Our group were exploring metaphors of borders and their ability to enable us to understand interdisciplinarity better, and also looking at concepts of facilitating, policing and transgression.
Our discussion began with the strong imperative, voiced and seconded by members of the group, to map the contemporary period: its thought, the origin of that thought, the significant players, across the range of the arts, who now produce work though the Internet. Unlike the periods of modernism and the neoavantguardia/post-modernism, which we explored in the New York and London workshops, the contemporary period is so close to us that it disappears into a thousand fragments, rather like Antonioni’s hyper-enlarged pictures of the crime scene in Blow up. It is fluid and only partially and temporarily canonised. While a great deal has been written in media studies, sociology and so on about the changes wrought by the Internet, very little work is done specifically on the cultural shift within Italy.
We spent some time discussing the possible metaphors which might be used to approach interdisciplinarity. We looked particularly at relevant theoretical work: from Umberto Eco’s Opera aperta to Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the rhizome (developed in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project) which allows for proliferation, the multiple, and the non-hierarchical; from the writings of Derrida, Nancy, Foucault, Maurice Blanchot, to the new understandings of subjectivity, identity, and freedom expressed in so-called post-humanist thought (Katherine Hayles (Writing and Machines), Donna Haraway (A Cyborg Manifesto), Rosi Braidotti (the nomadic subject). There was also discussion of the importance of the “seconda oralità” in the Internet age, and the possible outcomes of this. There was some discussion too of the works bringing together literature and technology by George Landow and Katherine Hayles, and mentions of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alvin I. Goldman and Renato Barile, alongside arte povera and arte concettuale. Conversation turned inevitably to Wu Ming, and especially to an example of a piece of graffiti by Blu on a wall of an occupied building, the Xm24 in Bologna, which Wu Ming commented on and of which they told the story story http://radio.rcdc.it/archives/occupymordor-wu-ming-racconta-blu-116698/ . In it Tolkien’s narrative becomes part of Blu’s political graffiti, and it then narrated by Wu Ming; the story migrates and changes through different mediums. The discussion therefore threw up a variety of possible metaphors and practices.
Power and the surveillance of borders was then discussed. Who polices the huge, and ever growing number of new genres and virtual artistic de-formations? We discussed how in the literary world it is editors who police text, but the Internet is of course bypassing this by publishing material directly on line. The ideology of participation is clearly important here, and needs more research to be done on it.While it’s clear that old forms of power and authority are being removed or shifted, no one in our group had a definitive answer for where new forms of power were collecting. There were some possible directions indicated: new global powers (including new global languages like English), hackers, the continuing social power of the Premio Strega, blogs creating an on-line territoriality competing with the off-line one and especially the powerful personalities of some of these bloggers.
Emanuela Piga thought that it would be interesting to contrast the reactions to texts on the web to reactions within the institutions – looking at blogs competing with off-line work.
We agreed that a collective bibliography would be a good next step.
This group still lacks people working on contemporary design and on music and we should endeavour to get representatives from these fields involved in the project.
Advertising campaign for the 31st edition of the Oporto International Film Festival, Fantasporto 2011, realised by DraftFCB (http://www.draftfcb.com/) in Jornal de Notícias, 24 February 2011. http://reface.me/humor/bloody-like-button/
