Condivisione di buoni prodotti della Rete.
Contributed by Mauro Magnani
Le nuove tribù promuovono nuove infrastrutture di accesso alla Rete. L'innovazione la promuovono i Cittadini; siamo noi quelli che stiamo aspettando.
Art Made at the Speed of the Internet: Don’t Say ‘Geek’; Say ‘Collaborator’
When Robert Rauschenberg and a buttoned-down Bell Labs engineer named Billy Kluver began thinking, in the mid-1960s, about ways that people from the world of technology could help artists make art, Mr. Kluver surveyed the mighty gulf between the two groups and almost thought better of the idea. “I was scared,” he said once in an interview. “The amazing thing was that it’s possible for artists and scientists to talk together at all.”
Nearly half a century after that influential experiment, one in the same spirit, though crazily compressed into a single day, was taking place on Friday in a chilly loft office on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. An artist and a technical whiz sat together at a long table, their faces made silvery by the glow from their laptops — the only tools they had brought, besides their digital cameras. Anyone unfamiliar with the pair — Evan Roth, a kind of Web-centric graffiti artist, and Matt Mullenweg, a creator of the popular blogging platform WordPress — would have had to listen a long time to figure out which one came from which world. They free-associated at Web speed, their conversation sprinkled with things like hex values, detection algorithms and executable code.
“Let’s try to stay away from the Web-nerdy stuff,” Mr. Mullenweg, 26, warned, as Mr. Roth, 32, trolling for help on Twitter, was compiling video clips for the work of art they had conceived that morning.
The two were part of Seven on Seven, a project conceived by Rhizome, the new-media art organization in New York, to match seven artists with seven “technologists,” a Google engineer and an early Facebook developer among them. The pairs were given a reality-show-era deadline of 24 hours in which to sit together in rooms across Manhattan and come up with creations to present on Saturday to an audience at the New Museum, where Rhizome is based.
Whether the brainchildren of these collaborations ended up feeling more like apps or like art was up to the teams, and the distinction didn’t seem to matter to artists nearly as much as it might have even 14 years ago, when Rhizome was founded to explore the emerging field of Web-based art, said Lauren Cornell, the organization’s executive director.
But Ms. Cornell, who created the team-up project along with some of her tech-world board members and supporters, added that even now, after decades of increasing overlap between art and technology, the idea remained daunting to many of the artists and Web people she approached. “This was something we went into with the knowledge that it was an experiment and that it could end up being a failure,” she said. “A lot of people I called to see if they were interested, people I know — friends of mine — didn’t even get back to me.”
More than 150 people turned out for the New Museum presentation, some paying as much as $350 for tickets. With a couple of exceptions what they saw were not objects but ideas — some funny and entertaining, some deadly serious — situated at the fertile nexus where social networking and the Web’s data-gathering power is providing artists and scientists with immense piles of raw material about society and psychology.
Joshua Schachter, a software engineer at Google, and Monica Narula, an artist from New Delhi, came up with a rough plan to convert private guilt into charitable giving, allowing Internet users collectively to assign dollar values to various misdeeds so that guilt might be assuaged through donations. (On Friday the team paid Web users small amounts to help come up with categories of misbehavior and attendant fines. They arrived at $47 for forgetting one’s mother’s birthday, for example, and $20 for “being mad at my spouse because of a dream.”)
The artist Ryan Trecartin and David Karp, a creator of the short-form blogging platform Tumblr, came up with a streaming video site that feels like plugging YouTube directly into the cerebral cortex. The artist Kristin Lucas and Andrew Kortina, who builds social Web applications, proposed a way for people to exchange identities — in essence, to take a break from themselves — via Twitter. Ayah Bdeir, an engineer and designer, and Tauba Auerbach, her artist collaborator, made a randomly moving moiré-pattern sculpture designed to freeze when a viewer enters the room, leaving its actions when unwatched a mystery.
(Fonte: New York Times)