments was Sacred Love of Sebastiano Deva in Naples exhibited at Pan as part of the Emergency Room, a curatorial strategy by the French Canadian Thierry Geoffroy. Most certainly not a masterpiece, but I wonder what could be the benefit for the Italian authorities in removing it. (The article is in Italian.)

The contemporary politics of religious and artistic censorship have become manifestations of a malaise signaling a power struggle over the redefinition of public boundaries. More radical interpretations of secularism are increasingly becoming a response against the return of religious fundamentalism or orthodox interferences in the public sphere. Confrontations of religious sentiments vs. freedom of artistic expression are becoming more common.

Art and Outrage: Provocation, Controversy and the Visual Arts is a good read on the subject of artworks that have sparked public outrage. 

One of the reasons I moved to Istanbul is due to the fact that too many people, including too many academics, speak of Transculturalism, issues of migrations, otherization processes or a country’s democratic standards without having never been there or in that position.

In my opinion this superficial process of inquiry - nothing taken away from Alexis Charles Henri Clérel de Tocqueville’s methodological approach that is testament to his acumen - does nothing more than adding stereotypes and categorizations without understanding the richness and complexity of a debate within a country. In a recent academic conversation it was blurted out - strangely enough as a carefully worded statement from someone belonging to a minority group (could this be the week for ill-adviced comments?) - the idea that Turkish students are conditioned by the institutional system within which they live and therefore their analytical approach is somewhat ‘lower’ or ‘substandard’. This also implied that Universities’ approaches and academic standards in Turkey are lower and substandard, that the academic debate is stifled and that there is very little freedom within the country as a whole.

First of all, even without being a Turkish nationalist, since I am a secular globalized citizen with multiple nationalities, I was so offended and flabbergasted that I felt necessary to write this post.

Perhaps by being at Sabanci University and having had the freedom of teaching whatever subject or artist I wanted to, including Mapplethorpe or Darwinian evolutionary theories applied to the arts and cultural expressions - thereby stating that religions having defined themselves within multiculturalism as cultural form are subject to evolutionary processes and even extinction - I am taking for granted a free academic line of enquiry. These are subjects that would be problematic in quite a few of the American Colleges and Universities and I have not had any forms of censorship, innuendos or signals to alter my teaching.

My question is then: is Sabanci University a rare exception, or the only exception, in the Turkish horizon? Or am I, as a foreigner, someone who has some kind of privileged status?

I am not in a privileged position, as it seems to me that I am treated like everyone else, and actually I have colleagues that do work that is highly more important and socially relevant then mine. Ayse Gul Altinay at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sabanci University, is working on issues related to Hrant Dink, as witnessed by this BBC article.

This is an invitation to engage, understand and think, before throwing off the cuff comments construed on baseless information and second hand interpretations of the facts. Turkey has its political problems in dealing with the definition of the Armenian Genocide. But presenting the whole country as a desert of intellectual debate and engagement is nothing less than disinformation, prejudice and stereotype.

If you have time feel free to attend the Hrant Dink Memorial Workshop May 21-24, 2009. My question is how many university around the world would have the opportunity to freely discuss topics that go clearly against the governamental political lines and that try to develop inclusion and overcome a history of violence and confrontation?

Perhaps, without being Turkish or a nationalist, I could feel a tinge of pride in being a part of a true academic community at Sabanci University and of the work carried out in overcoming historical prejudices and stereotypes to construct a more just and inclusive society. 

On Thursday I had a day of shooting in order to complete the visual elements of a research project that is focusing on the riots in Istanbul on the 6-7 of September 1955. The research focuses on the possibility or impossibility of representing through a performative act the past and finding ways of generating forms of visual engagements in augmented reality that do not simply re-present and represent past memories, but engage the viewers in a process of reconciliation with past violent events.

The danger of this field is the complexity caused by the range of disciplines involved as well as the difficulty in measuring the impact on the viewer. I will have quite a bit of work in the next few months to get on with. But we had a pretty good session yesterday and I am looking forward to discussing the outcomes next week in Exeter.

I am going this year to the Social Technology Summit where I will be presenting a paper titled: Social Connectives: Adopting Digital Behaviours in Real Life. I am really looking forward to being in Manchester this year and to see what everyone else is up to, including some of my friends who I have not seen since ISEA 2008 in Singapore.

The article I wrote for Leonardo is out and available to subscribers at the Project Muse link. The title of the article is: Without Visible Scars: Digital Art and the Memory of War. It took me quite a while to put it together for personal and aesthetic reasons. The subject matter of war, memory and reconciliation for me is always a very complex one. I have received some very positive feedback on it and hope other people will enjoy it as well.

Lanfranco Aceti, “Without Visible Scars: Digital Art and the Memory of War,” Leonardo 42, no 1 (February 2009): 16-26.

 

Probably I shouldn’t be blurting about this, but I am very excited for this new international symposium titled Portraits of Transculturalism Istanbul.

This should be a great event with the participation of speakers from England, Austria and Turkey. What I am very happy about is that it will offer a great opportunity to develop a research agenda as well as collaborations on specific project or general thematic areas in digital fine arts and curatorial studies.

In these days I am finalizing the remaining details and soon it should appear in the event page of the website. For this I have to thank Emrah Kavlak, who has been amazing with his design and web implementation work. There is another person that I have to say thank you to and that is Ozden Sahin who puts up with my continuous stream of ideas. They are both two very professional research assistants.

I always love going to Boston and the biennial conference Media In Transition 6 stone and papyrus/storage and transmission is a good excuse, if I ever needed to find one. I have been at the previous conferences and this is one of the best events where to speak and meet new people, discuss the latest trends and recent development in the field of new media studies.
I look forward to seeing both William Uricchio and Henry Jenkins.

The abstract I have presented is titled When Art Creation Is Ephemeral: Digital Migrations of Contemporary Time-Based Media and Obsolete Space-Based Media.

The paper will address the issue of ephemerality that has characterized a great part of the preservation effort in the field of contemporary digital media. The practice of migration is not restricted to the transition from time-based media to space-based media. The issues of ephemerality, deterioration and disappearance affect relatively recent artworks, less than 10 years old, that have been based on digital media formats suddenly obsolete, costly to preserve or simply no longer reproducible. The statement of John Ippolito that it is necessary to preserve media is parallel to the distinction of Harold Innis, and both provide an operative conceptual framework for the definition and structure of the operative frameworks within which museums and artists have to operate.

If the museum has an institutional obligation to the preservation of the artwork, very different can be the approaches chosen by the artist that, aware of the ephemerality of the artwork, may choose, as an aesthetic conceptualization of an artwork, space over time. The slow or accelerated erosion of the artwork that leads to its final disappearance is a part of the performative element of an art object, which may survive only as a documentation process in more stable and durable media such as: prints on acid free paper, digital prints on canvas, photographs and sculptural objects. The ephemerality of an artwork based on processes and produced in a ‘final static status’ as space-based media challenges the cultural, social and economic relationships on which the arts have traditionally operated.
The artist is not alone in this new adoption of ephemerality and performativity that favors space over time and speed of dissemination over integrity of the medium. The process of deterioration has become an aesthetic paradigm in itself that can be adopted by artists and curators alike.

Historical phenomena of the disappearance of the artwork, Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome (1963) and Charles Csuri’s early processing for the creation of plotted drawings (1963 to 1974), are only a part of the history of the tension between time and space which is expressed by the conflict between durability and ephemerality. Exhibitions have been created that were based on ephemeral interactions: the most important example is Billy Klüver’s Pepsi Pavilion. This was a large exhibition space - commissioned by Pepsi-Cola for the Expo ‘70 in Osaka, Japan - where collaborative interactions went beyond the display of what Klüver called “dead programming” in order to achieve “live programming.” The exhibition itself became a work of art in its totality that the curators, without success, tried to preserve in its entirety as an art object. The Pepsi Pavilion marked the moment in which curatorial studies had to consider the conflict between ephemerality and durability as well as time and space as part of contemporary new media exhibits and curatorial strategies.

The paper will conclude by analyzing the opportunities and challenges that both these conflicting parameters - ephemerality vs. durability and time vs. space - offer in the analysis of the history of media as well as their influence on contemporary artistic and curatorial aesthetic strategies.

I am going in April to the Biennial Conference of the Society of Italian Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. The exciting part is that I will be on a panel of friends and colleagues. I really look forward to seeing Monica Jansen. Her book on Il Dibattito sul Postmoderno in Italia: In Bilico tra Dialettica e Ambiguità is an interesting read.

The abstract I am presenting is on the role of contemporary digital media in the representation of resistance. My argument is that, particularly in Italy, the impact of the Internet and digital media in general have not the same democratic outcomes as in North American and Northern European social systems. The spaces and roles played by social interventions that are participatory and from the bottom up are very limited if not non-existent. Social movements are born and immediately fagocitated by the political system that inglobates them into a dialectic of left vs. right, leaving no space for spontaneous and regenerative forms of social aggregation.

The Precarity of Digital Resistance: When The Online Existence of Italian Cultural Movements Is Deleted

The possibility or impossibility of understanding whether online networking systems are tools of democratic engagement or forms of institutional control will be an important aspect that will shape contemporary interactions both in virtual and real spaces. 

What does precarity really mean? Is the precarity of the disappearance of a job linked to the precarity of a democratic state being slowly eroded until it loses its point of equilibrium? Or is precarity just a flaring, like that of students’ movements and actions that - localized in time and space in this era of ubiquitous computing - are objects of a delete action activated with the push of a button?

Precarity in the digital realms is a reference to the fluidity of platforms, to their instability and to the ease of censorship. The question to be asked is whether the current precarity discussed and rejected by students’ movements in Italy will be able to resist the impact of the erosion of self-confidence, keep momentum and survive the exposure of personal memories to the public scrutiny that could bring ostracism and marginalization. Perhaps the current movements about precariety are not just another series of Italian operettas and will have the consistency of a moral stand able to rebuke the infinite cyclical repetitions of history theorized by Giambattista Vico and the ‘mentalità piccolo borghese’ condemned by Pier Paolo Pasolini. 

The paper will conclude by analyzing what will happen when the personal stories of the students’ movement will start to be deleted and the innumerous initiative will start fading under the pressures of the precarity of Italian democracy.