Qualche settimana fa NOT ha pubblicato un paio di estratti in italiano dal volume Surfing con Satoshi. Arte, blockchain e NFT (Postmedia Books, Milano 2021), con un breve cappello introduttivo. Lo trovate qui:
Domenico Quaranta, “NFT changed my life! La blockchain sta reinventando il futuro?”, in NOT, 6 ottobre 2021.
Participating Artists: Morehshin Allahyari (US), Kamilia Kard (IT), Oliver Laric (DE), Petros Moris (GR)
curated by: Domenico Quaranta
For: Apulia Center for Art and Technology
Venue: Fondazione Museo Pino Pascali
Via Parco del Lauro 119, Polignano a Mare (BA)
Opening: September 3, 2021, 7.30 p.m.
September 3 – 30, from Wednesday to Sunday, 4.00 – 8.00 p.m.
Press release (pdf, english) – Press Images (zip, 6,5 mb)
www.museopinopascali.it – www.lineafestival.it
We live in an era characterized by a stratified, intersecting and confused temporality. The future has disappeared from our horizon with the approach of the new millennium, depriving us of any possibility of imagining it as anything other than an apocalypse or an unchanging repetition of the present in which we are immersed. The shock caused by the speed with which the future arrives, catching us unprepared, has been transformed into the shock of a present that engages and distracts us at a relentless pace, preventing us from looking elsewhere. Immersed in the present and deprived of the future, we watch the past return again and again: in the form of farce, in the form of natural, historical or biological relics regurgitated from the earth or released from rapidly melting ice, of plastic islands, open-air dumps, seed banks and DNA strings, of cultural heritages digitized and put on the web to train artificial intelligence or distract us during a pandemic. But duration obsesses us, and if on the one hand we struggle to believe in the near future, on the other we continue to create time capsules for the distant future, wondering what sense the traces of the present and the past will have for the intelligences – human, alien or artificial – for which they are intended.
2019 is a documentary about 2019 made in 2019 by the students of the Master in Net Art and Digital Cultures, Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara. The video is based on chapter “2019” from Ray Kurzweil’s book “The Age of Spiritual Machines” (1999), an attempt to predict the future in detail, decade after decade.
The eerie quality of this text depends upon the fact that it is, not differently from our current 2019, the output of the way the future (our present) was predicted and designed at the end of the last century; as such, it’s very similar, yet very different from our current 2019. It’s the output of imagination, without the recombinant effect of reality. It’s a prediction, but the use of the present form makes it sound like the description of an actual development, along a different time line.
“Historically the New Media Art world filled the gaps between one creative arena and another, between arts and science, arts and technology. This was its mission, its destiny. Reducing it – or as is often the case seeing it reduce itself – to a niche in the contemporary art world, is not only unjust but also historically unfounded, and the same goes for considering it – or seeing it consider itself – an incubator for industrial research. Yet the conceptual model introduced by the term “incubator” is an apt one: like a business incubator, the New Media Art world has to act as an incubator for the other, more solid art worlds, creating the ideal situation for the development of advanced, risky, financially unsustainable or aesthetically challenging work, and subsequently enriching those arenas that, not out of conservatism but due to their very characteristics, would have nipped it in the bud. The New Media Art world can potentially generate the energy that powers the other art worlds, giving their respective “ideas of art” a radical evolution. While for Shigeko Kubota video was a holiday for art, New Media Art can be the childhood of art, or its spring.”
What are the defining aesthetics of art in the networked era? How is mass collaboration changing notions of ownership in art? How does micropatronage change the way artists produce and distribute artwork? The Future of Art begins a conversation on these topics and invites your participation.
The Future of Art. An immediated autodocumentary was shot, edited and screened at the Transmediale festival 2011 in Berlin, Germany. More info here.