http://neoludica.blogspot.com/ http://www.skira.net/dettaglio.php?isbn=8857211633 http://www.gabriellaparisi.it/ Art is technology, as much as the human being.
Since the beginning, game has been the enactment of its own destinies (plural).
A glowing red wire links the choppers made by homo habilis to the mouse of our pc,
fossil handprints to touch-screens, with the dream of a future breach of any divisor screen.
It is a discourse that starts as abruptly as a flash ("αστραπτω," "astrapto," "lightning,"
abstract thought) and 75,000 years ago was translated into a series of lozenges on red ochre,
in Blombos. Later on, once the agricultural civilization was established, lozenges became
bricks and artfully built a new artificial reality made of those angles, squares and rectangles
of which we still love surrounding ourselves with.
There is no square without brick.
There is no way of defining reality without playing the game (dice or chess?).
There is no technology that does not answer art's questioning.
Mythology gives eyes to statues, religion sits choirs in the theater, the story of a squared
chunk of wood gives birth to the picture (preferably rectangular). Paper reed rolls unfold and
become codex, palimpsest, illuminated book, printed book. The square-angles door is now
wide open, and from the darkroom to photograph, movies and the computer screen it is a
short path.
For every step a new level: reality augmented by man's articulate intervention, by the
indissoluble osmosis between science, technique and art which is culture. Every time the same
search for what we think we are, our representation of what we think of as natural or substantial:
are we that chunk of wood? That rock? That mixture of color, silver nitrate, celluloid,
bits?
We are multi-level. Artists, philosophers and scientists have always known it.
We surf the Internet acknowledging the existence of a platonic second navigation, of
an Aristotelic level jump from potentiality to actuality, to the different angelic hierarchies or
Dante's Infernal circles, stricken both by Bruno's heroic frenzy and Leibniz's binary arithmetic.
We tear up the veils of Maya with deep pleasure and no shame: we leave the same traces as
Derrida. We are made of the same substance as a Flemish oil, and of the same powerful inconsistency
as a film by Kulešov. Behind the ideal city of the Renaissance we see Daguerre's
Paris appear into light, and the 1889 World's Fair, with the Eiffel Tower, photographed from
bird's-eye view on Google Earth. Let's play SimCity. We are also video-ludic, or rather NEO-LUDIC, because art comes into play.
For today the world is a video game, a total bet on our future, in which video game as
a medium, knowingly sprung from its own fiction, may finally get out of the mirror, like Alice,
in order to express its thought on a society that has never been so stratified and complex.
The two realities -- which sum up to form one augmented reality -- are very much alike and
cannot do without one another.
Neoludica constitutes the first great attempt to define a coherent and strongly characterized
perspective on this new, fundamental technological challenge art has embarked on.
Artists, creators, developers and players are then called upon to step up in class, and
to accept a confrontation that will be aesthetic as well as ethic, and therefore will bring up
more daydreams.
Today more than ever we are moved by Lewis Mumford's words from his 1934 essay
Technics and Civilization: "Thanks to machines, we now have a chance to understand a world
we contributed to create."
DEBORA FERRARI, LUCA TRAINI
Mai come oggi risuona con forza quanto Lewis Mumford scriveva nel ‘34 nel suo “Tecnica e cultura”: “Attraverso la macchina abbiamo ora la possibilità di comprendere un mondo che abbiamo contribuito a creare”.
Debora Ferrari, Luca Traini
Melnick42 7 months ago
NEOLUDICA si presenta come il primo grande tentativo di dare una definizione, meglio, un orizzonte unitario e identitario a questa nuova fondamentale sfida tecnologica dell’arte.
Artisti, creatori, sviluppatori e giocatori sono chiamati a un nuovo salto di qualità, a un confronto che vuole essere tanto estetico quanto etico e quindi propositivo di nuovi sogni ad occhi aperti.
Melnick42 7 months ago
Perché oggi il mondo è un videogioco, una scommessa sul futuro a 360°, dove il nuovo medium videoludico, nato cosciente della sua finzione, può finalmente uscire dallo specchio come Alice e dire la sua nei confronti di una società umana quanto mai stratificata e complessa. Le due realtà – che sommate fanno una sola realtà aumentata – si somigliano e non possono fare a meno l’una dell’altra.
Melnick42 7 months ago
Noi siamo fatti della stessa sostanza di un quadro fiammingo (olio), dell’inconsistenza prepotente di un film di Kulešov. Dietro la città ideale del Rinascimento vediamo prendere luce la Parigi di Daguerre, l’Esposizione Universale del 1889 con la Torre Eiffel, ripresa a volo d’aquila da Google Earth. Giochiamo a SimCity.
Siamo anche videoludici, anzi, NEOLUDICI perché l’arte è in gioco.
Melnick42 7 months ago
Navighiamo su Internet coscienti di una seconda navigazione platonica, di un salto di livello aristotelico dalla potenza all’atto, ai diversi livelli delle gerarchie celesti o dell’inferno dantesco, preda allo stesso tempo dell’eroico furore di Bruno e dei calcoli binari di Leibniz. I veli di Maia li strappiamo con piacere, senza nasconderci: lasciamo le stesse tracce di Derrida.
Melnick42 7 months ago
Ad ogni passaggio, un cambio di livello: una realtà aumentata dalla complessità dell’intervento umano, da quell’osmosi inscindibile di scienza, tecnica e arte che è la cultura. Ogni volta la stessa ricerca di quanto ci sembra di essere, la nostra rappresentazione di quanto ci sembra naturale o sostanziale: siamo quel pezzo di legno? Quella pietra? Quell’impasto di colore, sali d’argento, celluloide, bit?
Siamo multilevel: questo artisti, filosofi e scienziati l’hanno sempre saputo.
Melnick42 7 months ago