Title: Networking. The Net as Artwork
Year of publication: 2008
https://networkingart.eu/2009/09/networking-the-net-as-artwork/
Language: English | Pages: 336. Download (PDF, 3.10 MB).
Language: Italian | Pages: 317. Download (PDF, 3.9 MB)
Buy the book: www.bod.com
I came upon this book via a post by Edmund Berger – Turning On the Enternal Network. A hyperlink joy (open tab collapse) – pushing towards further art historical anarcheologies of networks and cyberculture lost continents, taking the cue from “Autodidact’s Guide to Accelerationism”, a guide recently compiled by Aly that manages to circumvent the usual Daddy-Os.
There has never been a better moment to wade trough and unleash the occult strains of tightly woven cyberfeminisms that pulses amongst Australian VNS Matrix manifesto towards the Xenofeminist Laboria Cubonics manifesto translated in Romanian by Alina Popa. Berger also points to another important strain: the Italian netwokerist connection. This chunk of countercultural non- pre- proto- cyber prehistory in Italy gets its wider historical context in a book by Tatiana Bazzichelli linked above. Tatiana excellent book comes close to what Ernst Bloch’s Aristotelian Left materialism traced in the 50s in regards to the anticipations and proclivities of a restless materialism in the Islamic Middle Ages. Antecedents, traces (Spuren – as in E Bloch pointed by a friend) crumbs left and picked up by the new artist-as matrix networker, historical precedents that link mail-art, autonomist Marxism and cyberpunk in Italia as forged within artistic practices (FLUXUS), pirate radio enclaves, feats of pranksterism, incipient hacktivism and ludic anonymization via active depersonalization. The Italian connection also comes up recently in the I WANT TO BELIEVE book by A. M. Gittlitz and the later-day Italian scion of the Posadist UFO communist heresy: the MIR Men in Red radical ufological unit (a big highlight for me in these quarantined 2020s). NIRVANA the italo-cyberpunk 1997 cinematic classic also nicely dovetails with this prehistory of the network.
To this vibrating & cryptic history of the cyber I would like to add another (unrelated) but important lead (I will repeat this and continue to do so), this time in the realm of affective networking – the inescapable net- weirding we are all living trough, a sort of survivalist journal by Steven Shaviro’s from 2003 CONNECTED: Or What It Means to Live in the Networked Society that makes Sci-fi the eminent stalker leading us towards the outer regions of our Zone of distraction.
From the abstract of Tatiana Bazzichelli’s book:
Networking means to create nets of relations, where the publisher and the reader, the artist and the audience, act on the same level. The book is a first tentative reconstruction of the history of artistic networking in Italy, through an analysis of media and art projects which during the past twenty years have given way to a creative, shared and aware use of technologies, from video to computers, contributing to the creation of Italian hacker communities.
The Italian network proposes a form of critical information, disseminated through independent and collective projects where the idea of freedom of expression is a central theme. In Italy, thanks to the alternative use of Internet, during the past twenty years a vast national network of people who share political, cultural and artistic views has been formed.
The book describes the evolution of the Italian hacktivism and net culture from the 1980s till today. It builds a reflection on the new role of the artist and author who becomes a networker, operating in collective nets, reconnecting to Neoavant-garde practices of the 1960s (first and foremost Fluxus), but also mail art, Neoism and Luther Blissett. A path which began in BBSes, alternative web platforms spread in Italy through the 1980s even before the Internet even existed, and then moved on to Hackmeetings, to Telestreet and networking art by different artists 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.
More books by Tatiana Bazzichelli
TimeSpace Warps 