Visions, vampires and sentient microwaves
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things I found
1. Dracula Daily
“Dracula Daily is a newsletter by Matt Kirkland that sends you a chapter of the Bram Stoker novel Dracula, written as a series of dated diary entries, news clippings, letters, etc., in realtime on the actual date of each entry between May 3rd and November 10th, the dates between which the novel takes place. The newsletter became very popular on Tumblr, where it caused memes and posts about Dracula to trend.” – more info here
2. Hide and Seek
Hide & Seek (1940-42) is a painting by Pavel Fyodorovich Tchelitchew, a Russian surrealist artist, that has gained a cult following of people who love to stare at it while taking Peyote. Journalist Hamilton Morris tells the fascinating story of the psychedelic artwork in this video.
3. AI and the latent camera
Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst experimented with the new OpenAI DALL·E 2 software and they wrote a very interesting report about it. Read it here.
“DALL·E represents a shift from attempts to reflect objective reality to subjective play. Language is the lens by which we reveal the objective reality known to the neural network being explored. It is a latent(hidden) camera, uncovering snapshots of a vast and complex latent space.”
4. Breaking News: NFTs do not go bad
In this short documentary published by Vice News, journalist Michael Moynihan asks the following question to Metakovan (aka the most famous cryptoart collector, the guy who spent 69 million dollars on a Beeple’s NFT): : “Can you explain to people who might be confused as why a very smart, sensible man like yourself, would spend 500,000 dollars on a jpeg?”
He gave this enlightening answer : “I can have it forever because it’s on the blockchain, I DON’T LOSE IT and IT DOES NOT GO BAD”.
5. A microwave with a soul
YouTuber Lucas Rizzotto fitted his microwave with voice-controlled AI in order to resurrect his childhood imaginary friend “Magnetron”. But at some point things got scary… The whole video, which is amazingly well written, shot and edited, contains a poetic and entertaining take on the relationship between humans and digital machines.
6. Computer Art pioneers: Joan Shogren
I’ve been studying early Computer Art quite a lot in the past ten years, but I just discovered a new artist I never came across before (via). Click here for the story of Joan Shogren, a secretary who, back in 1963 (so before Micheal A. Noll and Frieder Nake, but also before Sol Lewitt’s conceptual wall drawings based on instructions), “suggested that computers should be able to ‘design a picture’”.
Joan’s artworks were exhibited two years before the famous “Generative Computergrafik” exhibition at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart in 1965, which is generally considered to be the very first computer art public show.
new entries on my bookshelf
Christian Caliandro, L’arte rotta, 2022
Ivan Illich, La convivialità. Una proposta libertaria per una politica dei limiti allo sviluppo, 2013
Ksenia Fedorova, Tactics of Interfacing: Encoding Affect in Art and Technology, 2020
Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, 2019
T.Pepping, M. Doorn, S. Duivestein, Real Fake: Playing with Reality in the Age of AI, Deepfakes and the Metaverse, 2021
Chiara Passa, IDEASONAIR. Blogging as an Open Art Project, 2021
Daniela Cotimbo (curated by), RE:DEFINE THE BOUNDARIES, 2022
things that are coming soon
25th May - I wrote a new text for the PostScriptUM Series by Aksioma. The publication is part of the 4th instalment of the “New Extractivism” programme, with the amazing Ben Grosser. The title of my essay is “The Great Algorithm” and it will be out on May 25th.
18th May - Blitz Valletta OPEN Digital Residency Program - Online talk with artist in residence Steph Foster, curator Sara Dolfi Agostini and Blitz Director Alexandra Pace.
15th May - Tecnocene. Il potere dell’arte nell’epoca della sua riproducibilità digitale, Bologna. Talk with Marco Mancuso, Bianca Cavuti and Amerigo Mariotti
17th June - And We Thought / Food Data Digestion, a project by Roberto Fassone, Torino. Talk with Roberto Fassone and Federico Bomba.
20th June - Representing and (re)Imagining Online Crowds Beyond Data Reduction - Online talk, curated by Nicola Bozzi - King’s College, London
7-9th July - Simposio 2022. Non è la fine del mondo, Borca di Cadore - Talk & Workshop
things I did recently
10th May - Steph Foster - From Above. The first exhibition of the OPEN Digital Residency Programme by Blitz Valletta is online. I had the pleasure to be one of Steph’s mentors. Check the newly produced work here!
20th April - A Journey in the Back of the World in Noclip Mode - My article on the Backrooms is also out in English on NERO.
12nd April - I wrote an essay for the catalogue of the exhibition “Il video rende felici” (ed. Treccani), open in Rome until September 4th. The title of my text is “La nuova vita delle immagini. Percorsi tra software art e video in Italia”.
14th April - The book “L’ elettronica è donna. Media, corpi, pratiche transfemministe e queer”, curated by Caterina Tomeo and Claudia Attimonelli is finally out. In this wonderful anthology you can also find my essay “Gli occhi della rete: dai primi sguardi elettronici alle storie di Instagram”.
That’s all for now! Feel free to send me an email or leave a comment.
Sempre super-interessante! Leggo sempre con grande interesse.