Recently my book review of OPEN 20 on the Masters of Media blog was republished on the French digital magazine OWNI. As a follow up to that article I wrote another one, specifically for them, regarding a related event here in Amsterdam. The conference, titled The Populist Front, was the perfect occasion to write some considerations I had been brewing about some art shows I’ve seen.
Read the article here.
Off Beat is an Amsterdam-based magazine about alternative and underground cinema. In the lates issue you can find my review of Champion, a documentary about the trials and tribulations of Danny Trejo, the bad-ass Mexican from Machete.
Go enjoy it here.
These are the shows I reviewed for ArtSlant‘s Gallery Hop in March 2011.
[Cross-posted on the Video Vortex website]
Vito Campanelli’s presentation of his own Web Aesthetics. How Digital Media
Affect Culture and Society (published by NAi) was one of the few theoretical ones in a very visual and demo-ridden Video Vortex edition.
In his work, the Italian scholar reduces important phenomena like social and peer-to-peer networks to their historical premises, laying the foundations for an organic aesthetic theory of digital media. His intervention outlined his conceptual framework, providing the common denominator to the examples analyzed in the book. (more…)
[Cross-posted on the Video Vortex website]
Upload Cinema is a monthly video spree that quite literally takes the most valuable YouTube gems to the big screen. That is, the not-so-big one of the Uitkijk, the smallest and coziest movie theater in Amsterdam.
Dutch creative director Dagan Cohen and cinema programmer Barbara de Wijn started the initiative because they thought (the best) YouTube videos deserved a bigger screen. So, to make sure they selected only the most compelling, they made the format of their cinematic get-together strictly editorial and topical, with a monthly theme explored with the help of experts and, of course, crowd-sourced suggestions from the users of their website. (more…)
[Cross-posted on the Video Vortex website]
A media theorist and lecturer at Leicester’s De Montfort University, Andrew Clay has been investigating online video for some time. As an opener of the sixth edition of Video Vortex, his intervention explored YouTube and effectively went a bit beyond, as the Reader tagline suggests. The British theorist raised several compelling questions about the popular video sharing platform, inspiring the audience to ask quite a few questions at the end. In particular, his analysis of the top YouTubers – the ones who got rich by putting serial sketches online and engaging the community – took stock of the YouTube experience so far, focusing on the blurrier and blurrier distinction between amateurs and professionals. (more…)
The Populist Imagination comes in a timely moment. The 20th issue of Open, the cahier on art and the public domain published by NAi, is a collection of essays dealing with “the role of myth, narratives and identity in politics”. Contributions include authors as diverse as Argentinian political theorist Ernesto Laclau, Italian writer collective Wu Ming, American media scholar Stephen Duncombe, and French literature professor Yves Citton, among others.
The subject of populism – and, more generally, myth-making – is especially urgent these days, mostly because of two world-scale phenomena: the emergence of political figures and movements that are strongly characterized by a mythological appeal, and the mass-mediated channeling of collective imagination sustaining such figures.
On both ends of the political spectrum, both President of the United States Barack Obama and Dutch right-wing politician Geert Wilders represent media-savvy interpreters of widespread heart-felt emotions, supported by a matching rhetorics of desire and imagination.
Be it the change promised by Obama or the evil forces of communism which Silvio Berlusconi claims to protect Italy from, from the United States to Europe we’re all experiencing a return to epic narration in politics.
Internet, social media, and a general decentralization of political discourse have made populism a widespread phenomenon, giving unprecedented space to previously marginal factions. Geert Wilders’ PVV party in the Netherlands, Lega Nord in Italy, and the Tea Party in the US, show how similar rhetorics have caught on throughout the Western world.
These neo-epic narrations are all rooted in a fictional fascination for a glorious past and the identification with the leader’s actions as the deeds of a hero, usually struggling on behalf of his (selected) people for ideals such as freedom, change, or national identity. (more…)
I know I already published the full version on the site, but – for the vast majority of you, who wouldn’t read the whole thing – the first issue of Frame Journal features a shorter and sharper version of my Master Thesis, From Metaphysics to Metadata. Aesthetics and Politics of Interface. Frame is a peer-reviewed, re-imagined, transdisciplinary rebirth of pART, an art history journal housed at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Check it out here.
(Originally posted on Ymag)
When can you say a new era has begun? According to Michiel Schwarz and Joost Elffers – both Dutch, working in the United States – it’s when you can give it a name. And here it is, then: Sustainism, the single word representing the global trend that will eventually save the world.
In the words of its authors, Sustainism is the new Modernism is "A Cultural Manifesto for the Sustainist Era". Full of inspiring aphorisms and rich in colorful logos, the book definitely has the enthusiasm of a manifesto. Its contemporary mantras and hopeful predictions about the times to come make it a very optimistic one, too, albeit often redundant. But again, we’re talking about a manifesto.
As many of you might have guessed, the word “sustainist” echoes the need for sustainability we have so much heard about in the last years, mostly in association with architecture and design. Joost and Schwarz, though, take a step further and extend the meaning to other global phenomena, not necessarily inherent to familiar concepts like “green” and “recycling”. If the Sustainist world will be obviously reliant on recycled materials and clean energy, it will also be a media-savvy, iper-connected world.
Networking and new media are an important part of the Sustainist credo, with social media weaving a real-time global network coordinating the movement. To Elffers and Schwarz, recycling and the Internet are all part of the same open and participatory philosophy, a sort of “good wave” departing from many of the principles of Modernism – but not in total opposition with it.
