These questions were the starting point for an intermedial series of workshops, designed by Martina Borghi and Giuliana Pieri.

The workshop – organized for Sydney Russell and Riverside students and teachers in London – began with a thirty-minute masterclass, summarising key phases in the development of Fascism and presenting the focus of the two-hour session on propaganda and communication under the Fascist regime. Students were then divided into groups and each group was given a different selection of images based on categories. The nine categories selected for the workshop were Fascist and Youth, Fascism and Sport, Art and Propaganda, Plurality of Arts under the Fascism, The Fascist Empire, New Italian cities, and Mussolini’s gestures and speeches. Two categories were also dedicated to specific social and agricultural reforms undertaken in those years, namely The Battle of Grain, and The Land Reclamation. In this way each group were able to focus on a specific topic related to the Fascist dictatorship. Students were free to select from their bundle of images the ones they considered more meaningful and then they displayed them on a section of the class wall – this was their ‘exhibition space’. The way they chose to display the images was a means to express their personal critical and curatorial choices. Then each group was asked to explain and justify the reasons of their selection and arrangement on the wall. This phase of the workshop was crucial because it made students responsible for their own visual narrative displayed on the wall that was then transformed in an oral and textual narration by their own explanations. In this phase the students’ critical analysis emerged clearly, and it was possible to connect different groups and reflections together through a lively discussion that completed the task.

Thanks to these activities, the importance of an intermedial and interdisciplinary approach for the study of history and visual culture is rediscovered to allow students to elaborate in complete autonomy a comprehensive reflection on the topic studied. Visual sources remain a valid support to improve students’ skills that vary from the use of historical sources to the development of communicative competences.

Although modern history students at secondary level are not asked to engage with visual sources during their A-level exam, source analysis is a critical skill that is being tested. The use of a broad range of visual material that we presented during the workshop helped students to visualize the capillary nature of propaganda, which was embedded in all aspects of visual and mass communication. The visual sources selected for the event ranged from photos, illustrations and magazine covers to advertisement and graphic works to better comprehend the political and social dynamics of the period, helping students to develop an accurate reflection on the branched-out Fascist propaganda and its influence on the Italian people.

Introducing students to key curatorial skills brings in multi-modality in the secondary classroom, encouraging active and reflective learning and the development of the student’s awareness of the importance of using different types of sources for the study of modern history. Furthermore, the outcomes highlighted for this event were the stress on the relationship between visual culture and history, as well as the identification of visual sources as tools to encourage the study of modern history.

L'articolo Modern History through Visual Sources in the A-Level Curriculum sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

The conference is linked to the AHRC funded project Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2020: Interart/Intermedia, and two themes in the BSR research strategy: Heritage Management and Sustainability, and History, Place and Imagination. It is jointly supported by the UCL Cities partnerships Programme in Rome.

Organisation: Florian Mussgnug (UCL) and Giuliana Pieri (Royal Holloway)

Conference website: https://multidisciplinaryrome.org/2019/10/14/sites-of-cultural-agency/

Conference programme

PANEL ONE: EXPERIENCES
Chair: Florian Mussgnug (University College London)

PANEL TWO: MOBILITIES

Chair: Harriet O’Neill (British School at Rome and Royal Holloway University London)

PANEL THREE: ARCHIVES
Chair: Giuliana Pieri (Royal Holloway University of London )

L'articolo Conference Announcement: Sites of Cultural Agency (Rome, Friday 18 October 2019) sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

In 2018, together with Dr Ruth Hemus, an expert of Dada based at Royal Holloway University of London, the workshop at Tate continued to test the role and effectiveness of creative making as a tool for engaging students and supporting critically aware learning [link here]. We chose collage as this technique was used to great effect by Dada and allowed us to incorporate the imagery created by both Italian Futurism and Dada in response to WW1. The results were striking, playful, and acutely observed responses to the imagery of the two movements. The subversive nature of both movements and their opposite politics were captured by students and participants in wonderfully creative and irreverent images.

Our call for working across disciplines is not a stance against disciplinary specificity. Subject knowledge remains key and is the basis from which we ask all our participants to respond to the visual and textual prompts we send in advance of the workshops. Students study independently; come together in their schools in small groups to discuss their findings; and write short texts for an exhibition catalogue which is designed and produced by the Design department of The Sixth Form College Farnborough (one of our longstanding key partners in the project). On the day of the workshop, we meet at Tate and we are joined by students from all participating schools (and gallery visitors). Meeting, discussing and creating together offers a different mode of thinking and learning because it is embodied. The space at Tate Exchange is made for feeling, doing and making. It is not a traditional classroom, nor is it a traditional gallery or museum space (with its implicit barrier to a haptic experience).

We hope to see you on 16^th May at Tate Exchange for a full day of activities to explore our 2019 theme: ‘Women of the Avant-garde and neo Avant-garde: Activism and Dissent’. Whilst 12-3pm will be devoted to our workshop with schools, 3-6pm is open to all. Joins us in a conversation on activism and bring your own text/image/object for our pop-up exhibition.

L'articolo Thinking, Making, and Thinking through Making sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Where is Modern Languages in digital culture and digital arts? And where in digital culture in Modern Languages?

SYMPOSIUM REPORT

The ‘digital turn in the humanities’ has inevitably raised a number of questions about how digital technologies have transformed research, teaching and dissemination in Modern Languages. While hybridity still tends to dominate our teaching, research methods and objects of study – we mix traditional/analogue and new/digital practices to acquire and disseminate knowledge, as well as develop skills – digital technologies are significantly changing the way we understand literacies and pedagogy; publishing, research materials, our objects of study, and the notion of ‘culture’. The one-day international symposium, Digital Culture Studies in Modern Languages, co-organised by Giuliana Pieri and Emanuela Patti as part of the ‘Digital culture & digital creativity’ programme funded by HARI (Royal Holloway), explored theories, methodologies and future perspectives in the field of ‘digital culture studies’ in Modern Languages. It brought together scholars in Modern Languages and Digital Humanities, as well as artists, media arts historians and curators, in order to discuss new informed ways and methods for approaching the study of digital culture and creativity in Modern Languages.

Emanuela Patti kicked off the symposium, by introducing the main topics of the day. As emerged in the report recently published by Paul Spence and Renata Brendao, Survey of Attitudes towards Digital Culture & Technology in the Modern Languages, digital tools, including apps and social media, such as Duolingo, Memrise, Wordreference, Skype, Youtube, Twitter, have become an integral part of teaching languages; digital tools have facilitated multilingual and multicultural learning; they make authentic content such as TV and radio programmes, interviews, more accessible; they allow more independent forms of self-study; they encourage students and teachers to develop new forms of academic writing and presentation through intermedia genres such as blogs and video-essays; they provide new immersive experiences in the language and culture through virtual and augmented reality apps. Digital methods have also been integrated in our research practices in many ways, including enhanced critical curation, augmented editions, cultural analytics, aggregation and data-mining, visualisation and data design, large use of digital audiovisual texts and imaging, and so on. In 2017, Claire Taylor and Niahm Thornton published a collaboratively written article, together with other colleagues in Modern Languages, titled Modern Languages and the Digital: The Shape of the Discipline, which identified some of the key areas in our research and teaching practice where the “digital” had a remarkable impact. These included data-driven projects, digital archives, digital ethnography, users and interfaces, the research process, and the digital as object of study.

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. The ‘digital as object of study’ thus includes a variety of new forms of digital creativity and cultural phenomena which inform contemporary culture: for example, the broad range of new digital genres which have developed across different arts, media and communication practices, such as lit-blogs, electronic literature, visual novels, interactive films, web series, animation, digital arts, whose aesthetics, textuality, dynamics between authors and audiences require new critical tools. At the same time, these genres construct meanings, identities, and claim forms of otherness in dialogue with the imaginary of national and international high cultures, mass cultures, folk cultures, and avant-garde cultures. On the one hand, we are thus dealing with new intermedia genres which intersect multiple semiotic systems; on the other, with a variety of forms of remediations and transmedia storytelling.

Not unexpectedly, the definition of ‘digital humanities’ is constantly expanding, in order to reflect this evolution. One of the questions discussed at the symposium, following up on an article written by Claire Taylor and Thea Pitman, Where’s the ML in DH? And Where’s the DH in ML? The Relationship between Modern Languages and Digital Humanities, and an Argument for a Critical DHML, published in the Digital Humanities Quarterly in 2017, was in fact how Modern Languages and Digital Humanities intersect and can collaborate. Another question raised at the symposium was what digital culture and Modern Languages have in common and how ML-ers can contribute to the analysis of contemporary digital culture and creativity. This built upon a 2018 forum discussion published in the journal Explorations in Media Ecology, titled Digital Culture Studies: National and Transnational Perspectives in Modern Languages, in which Emanuela Patti, Claire Taylor, Massimo Riva and Erika Fülöp explored what ‘digital culture’ means for Modern Languages, how Modern Languages scholars (ML-ers) can contribute to ‘digital culture studies’, and, ultimately, how this contribution could reshape the discipline. A third question of the symposium was how digital arts, media art history and modern languages intersect and could collaborate. The boundaries between electronic literature, digital arts and post-cinematic genres, are increasingly blurred. The original definition of ‘electronic literature’ as ‘works with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer’ includes forms of kinetic poetry and computer art installations which could easily fall in the categories of digital arts, post-cinematic genres and digital performance. For scholars and teachers of modern languages, it is interesting to explore how these genres reflect local, regional and national cultures and how they relate to the historical avant-gardes at a national and international level. At the same time, in some cases, they reach exactly the opposite effect, by overcoming local, regional, national boundaries. The new media scenario encourages us to re-assess how the imaginary is formed as intermedia and transmedia practices and how modern languages and cultures contribute to this process. At the same time, interesting perspective emerge in how languages are used in media arts and digital literature.

In her keynote speech (chaired by Sarah Wright, RHUL), Digital Humanities, digital culture, and Modern Languages, Claire Taylor (Liverpool) explored the points of interconnection between the three interdisciplinary fields of Modern Languages, Digital Humanities, and Digital Culture Studies. Starting from an overview of recent developments in Modern Languages research that have engaged with the digital, including the question of nation-state as a (relatively) fixed category, of unity between language and territory, of the national canon, and the critique of area studies, the talk explored how theories of digital culture have raised important questions also about Modern Languages as a field. Subsequently, the talk examined the crucial contributions that Modern Linguists can make to debates in Digital Humanities and Digital Culture Studies, in particular as regards the insights that Modern Linguists can offer regarding co-creation; a commitment to community engagement; a contestation of Anglophone models; and a linguistically- and culturally-specific cultural studies approach to digital materials. To what extent we can still adopt a cultural studies perspective to digital culture and creativity today was another aspect considered in Taylor’s talk. A productive dialogue between humanities-based approaches and cultural studies-based approaches that currently characterises debates in Digital Humanities and Digital Culture studies alike, emerges especially, as Taylor argued, in the area of aesthetics, technologies and ethics.

The following two papers were chaired by Guyda Armstrong (Manchester). In his talk, Key elements of a critical Digital Humanities-Modern Languages (DHML) research agenda, Paul Spence (King’s College) explored how DH would benefit from greater sensitivity to ML epistemologies, within a ‘critical DHML’ approach, and he examined the challenges we face in realising such a vision. Spence emphasised how digital methods are not culturally/linguistically neutral; it is thus crucial to investigate how they operate in different linguistic and cultural contexts. The route to digital diversity would not only imply the development of multilingual digital methods, but also closer collaboration between DH and ML in terms of developing critical digital literacies for staff and students. Spence showed some of the results of the recent survey, published with Renata Brendao, Survey of Attitudes towards Digital Culture & Technology in the Modern Languages, which address a variety of areas such as teaching, research, dissemination, and he then presented some ongoing and future projects. 

 In her talk Digital culture in French Studies in the UK, Erika Fülöp (Lancaster) first analysed what ML research and teaching can do for digital culture: for example, recognising the possibility of cultural specificity in the digital space; countering the stereotype of a homogeneous global culture in the digital age; and facilitating the development of a comparative perspective on digital cultural studies and on digital arts and literature specifically. Viceversa, digital culture studies can contribute to Modern Languages by offering insights into the ways in which the digital media impacts the societies and cultures we study both through the culture-specific modes of presence of dominant multinational platforms and through national or language-specific services; as well as refining the concept and approaches to cultural identity in the Digital Age. Fülöp moved on to present current teaching and research projects related to digital culture and creativity in French Studies and beyond, highlighting the main methodological approaches used, as well as the benefits and challenges of some of these experiences. 

The second part of the day was devoted to digital arts, digital literatures and media art history, looking at how they raise relevant questions for Modern Languages. In his keynote speech (chaired by James Williams, RHUL), Telegraph, Airmail, Satellite: The Visual Imaginary of Global Media, Sean Cubitt (Goldsmiths), gave us a fascinating talk about the visual imaginaries employed to mythologise and to make sense of the reach and power of global media, tracing an archeology of internet cartography and informatics, attending to the problematic relations between text, numbers, diagrams and pictures in their traverses of global space and local place. Cubitt’s talk started from a 1930 30 franc airmail stamp from the Belgian Congo, showing a biplane flying over a line of porters. As Cubitt highlighted, since the explosion of cartography in the European expansion of the 15th century, globalisation in its many variants has always depended on media, but it has also pictured and otherwise visualised the media of its planetary reach, and very often done so in imagery that picks at the gap between the persistence of local and the deracination of the global enterprise. Cubitt presented an extraordinary variety of images, including painting, poetry, films, coins, stamps, photographs. How imaginary is constructed, validated and disseminated has been a central question in modern languages scholarship. In this respect, Cubitt cast light on a variety of interesting intersections between media and the arts – some of them concerned more specifically the impact of the medium in the lyrical perception of space; others revolved around issues of cultural representations in stamps, coins, paintings or they examined the formal impact of media in the texture and composition of artistic works.

In the following talk, Rethinking the medium through media art. The Italian case, Valentino Catricalà  (Media Arts Festival) focused on the contribution that media artists have given to the development of new technologies. By challenging the idea of technological determinism, Catricalà  underlined the crucial role played by artists in experimenting with technologies, thus inspiring innovation, as well as informing the design of media devices for the general public. As Catricalà  emphasised, quoting Oliver Grau, ‘media art has combined the latest technologies with the big questions of our time: artists critically addressed the visions of life sciences and projections on artificial life, utopias of neuroscience, robotics and cyborgs. Media art reflects and researches the media and image revolution and takes up the subject of the processes of globalisation and growing worldwide surveillance’. Again, this field of enquiry has proven to be very relevant for scholars of ML who address modern and contemporary languages, cultures and societies.

In the final paper of the day, The Winnipeg: the poem that crossed the Atlantic, María Mencía (Kingston) shared her experience as a media artist, lecturer and researcher to address the question of methodologies. How can we research and teach forms of digital creativity with a focus on linguistic and cultural aspects? By presenting her own artistic work, The Winnipeg, namely a multi-linguistic sea of networked, interactive poetic narratives fed by the stories from the posts uploaded to the website, Mencía discussed how she uses The Winnipeg as both cultural material and a way to instigate new poetic forms and online communication – through practice-based research, translation methodologies, archiving historical research, visual research and oral histories. The stories uploaded have been translated into different languages (from Spanish into French and English). The Winnipeg lends itself to examine social and political issues and raise awareness of historical events through hybrid forms of visual art, language and technology. Concurrently, this work reflects pertinent critical issues of migration, displacement and the search for survival so apparent in current worldwide events.

The final discussion offered some extra time and space to address questions related to the papers and reflect on the many points which were raised during the day. What emerged, on the one hand, is the necessary collaboration which DH and ML need to develop not only by applying new tools to address old questions in the humanities, but by adopting a more critical and linguistically/culturally situated approach to both the new tools and the old questions. In order to make modern languages, literatures and cultures truly contemporary, it will also be crucial to re-assess its key definitions – language, literature, culture – in the light of the technological advances of the digital age. In this perspective, we would require a broader understanding of ‘language’ and ‘translation’, for example; one which takes into consideration the language of code, interfaces, and users, as well as the phenomena of trans-coding and trans-mediality. In the way media art reflects on technologies and imaginaries, media arts historians and ML can develop a productive dialogue on how , for example, aesthetics, technologies and ethics reflect local and global cultures and languages.

This symposium was just a first step on a series of discussions which will be taken further. Please get in touch, if you are interested in getting involved [emanuela.patti@rhul.ac.uk].

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

Panel Submission

PANEL 1

Title: Interart and Intermedia in Italy

Speakers: Dr Clodagh Brook (Birmingham), Prof Giuliana Pieri (Royal Holloway), Dr Emanuela Patti (Birmingham)

Focus and aims This panel analyses the relationship between arts and media in twentieth and twenty-first century Italy, and investigates collaborations between artists from different artistic disciplines by focusing on three case studies: cinema, art, and literature, exploring the ways in which these three arts expand beyond their boundaries, why they do, and what the consequences are. The panel will present work-in-progress findings of the second phase of the Interdisciplinary Italy project (2015-2018).

Panel Chair: Clodagh Brook

Clodagh Brook: Intermedial cinema: Creativity and collaboration

This talk investigates how Italian cinema has collaborated with the arts, particular other visual arts, from the Sixties through to our digital contemporaneity. Crossing boundaries between artistic disciplines has been variously described as “avant-garde”, “experimental”, “disruptive”, even, for Roland Barthes, as “war”. However, by the 1960s, cinema was already a collaborative art, so was there still room for such experimentation? Where has cinema set its artistic boundaries? Has it domesticated art, architecture or fashion? And are there players who defamiliarise the normality of cinema’s interartistic and intermedial collaboration? Taking mini case studies from Italy of the 1960s, 1980s and the 2010s, I will focus attention on individuals and groups who are actively engaged in disrupting boundaries and I will explore how institutions and technologies foster or hinder such disruption. In so doing, the talk will challenge and amend established ideas of cultural centres and peripheries. I seek to examine how an interdisciplinary (and interartistic/intermedial) approach can subvert widely accepted artistic canons; what looks central under the lens of the monodisciplinary microscope may not be so from an interartistic one.

Giuliana Pieri: Interartistic practices in the arts 1909-1969

Ever since the Italian Futurist movement came to the attention of the international artistic community in 1909, radical art movements in Italy have been characterised by a programmatic attempt to cross the boundaries of disciplines and media. Yet interartistic practices have more often than not been downplayed by critics, art historians and curators alike. We still often reply on monodisciplinary narratives which cannot easily accommodate the work of those practitioners who moved easily between media and/or whose work span across a number of artistic disciplines. This paper will focus on a number of case studies to highlight the centrality of interartistic theories and practices in the work of a number of practitioners associated with Futurism (before and after the Great War), industrial design, and Neoavanguardia. By focusing on the work of Giacomo Balla, Fausto Melotti, Gio Ponti, and Ketty La Rocca I intend to probe further into the critical resistance towards interartistic practices in Italy in the period 1909-1969.

Emanuela: Italian Digital Poetry: Birth and Evolution of a Genre

Up to now, a history of Italian digital poetry has not been written yet. Not unexpectedly, one may still wonder what exactly digital poetry is, given the fact that in Italy the genre has not been canonized so far. Only in the last decade, the term has found official definitions in international handbooks, guides and companions such as A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (2008) and The John’s Hopkins Guide to Digital Media (2014), which have acknowledged the existence of this new genre (Strehovec 2003). In its broadest sense, “digital poetry” is poetry in which computer programming or processes (software) are distinctively used in the composition, generation, or presentation of the text (or combination of texts) (Funkhouser 2007). By drawing on a number of case studies from the Sixties to our days, including Nanni Balestrini, Gianni Toti and Caterina Davinio, this paper discusses whether and how we can trace the history of Italian digital poetry, looking at how the genre has metamorphosed in the last fifty years together with computer technologies.

PANEL 2

Title: Teaching Italian the Interdisciplinary Way: Trends, Challenges, Opportunities

Speakers: Dr Clodagh Brook (Birmingham), Prof Giuliana Pieri (Royal Holloway), David Brown (The Sixth Form College Farnborough)

Panel Chair: Prof Giuliana Pieri

Focus and Aims This panel explores models and methodologies in interdisciplinary (rather than multidisciplinary) teaching, drawing on the experiences of the AHRC-funded Interdisciplinary Italy project and current pedagogical theories. The panel will open with an overview of current thinking on, and practice of interdisciplinarity in the seminar and classroom. This will be followed by a discussion of the development of teaching material on the part of the Interdisciplinary Italy research project and a presentation by a secondary school teacher.

Clodagh Brook: New trends in Interdisciplinary Teaching

Interdisciplinary teaching has rapidly become normative and naturalised. Despite the apparent omnipresence of interdisciplinarity, Alan Liu argues that interdisciplinary study is the most seriously underthought critical, pedagogical and institutional concept in the modern academy. In universities, we typically present a range of multidisciplinary (rather than interdisciplinary) approaches in multi-taught modules and leave it up to students to make the links, without, however, providing them the tools to do so.

In this talk, I will critique recent, and often radical, models of interdisciplinary teaching, such as that currently being rolled out in the Finnish school sector and the Ross Spiral model. Drawing on the work of Julie Thompson Klein, Hans Lauge Hansen and others, as well as on emerging research from the AHRC-funded Interdisciplinary Italy project, this talk will explore what makes interdiscipinarity successful in the seminar room, classroom and lecture theatre. The focus of the talk is especially on notions of connectivity, collaboration and the active, creative student, as well as on the methodologies and practices necessary to make take multidisciplinary teaching and learning towards successful interdisciplinary practice.

Giuliana Pieri: Interdisciplinarity in the classroom: “Interdisciplinary Futurism” at Tate Exchange

This paper will present a collaborative project between the Italian department at Royal Holloway University of London, The Sixth Form College (Farnborough) and Queen Margaret’s School (York). “Interdisciplinary Futurism” aimed to explore modes of interdisciplinary exchange both between universities and secondary schools, and between different disciplines in schools. The focus on a common topic, Italian Futurism, allowed the students and teachers involved in the project to question the way in which disciplines articulate and shape knowledge, but also limit the boundaries of understanding and research. The project, which developed over a number of months, culminated with an event at Tate Exchange.

David Brown (The Sixth Form College Farnborough): Interdisciplinary in the classroom: Fascist visual culture in the History curriculum

This paper will present a project run by the History department at The Sixth Form College in Farnborough, the Liceo Linguistico Sperimentale (Ragusa) and Prof Giuliana Pieri (Royal Holloway) which aims to explore memories of Fascism and the traces of the regime in the built environment. The projects’ aim is to challenge traditional ways to study Fascism in the history curriculum by means of a focus on the role of the visual arts (painting, design, sculpture and photography) and architecture in the study of the regime. The project provides a platform to explore different modes of collaboration between school and the HE sector as well as showcasing the role of interdisciplinary perspectives and research-led teaching to enrich the history curriculum in schools.

L'articolo 27-30 June 2017/SIS Biennial Conference, University of Hull sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Italy’s “Expanded Cinema”: Cinema and The Electronic Arts

Cinema has, since its very origins, been a plural medium, one which encompasses theatre, photography, music and other forms. However, since the sixties, its relations with arts, media and technology have been in a state of constant flux, and what “cinema” means has been transformed as cinema touches adjacent forms. Despite the evident changes in what “cinema” means, research into Italian cinema still often treats films as if borders of the medium were unchanging. This panel challenges the static notion of the medium, by presenting some of the tears in its form, attempting to pinpoint some of the key moments in which it bleeds into other forms. We are interested in tracing these transformations and through them understanding what the term “Italian cinema” means today. Is cinema re-totalising itself, or disintegrating?

This panel will explore the experiments, collaborations and tensions that have arisen between Italy’s cinema and its electronic arts from the sixties to the present. In particular, we will investigate three particular moments: cinema’s relationship with experimental television, with video art and with augmented reality. In doing so, we will focus attention on individuals and groups who have been actively engaged in creative boundary-crossing and on institutions and technologies which fostered or hindered it. Case studies we will consider include video artists Gianni Toti, Studio Azzurro, Fabrizio Plessi and others.

The panel will start by examining the first theoretical debates within journals such as Marcatré and the early experimentation within the RAI Servizio Programmi Sperimentali the late 1960s to early 1970s. In their double paper, Emanuela Patti and Clodagh Brook will look at the interplay between the theoretical debates in journals such as Marcatré, Cinema Nuovo, Videocritica and creative practice. Particular emphasis will be devoted to the Italian critical reception of the notion of “expanded cinema” in the 1967 triple special issue of Marcatré (n. 34/35/36) and how this was negotiated with local theorists’ perspectives such as Carlo Lizzani’s “La quarta età  dell’immagine in movimento” (1969) and the neo-avandgardist debates of the same decade (following Eco’s “opera aperta”). The paper will examine how such debates gave impulse to a new era of cinematic experimentation leading to video art and how this developed in the following decades. Patti will concentrate on Gianni Toti (1924-2007), better known as the founder of poetronica, a mix of poetry and electronics. After a long experience as a journalist, poet and experimental film maker – from 1958 to 1969 he made the newsreels (cinegiornali) in collaboration with Cesare Zavattini and Jean-Luc Godard –, in the early 1980s Toti began mixing cinema, poetry text and electronic images in his video poems, giving rise to a number of derivative artefacts such as “Videopoemopera”, “videopoemetti” and “videosyntheatronica”. Brook will focus on the experience of the Milanese collective, Studio Azzurro, who have been working across cinema, theatre and video since 1982. Brook’s paper will explore in particular the place of artistic collaboration in “expanded cinema”. In the third paper, Mirko Lino will look at how cinema intersects with augmented reality, focusing on the project Komplex, as a case study.

Papers

Clodagh Brook and Emanuela Patti (double paper) Italy’s Expanded Cinema in Practice: Gianni Toti (Patti) and Studio Azzurro (Brook)

Mirko Lino – Interferenze intermediali: le esperienze cinematiche in Realtà Aumentata. Il caso di Komplex – Live Cinema Group

L'articolo 9-10 June 2017/JCMS Conference: Innovations and Tensions, Italian Cinema and Media in a Global World, Rome sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Workshop Two: “Making Places”

Monday, 18th April 2016, University Roma Tre

Hosted by the University of Rome (Roma Tre) with the support of the British School at Rome (BSR), our second workshop celebrates the exuberant energy and visionary imagination of radical architecture and its influence on other artistic forms. Our invited guest will be the Florentine architect Gian Piero Frassinelli, a key member of Italy’s celebrated radical architecture firm Superstudio (1966-1978). Artist and scholar Jacopo Benci (BSR) will lead the conversation with Frassinelli, and will be joined in discussion by experts from various disciplines, including Prof. Robert Lumley (UCL), whose contribution to Italian cultural history includes important studies of radical art from the Sixties and Seventies.

Monday, 18 April 2016 / 10.00 am-6.00 pm

Sala Conferenze Ignazio Ambrogio

Via del Valco di San Paolo 19

PROGRAMMA

10.00 Saluti e Introduzione

PRIMA SESSIONE – coordina Florian Mussgnug (UCL)

10.30 Robert Lumley (UCL) Mario Merz: Time and Space

11.45 Jacopo Benci (BSR)

Superstudio attraverso e oltre le discipline (una panoramica work-in-progress)

L’intervento sarà  preceduto dalla proiezione del film di Superstudio Cerimonia (1973)

13.00 Pausa pranzo

SECONDA SESSIONE – coordina Simona Corso (Roma Tre)

14.30 Gian Piero Frassinelli (architetto)

in conversazione con Jacopo Benci (BSR)

e proiezione del film Viaggio al termine dell’architettura

16.00 Pausa caffè

16.30 Matteo Pericoli (disegnatore e architetto)

Il laboratorio di architettura letteraria: colla, cartone e storie: un’indagine interdisciplinare dello spazio letterario

17.15 Viola Papetti (anglista)

Conclusioni

For further information, please contact the organisers: Prof. Simona Corso (simona.corso@uniroma3.it) and Dr Florian Mussgnug (f.mussgnug@ucl.ac.uk).

L'articolo April 2016 / Workshops, Making Places, University Roma Tre sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

PER98

Workshop One: “Visual Storytelling: Examples from Italy”

Wednesday, 2^nd March 2016, 3pm-7.30pm

Institute of Advanced Studies University College London South Wing, Room G09 Gower Street, London

Organized by the AHRC-funded research project Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2020: Interart/Intermedia and hosted by the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, this multidisciplinary symposium explores the rich diversity of visual and verbal art in contemporary Italy. We are delighted to welcome the illustrator and painter Tullio Pericoli, one of Italy’s most distinguished contemporary artists, who will speak, in conversation with Prof. Simona Corso (Roma Tre), about how literature has shaped his artistic imagination. Interartistic creativity will be envisaged as a constantly changing, dynamic field of investigation, which has been, and continues to be, a driving force of modern art. We will begin with a plenary lecture by the poet and scholar Prof. Jan Baetens Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Leuven and a leading authority on literature and the visual arts. The afternoon will end with a roundtable, chaired by Dr Florian Mussgnug (UCL), which will include contributions by Dr Pierpaolo Antonello (Cambridge), Prof. Timothy Mathews (UCL) and Dr Giuliana Pieri (Royal Holloway).

For further information, please contact the organizer: f.mussgnug@ucl.ac.uk.

If you are interested in participating, please register at the following link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/visual-storytelling-examples-from-italy-tickets-21079376984

PROGRAMME

3.00 pm Welcome and Opening

Clodagh Brook (Birmingham; Principal Investigator of Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2020: Interart/Intermedia) and Florian Mussgnug (UCL)

3.15 pm Jan Baetens (Leuven) – Hybridized popular literature: fotoromanzi and cineromanzi In postwar Italy

Chair: Florian Mussgnug (UCL)

4.30 pm “Painting and Drawing Literature”: Tullio Pericoli in conversazione con Simona Corso (Roma Tre)*

5.45 pm Roundtable “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Visual and Verbal Art”

Pierpaolo Antonello (Cambridge)

Timothy Mathews (UCL)

Giuliana Pieri (Royal Holloway)

Chair: Florian Mussgnug (UCL)

7.00 pm  Concluding Remarks and Reception

* This conversation will be in Italian. We will provide a written summary in English detailing major points for discussion.

L'articolo March 2016 / Workshops, Visual Storytelling: Examples from Italy, University College London sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.