time machine // database // travel guide
In continuation of the article by Erik Davis I decided to post one of the most popular Romanian TV shows that aired just after the 1989 Revolution and left an indelible impression of tentacled mafiosi.
La Piovra – imdb
Roma piovra le monde (anti-Rome anti-Vatican centralism?)
contemporary Italian mapping of political connections
and again an Italian anti-German anti-Habsburg Empire propaganda poster from 1915
time-space coordinates: present day Italy. The sweltering summer heat beats down on a sterile residential estate in the suburbs of Rome. Many a family lives here that no longer belongs anywhere.
A dark fairytale set in a southern suburb of Rome, where a small community of families live with their adolescent children. (Cineuropa)
Directors & Writers: Fratelli D’Innocenzo
Sit back, relax and drip drop out! Dig into this wonderfully magick link via Erik Davis.
Towards a science of psychedelic aesthetic (essay originally published in Psychedelic Press, no. XXV (2018): 49–59.)
About:
The Psychedelic Video Museum is the world’s first museum of psychedelic art and video. It is the fruit of a decade long effort which began in April 2010, and the foundation of the Daily Psychedelic Video, a group blog that’s been serving the internet it’s daily menu of selectively curated psychedelic videos from across the web.
The videos on this website were carefully selected from within the Daily Psychedelic Video collections of more than 4,000 videos that were posted on the website between April 2010 and April 2020. Together, they constitute the first ever attempt to showcase the variety and creativity of psychedelic video artists from across the globe, since early 20th century and to this day.
You can roam our virtual exhibition halls choosing to advance chronologically, from early 20th century psychedelia to this day, or by region, by exploring global hotspots of psychedelic creativity such as Germany, France, China, Japan and Israel. Alternatively, you can also explore psychedelic videos of different themes, styles and moods: feelgood psychedelia, contemplative psychedelia, marine psychedelia, poppy psychedelia or hip-hop psychedelia.
Whichever way you decide to move through these collections, be sure to do so in an explorative psychedelic frame of mind. These videos are a mindstate-dependent form of art. They don’t have to be viewed under the influence to be enjoyed, but they dramatically benefit from a relaxed, fanciful, contemplative gaze which allows the shapes and colors on the screen to resonate in our minds and bodies.
Some examples
Everyday Objects In Macro – Macro Room
A mind-bending video shows the reality of everyday object in extreme close-up.
timespace coordinates: 1899, alternate Victorian Age world
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a 2003 dieselpunk superhero film loosely based on the first volume of the comic book series of the same name by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, directed by Stephen Norrington. It was the final live-action acting role for Connery before his retirement in 2006 and death in 2020.
As with the comic book source material, the film features prominent pastiche and crossover themes set in the late 19th century. It features an assortment of fictional literary characters appropriate to the period who act as Victorian era superheroes. (wiki)
Malta, Siracuse, Messina, Naples,
Porto Ercole. 18th July 1610.
Four years on the run,
so many labels on the luggage…
and hardly a friendly face, always on the
move, running under the poisonous blue sea
running under the July sun.
Adrift…
Caravaggio is a 1986 British historical drama film directed by Derek Jarman. The film is a fictionalised re-telling of the life of Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. It is the film debut of Tilda Swinton and Sean Bean.
In keeping with Caravaggio’s use of contemporary dress for his Biblical figures, Jarman intentionally includes several anachronisms in the film that do not fit with Caravaggio’s life in the 16th century. In one scene, Caravaggio is in a bar lit with electric lights. Another character is seen using an electronic calculator. Car horns are heard honking outside Caravaggio’s studio etc. (wiki)
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
Nirvana is a 1997 Italian cyberpunk science fiction film directed by Gabriele Salvatores. The film stars Christopher Lambert, Diego Abatantuono, Sergio Rubini, and Stefania Rocca. (wiki)
The movie and the in-movie game are named after the Nirvana, a religious and philosophical concept used in religions of India (Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.) to describe the peace of mind, body and soul one reaches after all desires are extinguished. Many believe that this is accomplished through reincarnations, where every time you “come back” you get slightly more world-weary and closer to the Nirvana. This has some similarities to what happens to Solo in his game.
The blue woman with many hands, an image that features throughout the movie (and is supposedly the cover art for the game) is Kali, the Hindu goddess of power, time, change, destruction and death. (imdb)
TimeSpace Warps 