For the newmedia art is time to restart from UNO – Unidentified Narrative Objects

March 10, 2009 4:50 pm

I liked very much the challenge that Francesco Monico has launched by a debate on new media art at the “Centro Forma” in Milan on March 4th. Francesco Monico is the active Director Media Design School & Arti Multimediali at the NABA – Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti Milano, designed by himself, where he teaches theory and method of the Mass Media.

The symposium he organized on training and research in new media art, this is part of the doctoral research program Phd M-node, was focused on an issue that has hit the nail on the provoking an avalanche of contributions from many Italians critics, artists, writers, directors and curators.

The theoretical basis of the symposium was the critical evaluation that Wu Ming 1 made of contemporary Italian fiction called New Italian Epic. Extending its scope beyond the cultural literature and translating the paradigm from the novel to the audio and new media art is fulfilled the brief passage from Unidentified Narrative Objects leads to Unidentified Audiovisive Objects.

The famous essay by Wu Ming 1 on the New Italian Epic says:

In Italian letters is something happening. The convergence in one – albeit large – nebulous of several fiction writers …. Usually they write novels, but they don’t disdaining episodes in fiction and in other realms, and sometimes they produce ” unidentified narrative objects.” Several of their books have become best-sellers / or long-seller in Italy and other countries … but they are a literary generation: they shared segments poetiche, shreds of mental maps and a fierce desire that each time brings them to the archives, or on the street, or where archives and road match.

(only Italian and French version is available here)

Monico asked more or less to 30 of artists, critics and writers, directors if the mass of products such as short films, video clips, video art, short films, music clips or net.art, interactive installations and multimedia performancesare are Unidentified Narrative Objects or rubbish? If the production of audiovisual media, as well as the works of new media art made in Italy from the nineties, were critically analyzed through a new paradigm and you share the critical premises that Wu Ming has found in the thesis of the UNO – Unidentified Objects Narrative- you would have a new Italian epic related to new media art? Is there anything that would combine newmedia art and literature in Italy today?
What are the boundaries within which the “nebula” of the new (media art) italian epic originated? There is a social and cultural history and it has identified a unique Italian that goes beyond literature, and opens out to an oil stain to artistic productions of recent years?
In the literature the blood Wu Ming 1 had the merit to trigger a debate, as he himself says, “no signs of burn out, indeed, it revives and raises every dribble of wind. The memorandum, published in the network, has been downloaded about 30,000 times, played in various forms and comments, read in depth or bed in a hurry, liquidated or celebrated, acclaimed, or crucified as frog in a museum. ”
This debate goes beyond what is NIE, that is his personal idea of reading. What is a fact, stresses Wu Ming, “is the existence of a body of texts, books written in the” second republic “with a common basic elements and allegorical nature of the fund. If this body does not exist, the memorandum would not be “played well” for so many people, it would not unleashed raise all this dust “.
These basic elements, this time belonging to an Italian politician and historian , which Wu Ming 1, identifies as a “second republic” are also common to Italian newmedia art?

The characteristics that make up the “force field” that many works that have made the mass of New Italian Epic, is the reservoir of images and references shared connecting apparently different works, but have deep affinities. Wu Ming1 is careful not to speak of “authors” but “works” because the New Italian Epic covers much more that the first seconds.
Works that are “mutants”, books that are either fiction, essays, prose poetry and journalism that is a memorial that is novel, fiction and non fiction, by hybrids between aesthetics essays and literary theory.

Books such as Lezioni di tenebra, Cibo, I viaggi di Mel, Gomorra e Sappiano le mie parole di sangue.
The amalgamation is defined by a play on words, the initials of “Narrative Unidentified Object” form the word “UNO“(it means one in Italian) , each of these items is a one, irreducible to pre-existing categories, a prime number.
So what are the unidentified narrative objects. And the unidentified art objects (more visual narrative but still) what they are, indeed, what works are they? There is an artistic nebulous? There is a force field similar to the Italian news madia art?

According to Wu ming behind this visual nebula there are the Media Garage,  concept dealt with Monico and the subject of a workshop MDAM NABA,  or the cultural self-legitimation of a spontaneous, both technical and critical prompted by the availability of video cameras, systems for recording and editing that have affordable for all, that allow a wide dissemination of the ‘personal media’, the cameras are to be incorporated in mobile phones to personal computers and with the arrival of Web 2.0 a lot of video content is published on line. These materials may be content for a New Italian Epic for audiovisual media and new media art?
The UNO have – says Monico – a new media approach to new stories and new stories and express new sensibilities, new items and turn to new markets.
The purpose of the debate is taking forward the definition of the first paradigm that starts from UNO and reaches to the identification of works that will reverberate in the ethics and aesthetics of the New (media art) Italian Epic. The UNO is seen as a tool to create a canon of reference and complete a memorandum, as it has done for literature Wu Ming 1.
The nebula of one of the new media art has aggregated immediately much of the Italian art scene, from OtheretO, and the artistic and collective avatar that as a nomad it was also a artistic work. Or the work of known artsista / paradigm Darko Maver of 01.org. that, as in the conference Eva Mattes said he is an artist that does not exist and he is an example of UNO, because  as their other projects are part of a story and not from an image, from an idea and not a visual object.

But their work starting particularly from the “street” and “from the archives” because they used the road as a showcase in the case of culture jamming Nikeground, and were upset by media archives techniques cut up and mush up with Darko Maver , emulsified material shot by others to occupy a new space for art that is the space stage represented by the media.
The documentary by Nicole Leghissa the exploration of the late 800’s Pietro Brazzà, partly from the archives, but it goes beyond mere biography becomes something that does not just tell a story, but reveals a collectivity.

Or the team Aut Art that with the operation “Anna Adamolo” creates a reaction of activism that starts from the road and that becomes an artistic gesture, which performs actions with an imaginary not tamed. Or the last work of Studio Azzurro said that as Paolo Rosa is not an opera but an operation. All that work every time you apply to the narrated change and become something else from the start.

Like the stories told by Salvatore Iaconesi (xDxD), including in its project Art is Open Source, which departs from the streets of artificial intelligence computing is indeed a work created a virus in the womb of the mother, the child named Angel_f (Autonomous Not E-voli? Generative Life Form), for a Iaconesi is also telling a story in a new way, using the power of the narrative of fake RomaEuropaFakeFactory ,that deturn falsely labeled a competition in Telecom (Italian big telephon company)  what defines making skateboard (a nice way of telling stories on architecture ) or add a layer of reality of everything in a narrative already there, telling stories that is overlapping the other.

This is the purpose of the new virtual epic, the web there is accustomed to stories overlapped, meta narratives, from which follows the concept of mutation linguistic fiction. Objects are Interstitial Narrative, dedicated to small moments, a space of time, change that changing the scan time and thus how the story.
We too di Piemonte Share we have been invited to give our contribution to the meta-project Action Sharing and work Orchestra Meccanica Marinetti . An example of Unidentified Narrative Objects that prelude to the birth of an epic of newmedia art. A work from the commission and manufacturing adopts a different narrative that offers a new vision of the relation between art, highly innovative companies and research laboratories in the area, a visually epic narrative that reverberates meanings, connotations archetypes and languages in a cultural environment that OMM contains in itself, both humanist and technology. Commencing on the street collecting items such as waste bins and crop areas that are not of their own as the Interdisciplinary Mechatronics Laboratory, Politecnico di Torino and the company Prima Electronic robotics.

This implies a new vision of art as a driver of innovation and a new idea of patronage. The work is done by engineers, but the project is by an artist. Elements have been used in technology built by engineering companies but are part of a unique spectacle, a prime number. The force field was born in newmedia art, but the technology sector is by Piedmont robotics as an example of local production talent.

Also Motor when running the show “nagHammadi” with OMM, uses material repertoire photos and videos of war NATO (already used in cleanUnclean).

Here are all these still hear a talk, because the challenge has just been launched.

Follow-depth interviews with the protagonists of the New/mediart Italian Epic.
Simona Lodi