Interviewing the Crisis: Carlo Infante - Performing Media [ENGLISH]
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Carlo Infante
- Journalist, new media expert, cultural consultant, you love to define yourself as “militant critic”: Carlo Infante, a short introduction for the readers
That definition comes from the experiences as avantgarde theatre critic that I had since the first years of the 80s - and not only in Italy - and with which I started the first forms of interaction using the new languages of electronics. As in videotheatre, a videocreative phenomena that actually opened up a new domain for media spectacularity. In this context I contributed to the theoretical definition of this research field, not only by writing but also by promting events, such as one of the first video festivals in Narni. This process evolved into the “Scenarios of immateriality” project that launched in 1987 one of the first specifically interesting initiatives of what we now call multimediality, with the name “the interactive scene”. In the same context with this work on video (in which I also have been independent producer, through the storyboard competition “the writings of the visible”) I have also been deeply involved in radio, using which I created several programs for RAI (the national Ratio and TV public company) such as “listening theater” and “the invisible scene”. At that time we experimented new interaction forms among scene and radio, with performances happening simultaneously to the live broadcast (not only in theatres, but also in urban spaces, using car radios).
- From theatre to multimedia to digital arts: how does your interest for new media art start and how does it develop? Let’s talk about PerformingMedia.
My path along Performing Media gets its origins in those experimentations on the the new languages of radio and video and, today, extends to interaction design and in the social creativity of the networks, in a tight interaction between web and territory. Inventing new forms of performance, inspired by the idea of the forms of smart mob described by Rheingold.
PerformingMedia is a serial project that does not only concern the experimentation on new languages any more (expressed by the creative movements of the ‘900 and, specifically, on the interaction between scene and new media such as videotheatre and cyber-performance) as it also gets involved in the design of events and platforms that are cross-medial (web, broadband, mobile) to allow for interactions between the web and the territory. Research aims not only to study media but also to the peculiarities of the territory, with their traditional and innovative values. It means to design a social and creative use for the networks through a specific strategic marketing approach, the so-called Territorial Innovation, wired into the more evolved solutions that can be found in Interaction Design and web 2.0.
- Your professional experience sees you in tight contact with local and national administrations: from this point of view, what are the most evident symptomes and repercussions of the financial crisis, in terms of both economic cuts and the logics of public intervention? What are the perspectives and scenarios with which artists and cultural operators will need to deal with?
Something that was widely expected is happening, even is the acceleration of the economic crisis (and not only financial) is pressing everything against a striking evidence. Resources for culture are about to be drastically cut. And a large part of the professional setups based on public sibsides risks disappearance. Yet establishing a realistic connection between that which we still define as culture and the communication systems deeply related to the neural networks of Information Society was a true need that should have been handled a while ago. A large part of teh inert cultural politics just looked the other way (and, partially, it also ignored the state of uprising emergency for the need of a culture that was more oriented more towards transformation than to conservation…). During these last few years we could have built a bridge between innovation culture and the scenarios of economic change, but it hasn’t been done. And now we need to quickly enact remedies. Fast. The concept of economy must be redefined, as the base paradigms of the productive systems blew up, those around which revolved the pact-conflict between capital and work, stuck in an industrial system that is currently drifting away. Diffused creativity (which is well beyond the concept of art) today fundamentally concerns a political and poetic tension that can embrace a radical process of social innovation. Which is about giving sense and sensibility to what is being called Information Society. Trying to find the ways to live interact with the processes of the new forms of productivity, just as some operative lines that go from open-source to wikinomics are showing. From this point of view I truly believe that web 2.0 related practices can widen the front of the thought-action to interpret the dynamics of change and turn them into resources.
- On your blog you use a sentence by Paul Valery “The future is not what it used to be” to speak about a crisis that you define as “squared” (to the power of two), but right after the election of Obama as president of hope 2.0 you say “Yes, web can”: the crisis as a chasm or as a possibility?
Thinking that this crisis can turn into growth is an act of ptimism and will. But it’s worth it. First of all, it is is ineluctable to unhinge the old weak logics concerning a country-system that is objectively inadequate, as it sits stuck in the inertia of representative politics that, in turn, are not able to grasp the spirit of the time. These are tormented times, filled with complexities that we probabily will be able to decline in a new auto-organizational sensibility that, starting from the concept of “glocal”, will be able to form that anthropological mutation that uses the new networked paradigms as an opportunity for connective creativity.
- “Network Politcs and Poetics”, this is the title of a meeting you hold with the students of the DASS: what is the theoretical and active scenario embraced by performing media when you talk about resetting the system and about being able to look to a 2.0 future that “cannot be settled with facebook trends, because it is pervasive”? What is the creation of value from connective social creativity in information society, and how does it get explicited?
One of the urgencies is to get out of the corner into which research has been pushed, reduced to a precarious system with no exits. There is a risk connected to the massified cognitive labour, on the ways in which it might suffer a terrible hit during these days of acute crisis. A “move of the horse” is needed to wrong-foot the trend of this systematic crisis, inventing functional formats to create the possibility for interaction between companies (with a profunt intervention by public political forces) and innvation processes demonstrating how research is not only about academic spheres, too often closed in auto-referential logics. The most interesting forms of reearch concern free intelligences that are able ti measure themselves with the serendipity of the web and that are able to reown a motto by Friedrich Nietzsche “Make an experiment out of our own lives, this is the freedom of the spirit”.
February 19th, 2009 at 2:26 pm Said:
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