Report of the Second Interdisciplinary Italy Postgraduate Summer School

The second Interdisciplinary Italy Postgraduate Summer School, called The Digital Turn: When, Why, and How to Embrace It, took place online on 1, 2, and 3 July 2021. While we really missed the in-person discussions and social events of the summer school, the remote format also had benefits, enabling participants from all over the world (Italy, Ireland, UK, United States, Brazil) to join in. The diverse cohort of graduate students and early career researchers that the event attracted was matched by the range of speakers and convenors who guided us in exploring the different aspects of digital arts and culture.

The first day began with the welcome remarks of the Interdisciplinary Italy team, followed by an introductory workshop by the two organisers, Dr Clodagh Brook and Dr Eleonora Lima, on the long history of the involvement of arts and humanities with digital culture: from the mid-1950s to the present. This initial historical survey aimed to encourage participants to consider how artists see digital technologies differently as broader cultural changes take place, and how this constant shift can be addressed in our research.

The second workshop, which concluded the first day, was dedicated to digital art and digital justice. It was led by Dr Tatiana Bazzichelli, the artistic director of Disruption Network Lab, a Berlin-based non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting participatory, interdisciplinary, international events that focus on human rights and technology, freedom of speech, exposing systems of power and injustice within network culture. Bazzichelli invited the participants to consider many pressing issues arising from digital technologies – the role of whistle-blowers for democracy, the practice of hacktivism, the military use of drones, racial and gender bias in AI systems – and how the arts can disrupt and oppose oppressive and discriminatory practices.

The second day began with a more hands-on workshop led by Eleonora Lima, during which participants shared their personal experiences and discussed opportunities and difficulties in working with Digital Humanities, in terms of career trajectory, grant applications, positioning within the academic field, time-management, and so on. To kick off the conversation, Lima presented her ongoing project for a monograph on Italian literature and computer culture, as well as her constantly developing website Narrating Computing, which hosts her work with Social Network Analysis.

It was then time for participants to meet the first of the two distinguished keynote speakers, Professor Henry Jenkins, and to discuss with him some of the key concepts and ideas he then presented in his online public lecture, titled Convergence Culture in the Age of Covid-19: A Fever Dream (available here). Prof Jenkins’s keynote speech first explored how the concept of “convergence culture,” which he famously theorised in in his 2006 pivotal book (featuring a preface by Wu Ming in its Italian translation), needed to be updated in light of the collective and personal experiences with digital technologies during the imposed world-wide lockdown. Secondly, he considered what long-term trends in media, entertainment, and popular culture the pandemic may have set in motion.

The third and final day started off with a workshop led by graphic and animation artist Leonardo Sangiorgi, founding member of Studio Azzurro, a collective engaged in art research related to new technology since 1982. The workshop was designed to offer the participants the opportunity to consider digital art from a creative rather than purely academic perspective. Sangiorgi, in conversation with Dr Emanuela Patti, retraced Studio Azzurro’s early involvement with digital technologies by showing rare footage of their installations, and shared the collective’s most recent projects, such as the exhibition for Federico Fellini’s centennial and the newly opened Museo Fellini in Rimini.

The Summer School concluded with a public lecture by Professor Massimo Riva, another long-standing contributor of the Interdisciplinary Italy project, like Studio Azzurro. First, though, Prof Riva met the participants for a private discussion, during which he shared some remarks on the state of Digital Humanities in the Italian Studies. In his keynote address (available here), titled Simulating the Past, from Analog to Digital (and vice versa), Professor Riva discussed his latest project, an upcoming digital monograph dedicated to “virtual travel” in the pre-digital age (18-19th centuries), such as the cosmorama, the magic lantern, the moving panorama, and the stereoscope, which he considered to be the ancestors of present-day Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Extended Reality (XR) experiences.

The Summer School thus concluded by coming full circle: having opened with a workshop considering the long history of digital culture, it closed with a lecture reflecting on the prehistory of virtual reality. The variety of periods, issues, and topics proposed was not  intended to suggest a flattening approach, equating different technologies and practices under the broad label of “digital.” The intent was rather to problematise it by considering the complexity of a concept which is constantly subjected to reinterpretations as a result of  historical contexts, affiliated fields, political positioning, and personal sensibility. We hope we succeeded in our attempt.

We look forward to our next Summer School in 2022. Details will be available on this website shortly.