In order to discuss these transformations in our subject, on 15th February 2019, the Centre for Visual Culture at Royal Holloway hosted a one-day international symposium titled ‘Digital Culture Studies in Modern Languages’ (see programme below), co-organised by Emanuela Patti and Giuliana Pieri as part of the Humanities and Arts Research Institute programme of events (HARI) on ‘Digital Culture & Creativity’. This symposium aimed to explore theories, methodologies and future perspectives in the field of digital culture and creativity in Modern Languages, by bringing together scholars in Modern Languages and Digital Humanities, as well as artists, Media Arts historians and curators. We had the honour and pleasure to discuss these questions with a wonderful line-up of speakers, including the two keynote Claire Taylor (Liverpool) and Sean Cubitt (Goldsmiths), together with Paul Spence (King’s College), Erika Fülöp (Lancaster), Valentino Catricalà (Media Arts Festival), María Mencía (Kingston), and our chairs James Williams (Royal Holloway), Sarah Wright (Royal Holloway), Guyda Armstrong (University of Manchester).

The overarching question of the symposium, as Emanuela Patti highlighted, was how to address the new wave of interdisciplinarity in Modern Languages which has been rapidly triggered by digital convergence. Arguably, Modern Languages, Digital Humanities and Digital Culture & Creativity intersect in new forms. What are already very ‘interdisciplinary disciplines’ such as digital humanities, electronic literature, media/digital arts, post-cinema collide and merge in different ways. As scholars and teachers of modern languages, cultures and societies, we are in fact increasingly exposed to texts and ‘signifying practices’ which are digitally-born or mix media, as it typically happens in the era of convergence culture. What forms of collaboration could we envisage between DH, ML and Digital Culture and Creativity?

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Programme

Friday, 15 February 2019

10.30  Arrival, Refreshments

11.00-11.10 Emanuela Patti (Royal Holloway), Introduction

Modern languages and the digital: theories, methodologies, case studies

11.10-12.00 (chair: Sarah Wright, Royal Holloway)

Keynote Lecture 1: Claire Taylor (University of Liverpool), ‘Digital Humanities, digital culture, and Modern Languages’

12.00-13.00 (chair: Guyda Armstrong, University of Manchester)

Paul Spence (King’s College), ‘Key elements of a critical Digital Humanities-Modern Languages (DHML) research agenda’

Erika Fülöp (Lancaster), ‘Digital culture in French Studies in the UK’

13.00-14.00 Lunch

Modern Languages and digital arts: national and transnational perspectives

14.10-15.00 (chair: James Williams, Royal Holloway)

Keynote Lecture 2: Sean Cubitt (Goldsmiths), ‘Telegraph, Airmail, Satellite: The Visual Imaginary of Global Media’

15.00-16.00 (chair: Emanuela Patti, Royal Holloway)

Valentino Catricalà  (Media Arts Festival, Rome), ‘Rethinking the medium through media art. The Italian case’

María Mencía (Kingston), ‘The Winnipeg: the poem that crossed the Atlantic’

16.00-16.30 Coffee break

16.30-17.00 (chair: Emanuela Patti)

Closing discussion, ‘The interdisciplinary challenges of Digital Culture Studies: what forms of collaboration between Modern Languages, Media Arts and Digital Humanities?’

L'articolo Digital Culture Studies in Modern Languages: Theories, Methodologies and Future Perspectives sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

L'articolo Digital Culture Studies in Modern Languages sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

[Luciano Caruso, ‘La poesia come gestazione mentaleâ€, Il gesto poetico. Antologia della nuova poesia dâ€avanguardia, Uomini e Idee, vol. 18, Naples, 1968]

Luciano Caruso (1944-2002) was a leading figure of the Italian Neoavantgarde. I havenâ€t had the chance to meet him in person, but I had the opportunity to visit his rich personal library, now the Archivio Luciano Caruso in Florence, various times. This extraordinary material body of books and artistic works has become eloquent to me, thanks to the dialogues with Sonia Puccetti Caruso, the director of the archive. In the past couple of years, we have had long and lively conversations on Carusoâ€s artistic and intellectual practice, as well as on how this activity relates to broader national and international debates on visual poetry, intermedia, political activism.

Caruso was born in Naples, where he lived until 1976, and spent the rest of his life in Florence. After a degree in Medieval Aesthetics and a dissertation on the carmina figurata, he collaborated with intellectuals such as Salvatore Battaglia, Francesco Arnaldi, Nino Cortese, Vincenzo Cilento, Giuseppe Galasso, Francesco Compagna, and the painters of the Gruppo 58 Mario Persico, Guido Biasi, Enrico Bugli, Bruno Di Bello, Lucio Del Pezzo, Salvatore Paladino, and Mario Colucci. Thanks to Colucci, especially, he acquired significant knowledge about the Milanese movement of “nuclear art” (Enrico Baj, Dâ€Angelo, Piero Manzoni) and established contacts with the Parisian groups of Lettrism and Situationism. These experiences significantly informed his radical experimentation of creative writing, especially in the area of poetry, towards a utopia of democratisation of the artistic practice and of revolutionary creativity.

Caruso played indeed a crucial role in developing a certain idea of ‘total poetry†meant to overcome the traditional formal and material boundaries of the genre and coincide with political action and life. In the 1960s, he was active in a number of neo-avantgarde reviews revolving around visual poetry, such as Ex, Linea Sud, Ana Etcetera, Tool, which are commonly known as ‘esoeditoriaâ€, namely self-produced counter-industrial publications. Overall, these reviews all tried to rethink the relationship between form and ideology in fiction and poetry, some of them experimenting with either concrete poetry and/or visual poetry, wall poetry, sound poetry, happenings, and mixed media installations.

In 1968, Caruso edited, together with Corrado Piancastelli, an anthology of experimental poetry, Il gesto poetico, including a selection of poetic experiments published in these reviews throughout the 1960s. It was a foundational act for a new poetry which aimed at the fusion of all arts, as to realise a full fluxus, or continuum, of poetic energy across artistic boundaries.

Two theoretical writings opened the issue: ‘La poesia come gest-azione mentaleâ€Â  [Poetry as a mental gesture/action] written by Luciano Caruso and ‘Una proposta di lettura nel dissenso†[A proposal for a protest reading] written by Corrado Piancastelli. In ‘La poesia come gest-azione mentaleâ€, Caruso explains how this anthology was intended as a continuous poetic re-invention of our daily lives [reinvenzione poetica del quotidiano]. Far from being a literary exercise based on syntagms and normative language, this new poetry was based on action, gesture, and on a closer relationship between subject and object to the point that it would go beyond its own definition of poetry. Significantly, in 1967 Caruso founded, together with the poet Stelio Maria Martini, the review Continuum, which later metamorphosed in Continuazione (1973) and E/mana/zione (1976). These reviews became a laboratory for the rethinking of the concept of the literary review itself, as well as notions of ‘authorship’, ‘text’, and ‘artistic disciplines’.  

Today, the Archivio Luciano Caruso hosts the majority of Italian neo-avant-garde reviews, as well as libri dâ€artista, volumes on Futurism, visual poetry, new writing. The archive is an invaluable resource for any scholar working in the area of interart/intermedia relations, art and politics, interconnections between the historical avant-gardes and artistic practice in the digital age, and so many related fields of research. And it is not a typical archive. What is most invaluable is the key role played by Sonia Puccetti Caruso, a unique intermediary to enter this fascinating world. 

[This blog post will be followed by an interview with Sonia Puccetti Caruso]

L'articolo In Conversation with Sonia Puccetti Caruso sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Last June I had the pleasure to give a talk at the workshop Mapping Multilingualism and Digital Culture organised by Paul Spence and Renata Brandao at Kingâ€s College, London. It was a great opportunity to discuss how the discipline of Modern Languages has been affected by the digital revolution in terms of research and teaching methods and how, as ML-ers, we can enhance our understanding of digital culture. The variety of methodological and critical approaches used to address these questions during the workshop proved that ‘Modern Languages and the Digital†is a constantly developing and ill-defined field. In its early days, it was mainly interpreted as the application of digital tools to non-digital texts – what we tend to identify as the first wave of ‘digital humanitiesâ€. However, it has become increasingly important to expand this interpretation and, especially for those who work in contemporary culture, to understand the ‘digital†as an object of study (see Digital Culture and Re-thinking Modern Languages). This includes how digital technologies have impacted on the arts and on what we used to call the ‘cultural industryâ€. In other words, how have digital technologies revolutionised our notion of ‘culture†in Modern Languages? Can we talk of national ‘digital cultures†in our transnational, multicultural ‘global villageâ€?

These are some of the questions I am addressing in the AHRC-funded project Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2020: interart/intermedia, run by Prof Giuliana Pieri (RHUL), Dr Clodagh Brook (Trinity College, Dublin), Dr Florian Mussgnug (UCL). In the arts, the impact of digital technologies can be identified in at least four areas: 1) Creation: art forms, practices and genres developed at the intersection between the arts and digital technologies; 2) Distribution: digital forms of consumption and dissemination of artistic products (digital and non-digital); 3) Criticism: digital forms of critical interaction on blogs and social networks; 4) Digital Humanities: application of digital methods to research and teaching. These phenomena do not only regard literary texts,  which underpin the philological tradition in Modern Languages, but the entire artistic spectrum, including cinema, theatre, music, visual arts and hybrid genres such as video art, multimedia performances, hypertexts. While digital distribution, digital criticism and digital humanities have become more popular in the post-Internet society connected through computer networks, mobile technologies and other wireless Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), early artistic forms of experimentation with computers date back to the avant-garde practices of the 1960s.

Implicit in the questions above is thus the need to define what we mean by ‘digital†in our discipline. The term has in fact been retrospectively used to look at how certain ‘new†genres, such as digital poetry, have evolved from the first generation of computers to our days (for example, in Chris Funkhouserâ€s Prehistoric Digital Poetry. An Archeology of Forms, 1959-1995, 2007). When we explore the impact of digital technologies on the arts, should we thus consider the full period that spans from the cybernetic era of the first mechanical or electromechanical devices (‘first generation†of computer technologies) to new media? Or should we focus on the so-called ‘digital revolutionâ€, including the ‘whole panoply of virtual simulacra, instantaneous communication, ubiquitous media and global connectivity†(Gere 2009: 15), and looking at the Internet history in terms of Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and beyond?

If we look at the evolution of the relationship between computer technologies, society and the arts from its early days what emerges is a variety of ‘digital cultural histories†that are very much influenced by the specific cultural and political contexts of each country, as well as been somehow defined by the language-specificity. As Gilles Deleuze argued, ‘the machine is always social before it is technical. There is always a social machine which selects or assigns the technical elements used†(Deleuze and Parnet 1977: 126-7). Avant-garde practices, in particular, are an excellent example of the interplay between national and international influences that inform ‘digital culturesâ€. In spite of its global dimension, the relationship between digital technologies and the arts is informed by the local background in which it has developed, going well beyond the Anglophone world that is commonly associated with the World Wide Web culture.

 [Feature image: Gianni Toti, Incatenata alla pellicola, 1983]

Further reading:

*   Charlie Gere, Digital Culture, London: Reaktion Books, 2009

*   Gilles Deleuze, Claire Parnet, Dialogues, Paris: Flammarion, 1977

L'articolo Modern Languages and the Digital: Towards ‘Digital Cultural Histories’ sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

In a 1963 seminal article published in the journal Marcatré, ‘Le ragioni dei gruppi: Il singolo è disperatamente solo nella follaâ€, renowned art historian Giulio Carlo Argan opened up one of the most heated intellectual debates of the decade. By looking at the lively neo-avant-garde artistic scene which was flourishing in those years, he raised a series of fundamental questions: why are organised research and working groups, identified by just a single letter or number such as Gruppo 63 or Gruppo N, taking over currents and trends? Isnâ€t the methodology of collaborative working specific to scientific and technological research? And what are the implications of this kind of working for personal creativity and aesthetic value, which many consider to be rooted in the most exquisite individuality? The first aspect of the article worth stressing is that working in groups was not considered a recent development. As Argan underlined, collaborative work had become common practice in architecture and town planning. For example, Gestalt theories, which underpinned the activities of many of these groups, were developed at least thirty years earlier in the Bauhaus, as well as in Moholy-Nagyâ€s and Albers†teaching. The second point to draw out from the article is that, in Arganâ€s view, two main things triggered collaborative work in the Italian neo-avant-garde groups: interdisciplinarity and the sense of the group versus the mass. Drawing upon these triggers or ‘reasons†(‘le ragioni dei gruppiâ€), we now raise a series of questions which reflect on the debates around interdisciplinarity in the 1960s and 1970s and which draw attention to how the concept has been interpreted differently then and now.

Interdisciplinarity – At a time when artistic languages seemed to have lost their power to signify and represent the new reality of mass media society, combining multiple artistic expertise, group work and free flow between artistic communities seemed the best strategies for renewing them. The arts, Argan underlines, need to be rethought as being in a dialectical relationship with each other, and as part of a system (‘come una forza in un sistemaâ€). This is a point which resonates with the concepts of ‘expanded cinema†(Youngblood) and ‘intermedium†(Higgins) developed a few years later. Questions which arise from Arganâ€s analysis include: why is it necessary for the arts to cross their boundaries and dialogue with each other? What does this reveal about the function of art itself?

Group vs mass – Reflecting critical debates about the relationship between the ‘individual vs mass†(media society), group work was intended as an organised counter-response to the threat of massification and alienation. In Italy, in particular, this was associated with principles of antitotalitarism and capitalist monopolies (such as television and press).  In order to defend the freedom of individuals against mass standardization, Argan suggested that people should seek interaction and collaboration, aiming at a society which finds within the dynamism of the group the willingness to go beyond it and progress. These general ideas were then interpreted in different ways by artists. Questions that arise from this strand of Arganâ€s thought are: How did free movement between artistic communities and group work translate into practice? What facilitated them? What theories of group work were developed in those years? Why was group work not seen positively by many artists? What was their idea of interdisciplinarity? Does interdisciplinarity need to be necessarily associated with group work?

Arganâ€s ideas provide a rich seedbed for discussion. Our hope is that in the ensuing blog posts on group work, some answers to these questions will begin to emerge.

L'articolo Collaborative Artistic Theory and Practice: Le ragioni dei gruppi sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

In this series of blog posts for Interdisciplinary Italy, we plan to explore debates and theories of collaboration in XX and XXI century Italian culture, whilst also looking at how these have been translated into artistic practice. We are particularly interested in the rationale and methodologies underpinning group work, how these reflect certain ideologies and why and how these are represented in artistic practices. We also aim to investigate transnational influences and collaboration across borders – for example, the productive relationships between some Italian neo-avant-gardist groups and Fluxus. We are proposing collaborative posts to tackle collaborative cultural production with a view to exploring through practice a process that Kester (2011) has described as double-edged and ethicially ambivalent: the word “collaboration” means both “to work together”, but also “to cooperate treasonably”.

From 15th February to 15^th April 2017, we invite collaboratively written posts blog posts for the following categories of our blog:

• History: Italian Group Work in the XX and XXI Century Italian Arts: forms of collaboration in early 20^th-century Italy (from Symbolism to Futurism) and in the interwar period (especially artistic collaboration and the fascist state), Neo-Avant-Garde groups (such as Gruppo 1, Gruppo N, Gruppo T, Gruppo 58, Gruppo 63, Gruppo 70, Superstudio), electronic arts (such as Studio Azzurro), new media (such as Wu Ming, Scrittura Industriale Collettiva). EXAMPLES OF FORMAT: co-written posts written by scholars working on the same case study but from different perspectives;
• Theory: debates and discussions on theories of collaborative work in the arts in XX and XXI century; legacies, similarities and differences between groups and between arts (including literature, architecture, music, painting, cinema, performing arts, etc.); relationships between artistic practice and society – why has collaborative work developed in certain periods and become less important in others? EXAMPLES OF FORMAT: collaborative discussions on theories or case studies developed by scholars coming from different disciplines;
• Creative Snapshots: we invite dialogues between artists of the same group or an interviews led by a scholar with a group of artists, reflecting on what informs their group work and why;
• Postgraduate Research: we welcome posts written by two or more researchers on projects which revolve around artistic collaboration.
• Teaching: we invite blog posts which focus on collaboration in the classroom; collaborative teaching practices teaching and interdisciplinary practice/exchange

Blog posts should be co-written and no longer than 500 words. Please contact Emanuela Patti (e.patti@bham.ac.uk) of your intention to submit a blog post, providing the title, a sentence explaining the rationale and the names of the authors.

L'articolo CALL FOR BLOG POSTS/Collaborative artistic theory and practice sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

[Tommaso Pincio, “Ritrai, ti prego, la mia storia” (2012) [Please, portray my story], in Scrissi d’arte, 2015]

From his very first novel M. (1999) to his most recent Panorama (2015), Tommaso Pincio’s fiction is an extraordinary example of intermediality in contemporary Italian literature. In his work, the relationships between artistic media figure in their most diverse forms: whether it is the transfer of artists, motifs, themes and narrativity from the visual arts, cinema, comics or the Internet to literature – see, for example, the interesting dynamics between Jack Kerouac, Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller, Neal Cassidy and the young Holden in Lo spazio sfinito (2002) [Beat Space] – or the thematization of one medium in another – as in the story of Kurt Cobain, leader of the rock band Nirvana in Un amore dell’altro mondo (2002) [Love-shaped Story] – the common thread in his writing is an open dialogue with the other arts and with their collective imagery. Painting and literature, in particular, feature as profoundly interconnected: his most recent series of portraits, Ritratti pedanti [Pedantic Portraits] and Sfere celesti [Celestial Spheres], confirm the constant cross-fertilization between the two arts.

[Tommaso Pincio, Sfere Celesti, 2013-2015]

It is within this context that we are encouraged to read Tommaso Pincio’s Scrissi d’arte (2015) [I Wrote About Art], a recently edited collection of essays on art written over a 30-year period that provides us with the key to enter Pincio’s intermediality at a deeper level. The Italian critic Andrea Cortellessa, editor of both the volume and its series Fuori formato (Rome: L’Orma), has rightly pointed out that the “archaeological operation, which Pincio’s writings on art provide on his work, was long overdue” (p. 277). From this rich series of articles covering a variety of artistic movements from 1984 to 2011, we do not only learn about Pincio’s past as a gallery manager and an art critic, but we also get a compelling account of Italian art history during those years, and are offered the tools for understanding how those artists who were his most formative influences, from Alighiero Boetti to Marcel Duchamp, had a strong impact on both his idea of authorship and on the writing style of his fiction.

In our conversation last July, Pincio claimed that writing about art was a way to elaborate a failure, or better the anxiety of not having become a successful painter; or at least this was how he conceived of things in 1996, the time when he moved from painting to fiction. During this time of transformation, his writings on art progressively became a pre-text to speculate imaginatively beyond artefacts, or better, strategically to use artefacts as a starting point to tell a story (“fare arte attraverso l’arte degli altri”), – such an understanding of art criticism emerges implicitly in the essay “Il critico immaginario” (pp. 94-95). In other words, the new collection of his essays tells us about the long-term coexistence of two creative voices within the same authorial subject, namely that of the writer and of the painter. Tommaso Pincio (i.e. the writer), is in fact a pseudonym adopted by Marco Colapietro (i.e. the gallery manager and art critic) when he began working on literary fiction. The former builds its fictional identity on a symbolic act of repression or denial (“autocancellazione”) of the latter. Ultimately, this results in a productive collaboration between the two. We may wonder, then, to what extent this strategy was informed by Alighiero Boetti’s idea of adding an “e” between his name and surname: Alighiero e Boetti . (p. 145).* Or should we rather see its origin in the idea of the “opera ulteriore” (p. 170) that Pincio uses to describe Duchamp’s creation of his own authorial myth? Scrissi d’arte is undoubtedly a crucial text in Pincio’s authorial self-identification, but it also reveals a wide spectrum of other significant connections between his fiction and the other arts, including transpositions of genres, formal structures and semiotic complexes, which certainly needs further investigation.

*As Pincio writes about Boetti in Scrissi d’arte, “Esiste forse un modo migliore di fare il mondo e l’individuo partecipi della loro differenza spingendoli a proseguire mano nella mano?” [Is there a better way to involve the world and the individual in their difference while pushing them forward hand-in-hand?] (p. 145)

For further details about Tommaso Pincio’s work, please visit his blog/website here

L'articolo In Conversation with Tommaso Pincio sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

In Mimesis, the German philologist and comparativist identified two significant moments in literary history, in which the traditional separation of “high” and “low” styles was surpassed: the history of Christ, which combined everyday life and sublime tragedy; and the Divine Comedy, which, drawing on the Christian tradition, again mixed divine and human elements. The concept of figura was employed instead to explain how Dante represented his historical characters as a prefiguration of their divine destiny. Figural interpretation establishes indeed a connection between two facts or people, in which one of them is not self-referential in its meaning, but also means the other; and the other also includes and resolves the former.

The originality of Pasolini’s intermediality is based on the manner in which he translated Auerbach’s concept of “mingling of styles” into a form of hybridization of artistic media, at the same time using the concept of figura to create semiotic interconnections between the protagonists of his films (Accattone, Ettore, Stracci, and Jesus Christ) and the figura Christi. The attractive feature of Mimesis was for Pasolini the radical mingling of “high” and” low” cultures, as a revolutionary characteristic of Christian religion (Christ impersonating at once altitudo and humilitas in his life and passion). Pasolini’s early films can be seen in fact as a progressive figural approximation to the passion of Christ, first only suggested through symbolic associations with music (such as Bach’s in Accattone), paintings (such as Mantegna’s Cristo morto or Pomtorno’s Deposizione, in Mamma Roma or La ricotta respectively), and sculptures (the figure of the Angel and the cross in Accattone), and then through the full identification with Christ in person in Il Vangelo secondo Matteo. The mingling of styles was thus used in his cinema as an aesthetic strategy to re-define the hierarchical boundaries of social representation. At the same time, through his figural realism, Pasolini constructed the filmic discourse on his “poveri Cristi”, the dimension of sacredness, namely of “exclusion” from society (in Agamben’s definition of homo sacer), being his form of resistance to Italian society in the 1960s.

[This topic is discussed more extensively in this recently published book: Emanuela Patti, Pasolini After Dante. The “Divine Mimesis” and the Politics of Representation, (Oxford: Legenda, 2016)

L'articolo Pasolini’s Intermediality: Translating Auerbach’s Literary Theory into Film Practice sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Edited by Valentino Catricalà

Review by Emanuela Patti

Between 25th February and 1 March 2015 Rome hosted the first Italian Media Art Festival, organised by Fondazione Mondo Digitale. Following this event, this publication gathers a series of theoretical contributions (Theories), some perspectives of past and contemporary forms of media art (Histories and Perspectives) and a few case studies of works by the new generations of Italian media artists (From Body to Mind. New Generations of Italian Media Artists). As Stephen Partridge clarifies in the first Foreword, the crucial question of the book is the definition of the quintessentially European term “Media Art” that encompasses today many media and art-forms ranging from film to interactive art. In the last decades, the field of these artistic practices has been difficult to define: post-media, inter-media, post-cinema, post video art? Whether “media art” is the best term among these categories is what Sandra Lischi discusses in the second Forward. She questions whether “media art” indicates an art that uses media or one that intersects all of them or one that is related to technology. She rightly emphasizes how in either case, this notion could also be used to describe traditional art media such as cinema and their avant-gardistic movements; at the same time, can we define the new generation of artists as “media artists”? Was Michelangelo a “marble artist?”, argued Fabrizio Plessi who refused to notion of “video artist”. The section “Theory” helps clarify these questions. Sean Cubitt and Paul Thomas, authors of Relive. Media Art Histories (2014), argue for a media art history as a collaborative task with a materialistic approach integrating scientific subjects and cultural history. Oliver Grau focuses instead on how media art plays a key role in the reflection of our information societies – he argues that “media art” is the art form that uses the technologies that fundamentally change our societies. Within this perspective, he also stresses the importance of researching and archiving it. How media arts can be productively introduced in education is the topic of Alfonso Molina’s essay. Molina illustrated how the project Phyrtual Innovation Gym created by Mondo Digitale, can help students develop a whole-brain, rather than a “left-brain-oriented” approach, thus providing them with an education for life in 21^st century. Finally, how technology is associated to revelation and salvation (Heidegger) is discussed in the last essay of this section where Valentino Catricalà explores how such perspective relates to “media art”. Interesting analyses on cinema (Marco Maria Gazzano), video art (Giulio Latini and Laura Leuzzi/Elaine Smith/Stephen Partridge), computer art (Valentina Ravaglia) and media art (Maurizio Marco Tozzi) compose the following section, “Histories”. These contributions demonstrate how the flexible notion of “media art” can be a powerful tool to re-examine the interartistic nature of both traditional and contemporary art works. The next section, “Perspectives”, finally looks at a number of key topics in contemporary artistic debates such as “post-Internet” (Domenico Quaranta), interactivity in the arts (Alessandro Amaducci), the intersection of art, science, technology and society (Roc Parés),  sound art (Elisa Cuciniello), and the democratisation of media art (Veronica D’Auria). To what extent the phenomenon of “media art” is Italian is something that emerges distinctively only in the very last section featuring a series of artworks by Italian artists. Can we define the boundaries of an Italian media art?

L'articolo Media Art. Towards a New Definition of Arts in the Age of Technology sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.