Media Art. Towards a New Definition of Arts in the Age of Technology

Review of: Media Art. Towards a New Definition of Arts in the Age of Technology (Rome: Fondazione Mondo Digitale, 2015)

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?