Since last January, 13 artists in Rome, Milan and Naples, have been working with students in 12 schools to develop digital art projects for the BNL Media Art Festival, which will be held in Rome on April 13-17. The works will be exhibited at the Rome MAXXI and the best will be recognized together with the winning artist of the international call that attracted nearly 1000 participants from around the world.
Two further labs have been held at the Phyrtual Innovation Gym: an informational one for students and one to explore new jobs in art for young men and women look for employment.
In Schools
#EMOTIONVIDEOMOMENT (live performance)
Giacomo Lion – Istituto Comprensivo Parco della Vittoria
Students will perform a real-time live performance to reflect the concepts of verbal/non-verbal communication, privacy, and the reaction/relation with the observer and the Butterfly Effect. The audience will be able to interact in real-time thanks to a tablet webcam. The students will wear self-constructed totem-mask to protect their privacy and allow them to freely express themselves.
TOTEM (interactive installation)
Giacomo Lion – Liceo Artistico Sant’Orsola
Our strengths and weaknesses are represented figuratively and then assembled into an “evocative totem” following a series of stages from the concept to the product. Each “artist” will conceive a single piece of the totem and develop it via rapid prototyping. The final result is an interactive performance: the audience will interact, modify and amplify the totem via a touchscreen and 3D printer.
WORLD WIDE WITHOUT (video art)
Walter Paradiso – Liceo Classico Virgilio – Rome
Students experiment with the manual dimension of an artist’s work, innovating via electronics to create a video with both digital and analogic techniques. The students will measure today through web illusions and social networks to forge a new meaning. An old typewriter provides the rhythm, as we are drawn through imaginary universes of the future.
KNOW HOW (live sound performance)
Paolo Gatti e Francesco Bianco – IIS Sandro Pertini – Rome
As the world changes and technology grows increasingly important, surely, music, the most beloved art form of the young, will have to change, too. The students have organised a small digital orchestra and discover creativity through the production of original musical gestures. The recordings of the student performance will produce a new interactive sound installation.
STOP MOTION (video art)
Eva Tennina & Rayn Spring Dooley – Liceo Classico T. Mamiani – Rome
Students use their technological devices to create a short stop-motion movie. Working alone or in groups with drawings or collages, the students will produce a video reproducing “movements of reality” in movement.
PERFOR(M)ING THE DAILY 1 (video art)
Dehors/Audela – Liceo Righi
To give shape to relations, the students will develop brief performances in which they transform emotions into actions. The central issue of the final product, a video, is the relationship with space, starting with daily activities. Students will experiment with new points of view in space, time, action, society and interpersonal dynamics.
PERFOR(M)ING THE DAILY 2 (video art)
Dehors/Audela – IIS C. Cattaneo – Rome
To give shape to relations, the students will develop brief performances in which they transform emotions into actions. The central issue of the final product, a video, is the relationship with space. Students will experiment with new points of view that will help them understand the space around them through a ludic and ironic approach, as well as great care in the production of the final video.
STILL LIFE WITH A BALLOON (installation)
Leonardo Zaccone – IC Largo Cocconi
The lab, inspired by a poem with the same title by Wisława Szymborska and Zbigniew Rybczynski’s “Tango” video, is one of the first examples of digital art. Students will photograph objects and record everyday sounds and create a video loop that will be played on an old TV set with a balloon. The objects will lie around the installation as in a real still life.
SOUND ENVIRONMENT (interactive sound art installation)
Roberto Fega – IIS Via di Sant’Agnese 44
The work is based on a large, plaster face, over a meter wide, made with natural conducting material (copper, water, iron, etc.). Spectators, touching one of these elements, will produce a sound, animating the work with sound and thereby bringing the analogic and digital worlds together.
MURMUR – LC LIBRANS (sound art installation)
Simone Pappalardo – Istituto Tullio Levi Civita
The central elements of the installation are materials that are commonly found in schools: old chairs covered in graffiti. Intertwined together with pipes, the structure ends as an old gramophone tube. Each pipe/chair is a voice in a chorus. The students work on the sound content of the opera, drawing inspiration from the graffiti on the school walls. The installation is completed by an artificial intelligence algorithm.
ESTRANGEMENT (video art)
Marco Mendeni – IIS Marconi – Milano
Videogames have profoundly influenced our collective imagination and even modified our concept of ourselves. Students experiment with digital and analogic techniques to learn how to “play with media” through a collective project on “simulation culture.” The workshop will help the students to acquire a greater understanding of the power of media.
COMPUTER MESSAGGE (video art)
Piero Chiariello – LSS Mazzini, Napoli
This is the first experience in the development of a shared art work, both for the students and the artist. Working together in front of a video camera to produce a video helps the students to express their emotions, naturally and efficiently. The final product will be an emotional message, a telepathic message for the audience, as suggested by the project title.
At the Phyrtual Innovation Gym
MEDIA ART LAB
Valentino Catricalà / Fiammetta Castagnini
What’s the relationship between art and technology? How does one become creative? The lab will guide students to the discovery of digital art and the creative use of technology through practical exercises with a range of different multimedia materials. The presentation of different works, even hard to come by, will allow the students to learn about techniques and technology and experiment with a new way of being “spectators.”
VIRTUAL IMMERSIVE ENVIRONMENT
Lino Strangis
In this lab conceived by the artist, students worked in a 15th century workshop. Each student had a specific role in experimenting new applications of immersive technology to mould artistic experience with the desires of the audience and market demand.
The work by this unusual team is a first in Italy. In fact, the artistic experience has been transformed into a videogame, a virtual world in which the spectator can move about freely in an environment full of symbols and structures. Moreover, the work can also be experience through an Oculus Rift headset to immerge the spectator into a multi-sensory virtual reality experience.
This new perspective, an original vantage point on the art of a changing world and technological innovation, is what enticed BNL – Group BNP Paribas, the title sponsor of the BNL Media Art Festival, which created a space for young men and women around the work of the artist.