Conferences

SHARE CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

The conferences organised by the Share Festival explore the theoretical aspects of Market Forces, offering a forum for debate and open dialogue. Just like all the other Festival events, the conferences are open to the public free of charge at the Museum of Natural Science in Turin, drawing together intellectuals, curators, artists and academics to present and discuss their points of view.

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WEDNESDAY, 4th NOVEMBER
Virtual Reality & Multimedia Park
>>>2.30 PM Conference CReATE – Connecting ICT Research and Creative Enterprises
Mette Quinn, European Commission
Andy Cameron, guest curator of Share Festival & director of FABRICA
Flavia Barca, Institute for Media Economics, Rosselli Foundation

The consortium behind the European project CReATE has organised the international conference “CReATE: Connecting ICT Research and Creative Enterprises”, to be held in Turin on 4th-5th November, 2009. The conference, sponsored by Regione Piemonte, will be the meeting point for experts coming from several countries and different backgrounds, to discuss the state of the art of ICT innovation in creative industries and cluster development.
Info & registration: www.lets-create.eu

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THURSDAY, 5th NOVEMBER
Albertina Academy of Fine Arts
>>>10.30 AM Conference Share Tech
The six finalists short-listed for the Share Prize 2009 show students from the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts the tools and technologies they used to create their works for the competition, offering a moment of real sharing and stimulus for young creative talent. Introductions by Simona Lodi and Andy Cameron.

Regional Museum of Natural Science
>>>3.30 PM  SHARE CONFERENCE
Presentation and screening of the exhibition Until the End of Cinema with Luca Barbeni and Simone Arcagni.
Until the End of Cinema is a Share Festival 2009 exhibition featuring a series of audio-visual works that begin where the cinema ceases to exist, taking us from the linear to the interactive, from the collective to an individual perspective. The works can no longer be said to be cinema, but nor are they something else.

>>>4.30 PM SHARE CONFERENCE
Market Forces – presentation of the exhibition by Simona Lodi
Exploring market forces is a vast issue that has inspired many artists from Duchamp to Jeff Koons. The old idea that art and the market are completely incompatible has become a thing of the past. Many contemporary artists today not only voice their opinions on the market and the economic consequences of art in the media, but use their art to make us think about economic mechanisms, or just outright parody them. They are all works relating to marketing, e-commerce, and commercial communication. These tongue-in-cheek and at times paradoxical works often use the real or virtual supermarket as a favourite setting.

>>> Followed by “Complex Shopping Narratives,” an experiential workshop by Salvatore Iaconesi and Luca Simeone – FakePress.
Browsing products on shelves, choosing, paying, running up debt, being convinced and seduced, relating to places, messages and other people: shopping is an experience that fills our days, an experience constructed through images, suggestions and strategies that are all so complex that we, as final users, systematically fail to perceive them. “Every product,” reads the artistic statement, “generates a chain reaction that propagates through the environmental, social, political, economic, technological, relational and emotional spheres. As highly complex and ramified as they are, these connections are not explicit. All too often, people are left merely with the experiential message of ‘buy this good/service, it’s designed just for you, for what you want to be.'”

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FRIDAY, 6th NOVEMBER
Conference Day DIGITAL ORBIT
Quazza Laboratory, University of Turin.
>>> 10.30 AM Riccardo Luna, editor of Wired magazine, and Stefano Rocco (wired.it) will open the conference on digital creativity with an analysis of the importance that platforms for technological and creative innovation, such as Digital Orbit, hold for the development of creative cities such as Turin, and the role of Italy’s most innovative magazine (Wired).

>>>11.00 AM Share Festival presents Erik Natzke, an artist, designer and programmer who creates and gives material substance to his ideas through immaterial computer code. His sensibility, combined with his stubborn resolve, has enabled him to push back the limits of his medium, beyond known methods and approaches. Erik loves to take risks, in the awareness that the value of failure lies in discovering new, never-before conceived solutions. Natzke uses programming to create his tools, colours and ultimately his artistic vocabulary. A vocabulary that is highly personal and unique. His artistic work can be seen as a sort of bridge between impressionism and expressionism. He is an impressionist in his emphasis on colour instead of the subject, but an expressionist in his use of a “digital gesture,” injecting dynamism into form. He is an impressionist when he represents nature, an expressionist when his works take an abstract bent.

>>>12.15 PM Club To Club presents US artist Jeff Mills, a founding father of modern electronic music, who will be presenting some of his multimedia work. Mills has worked with many DJs and producers on projects that go beyond music to embrace the world of cinema, such as his soundtracks to movies such as Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and Buster Keaton’s “Three Ages,” and on groundbreaking new concepts. These include the recent work “The Trip” and the project “X-102 rediscovers the Rings of Saturn,” in which Jeff Mills creates a soundtrack to a series of official images of Saturn provided by NASA, in an attempt to describe the physical aspects and characteristics of the enchanting planet through music.

Regional Museum of Natural Science
>>>3.00 PM CONFERENCE Officine Sintetiche
Ali Zaidi, MotiRoti
Antonella Usai, NAD Dance Company
Antonio Pizzo, University of Turin
Vanessa Vozzo, Servi di Scena Opusrt
Tatiana Mazali, Polytechnic of Turin
Officine Sintetiche presents a preview of its production format, consisting of a live showcase and interactive performance building on complex socio-cultural content. The live showcase features a demonstration applied to the development of interactive systems for the stage, whilst the interactive performance will be directed by two leading artists – Antonella Usai, founder of the NAD Dance Company, and London’s Ali Zaidi, founder of Motiroti.

>>>5.00 PM “Angel_F. Diary of an Artificial Intelligence.” With a presentation by Oriana Persico (co-author), in conversation with the art critic Massimo Melotti.

The child of Biodoll and Derrick de Kerckhove, Angel_F is a young AI (artificial intelligence) that grows just like spyware. Reproducing the development stages of an embryo in digital reality, the substrate narrative and poetics become a tool for studying and representing multiple contemporary identities (hybrids of the organic and digital), the languages and forms of knowledge (today synthetic and connective), and behavioural dimensions (observing users and implementing practices on-line and in the physical world, from an ethnographic and political perspective). Soon to be released, a book-diary-essay published by Castelvecchi, recounting Angel_F’s first year of life. (Authors: Salvatore iaconesi and Oriana Persico)

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SATURDAY, 7th NOVEMBER
Regional Museum of Natural Science
>>>2.30 PM SHARE CONFERENCE – Art vs. Market.
Moderator Simona Lodi, artistic director of the Share Festival
Alessandro Ludovico, Editor-in-chief of Neural
Franziska Nori, director of the Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina
Antonio Caronia, new media theorist

in collaboration with aksioma
The globalisation of art and the constant broadening of the definition of art have combined, on the international art scene, with the need to reflect upon the socio-cultural impact of software. The issue is one that also needs to be addressed in pragmatic terms, such as with reference to the storage, documentation and conservation of digital art works. Contemporary art though is also a source of knowledge about the economy, shining a light on hidden and opaque processes that are often concealed by the media.

Regional Museum of Natural Science
>>>4.00 PM SHARE CONFERENCE – The aRTvertising Industry.
Moderator Andy Cameron, guest curator of the Share Festival & director of FABRICA
Joel Bauman, founder and partner of Tomato Interactive
Renzo di Renzo, artistic director of the Buziol Foundation
Alex Giordano, co-founder of Ninja Marketing
Art and advertising cross paths in marketing, where they respond to the challenges of new technologies, cultures and emerging social forms, encourage the progressive disappearance of the distinction between audience and producer, and explore new forms of interaction. What consequences does this convergence have for the advertising industry and the art market? What happens when art, design and market form a hybrid? What role do global social networks and innovation play? Advertisers, designers and artists give and discuss their answers.
Teatro Gobetti
>>>4.00 PM Conference DIGITAL ORBIT – Music in Mooltimedia.
Alessio Bertallot, DJ
KIVER
FLUSHING DEVICE, musician and sound artist
Robin Rimbaud aka SCANNER, electronic musician
TeZ, founder and artistic director of Optofonica
An exploration of the new possibilities created by experimentation, sound design and independence.

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SUNDAY, 8th NOVEMBER
Regional Museum of Natural Science
>>>2.00 PM SHARE CONFERENCE Market Forces.
Moderator: PIETRO TERNA, Professor of Economics and Complex Systems, University of Turin
RICHARD BARBROOK, School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages, University of Westminster
BRUCE STERLING, writer and journalist, Austin/Turin
GIOVANNI FERRERO, Head of the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts of Turin
ROBERTO BURLANDO, Professor of Political Economy at the Universities of Turin and Exeter
SORIN SOLOMON, Professor of Theoretical Physics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
KATH KELLY, author of the book How I Lived a Year on Just a Pound a Day

The limits of understanding in complex transition. What does it mean to build systems whose behaviour we cannot predict or understand? The panel will focus on issues tied to the chaos and value of hybridizing art, biology, technology, politics and economics, exploring the problematics of control and the possibility of building alternative, free and open economies based on giving.