Presentation @ Transmediale

Presentation of the book: Networking | The Net as an Artwork @ Transmediale :: Sunday 4/2, 16:00 :: Salon, Akademie der Kuenste, Berlin, D :: With Tatiana Bazzichelli [it/de], Jaromil [it/nl], Gaia Novati [it/de]; moderated by Diana McCarty [de].

Networking | The Net as an Artwork :: Written by Tatiana Bazzichelli, with the preface of Derrick De Kerckhove and the epilogue of the Italian videoartist Simonetta Fadda. The book represents a first tentative to write a comprehensive history of both analog and digital subcultural networked art in Italy, through an analysis of the realities which during the past twenty years have given way to a creative, shared and aware use of technologies - such as Mail Art, Neoism, the Luther Blissett project, BBS culture, Telestreets, and many other subcultural movements and networks.
The Italian network proposes a form of critical information, diffused through independent and collective projects. Active in underground environments, they use diverse media (computers, video, television, radio and magazines) and deal with technological experimentation, or hacktivism, depending on the terminology used in Italy, where the political component is a central theme.

The book describes how in Italian subculture there was never a divide between artistic and political activism, covering the evolution of the Italian net culture from the Eighties till today. The book shelds light onto the affinity of 1980s Mail Art manifesto to post-1990s Internet culture, up to its terminology of artists as “network operators” and art as a “network-web”, the political redefinition of the term “Cyberpunk” in early 1990s in Italy, the mutation of Cyberfeminism into Netporn activism, and presents the works of many artists and activists, such as 0100101110101101.ORG, [epidemiC], Jaromil, Giacomo Verde, Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici, Correnti Magnetiche, Candida TV, Tommaso Tozzi, Federico Bucalossi, Massimo Contrasto, Mariano Equizzi, Pigreca, Molleindustria, Guerriglia Marketing, Sexyshock, Phag Off and many others.

Networking | The Net as an Artwork, is printed on paper (Costa & Nolan publisher, Milan, Novembrer 2006, pag. 336), but it is also available online under: http://www.networkingart.eu (Creative Commons License) ENG: http://www.networkingart.eu/download_eng.html

Diana McCarty [de] lives and works in Berlin. She is a co-founder of bootlab and co-initiated the open source radio project, reboot.fm. She is an active member of the Free Cultural Radio Network, Radia.FM. Together with Valie Djordjevic, Kathy Rae Huffman and Ushi Reiter, she runs the Faces mailing list for women in media. As part of the International Women’s University server development team, she worked with Seda Gürses, Barbara Schelkle, Prof. Heidi Schelhowe, and Heiki Pisch - and also worked to develop feminist pedagogical approaches to computing. In the mid-nineties, McCarty co-founded the Nettime Mailing list and as part of the Media Research Foundation, she co-organized the MetaForum Conference Series in Budapest. Her main interests are exploiting social and technological systems for cultural use; i.e. piracy and open source software development for real life. www.bootlab.org www.mrf.hu

Tatiana Bazzichelli a.k.a. T_Bazz [it/de] (Rome, 1974), is a Communication Sociologist and an expert in Media Art, Hacktivism and Net Culture. She gave a dissertation on Italian interactive digital art at the University la Sapienza in Rome (1999). Towards the end of the 1990’s she organized events and conventions, such as Cum2Cut (Berlin, 2006), Hack.it.art (Berlin 2005), Art on the Net in Italy (Berlin 2005), MediaDemocracy and Telestreet (Munich, 2004), AHA (Rome, 2002), Hacker Art Lab (Perugia, 2000). She is the founder of Activism-Hacking-Artivism, a networking project started in 2001 in Rome and based in Berlin since 2003. She manages the aha@ecn.org mailing list regarding artistic activism and writes of art, media and new creative trends for many Italian magazines.

Jaromil [it/nl] is a hacker and author of various free software applications (GNU/Linux/BSD), known as an artist for his performances and creations, as well as activist for his social concerns and radical way of life. Online since 1994, he co-founded the italian non-profit association Metro Olografix for the diffusion of telematic cultures. Later he gave birth to the dyne.org foundation: creating software for the freedom of expression, to let people communicate free from capitalist speculations and expensive hardware. www.rastasoft.org www.dyne.org

Gaia Novati [it/de] is involved since many years in the Italian queer countercultural movement. She has worked with radio and visual media projects. Co-founder of Sexyshock, communication laboratory on gender theme and first sex-shop managed by women in Italy, she is interested since long in independent pornography. She is one of the organizers of Cum2Cut, Indie-Porn-Short-Movies Festival in Berlin, where she lives since 2006.