Artmaker2

Exhibition at Toolbox

31th May – 3th June 2018

Share Festival is our beloved Turinese cultural event, where we of the Share Project display technology art to the public in our city. We also take action to encourage the global tech-art community.

Therefore, for Share Festival XIII: “Frankenstein: Il moderno Prometeo,” we are, once again, releasing our curated artistic tool kit: the “Share Festival Artmaker Bag” in the new “Version 2.0.”

One might presume from this year’s “Frankenstein” theme that our tools exist for raising angry monsters from the dead. That is almost true. However, we always have broader, deeper priorities at Share Project. As Share Festival’s Art Director for the XIII edition, I must explain our reasoning in our curation and distribution of these tools for technology art.

To create our ensemble of tools, we sought advice from technical creatives all over the world. They had a lot to say to us. No technology artist ever lacks tools. They have heaps of fascinating, specialized, arcane, high-tech tools. They possess entire racks of dedicated implements, often unique ones, which densely crowd their studios, ateliers, garages and fabrication labs.

We listened to their counsel with grave respect, because at “Share Project,” a cultural enterprise located in the regional capital of Torino, it is our task to curate globally and display locally. So, we have assembled a unique tool-set for the global tech-artist who arrives, from our planet’s many roads, to meet the need in some local situation.

Our Share Festival Artmaker reflects the demanding lifestyle of dynamic people who create net.art, interactive art, device art, electronic art and kinetic art. It is a global tool-set for local festivals, designed to be slung onto trains, taxis and ferries, and deployed at exhibits, wherever the artist may go.

This bag carries our Share Festival name, so it should reflect our region’s character. We chose ti include some handsome tools from the Italian craft tradition, and especially, from Turin’s long industrial tradition.

Our first Artmaker Bag, from last year, was a chic Italian shoulder-bag, suitable for software artists. This new 2.0 version is a full-scale, analog, engineer’s backpack. Since our theme for 2018 is “Frankenstein,” we choose to err on the side of the rugged and heavy-duty.

Our Artmaker 2.0 serves the global artist on the move. Whenever your large, delicate, complex art-device or installation snaps, breaks, shorts out, malfunctions or simply goes wild in public, the Share Festival Artmaker backpack will have your back.

After 13 years of hosting machine art here in the venues of Turin, we understand the mortal frailty of these creations. Our Artmaker is a portable Frankenstein clinic with specialized instruments scaling from tweezers to claw-hammers. In skilled hands, it should bring the deadest work of tech-art back to live in a jiffy.

After much debate, we have decided to give artists long-lasting tools, rather than ephemeral art supplies. We adore electronics at Share Festival, so our Artmaker contains long-lasting, fully-functional tools for manipulating electronics, such as a multimeter, a soldering iron and a small yet potent multi-limbed assembly station.

We have deliberately chosen not to offer any disposable electronic components, such as a stock of capacitors, switches or LED strips. Our Artmaker is not an educational kit. Our Artmaker serves the real-world needs of seasoned veterans, world-class creatives who are already on the road to carry the torch for their personal Frankenstein.

With that declared, we believe that artist’s proper tool set should have an aesthetic framework. A well-chosen toolkit should inspire a mood of confidence and creativity.

With its widely variant affordances for many practical technical actions, a tool-kit should invoke a sense of opportunity, and free the human imagination. At Share Project, we believe in the maker ethic, the hacker imperative and the radical hands-on spirit of “Proviamo.” We, as a community-of-practice, should arrange matters so that we can allow ourselves to give fine things a good try.

Finally, and most importantly, our Share Festival Artmaker is a gift. It is not a commercial tool-set, and is never offered for public sale. It is a gesture of public respect, from us, to our artists, and our guests, whose work we appreciate.

As a technology art festival with local roots and global implications, we will continue to assemble new and improved versions of these tool-sets.

These Share Festival Artmaker Bags are the souvenirs of a particular time and place. They are distributed in a chosen moment and in a specific location.

Their contents will vary, year by year, as technology and culture develop, just as our festival varies. However, by offering these creative tools to our artists, rather than static mementos, medals and awards, we choose, strategically, to look toward futurity, and toward artworks as yet un-built. Because, along with our public in Turin, we are curious people; we are enduring; we are inquiring.

What will emerge from our ardently making community and its locus of possibilities? Proviamo!

Bruce Sterling

Aria e Luce

Alessandro Sciaraffa

technical support: Angelo Comino

Here, now, straight away, and in all its complexity. “My heart was fashioned to be susceptible to love and sympathy…Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me… I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned.”

APOTROPIA

technical support: Daniele Suppo

“Alba Mater” is a video installation and immersive performance in three acts. Three theriomorphic representations of the nature of the feminine.

Carlo Gambirasio

evolution [ORIGIN Latin evolutio(n-) (unrolling and) reading of a papyrus roll, from evolut- pa. ppl stem of evolvere]…Any process of gradual change occurring in something, esp. from a simpler to a more complicated or advanced state; the passage of something through a succession of stages. Also, origination by natural development as opp. to production by a specific act….” (from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary) What’s the purpose of technology? This was the question I started from.

Diego Scroppo

technical support: Marco Cassino

“He was a being formed in the ‘very poetry of nature.” Homo faber is the subject–agent who has always possessed tools and has always been able to make them, to produce new tools for specific ends—first and foremost to persist, or better, to survive.

Fabio Battistetti, Paola Lesina

technical support: Fabrizio Raimondo, Angelo Comino

Study for a work: space to stay, rest, and move and to explore our memory, our experiences and remembrances. Nowadays human cognitive abilities have been matched, if not surpassed, by the computational model of neural networks. We are perennially connected and kept alive (socially) by the devices we handle. Virtual reality is real, within the reach of a finger. A notification invites us to another dimension. If we forget something, we can ask the oracle of G*****.

Giuseppe Acito

Summa Fluctus is a kinetic and audio-visual installation that explores the interaction between the heights (frequencies) of six sinusoidal waves generated simultaneously. The work is based on the research of the French mathematician Joseph Fourier, who in the 1800s formulated the laws that govern the relationship between harmonic waves produced by sound in nature. Later those rules were applied by additive synthesis to artificially recreate sounds with the electronic oscillators that electro-acoustic music composers had been using since the 1950s.