Carmen is the new short film written and directed by Gabriella Parisi, the story is loosely based on the novel by Prosper Mérimée published in 1845 from which is also ispired the unforgettable and acclaimed opera by Prosper Mérimée.
The original soundtrack is composed by Alessandro Porcella, musician, film composer and music producer, who is been nominated for numerous international awards. In the past, he has worked together with the artist for the soundtrack of Fly on the blue side and Over Game, this last exhibited at the 54th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, in 2011.
The character of Carmen, according to Gabriella Parisi, embodies the prototype of an independent female personality full of passion which is inherently loyal only to the idea of love and freedom, not to her men and to the social rules.
In addition, Carmen is a character so different from those sketched by Ibsen with his Nora, in A Doll’s House and Alexandre Dumas fils, in La Dame aux Camélias (literally The Lady of the Camellias, commonly known in English as Camille) with Marguerite , much to highlight all the signs of a contemporary female stance against the dictates imposed by the “male-dominated” thought which reduces love at mere possession, leaving anything margin of freedom to woman.
The tragic conclusion of Carmen’s life is the swan song of a destiny from which couldn’t escape but at the same time is an exaltation of the supreme value of freedom to which Carmen doesn’t want to give up not even in front of the specter of death, sacrificing her own life.
Carmen by Gabriella Parisi doesn’t aspire to be faithful to novella of Mérimée but to idea of expression’s freedom, a freedom that is not wound on a single meaning but which dissects, in a frantic search of truth about the meaning of reality, multiple interpretations and images, amplifying the point of view. In addition, the art film is steeped in the poetic spirit of Rimbaud‘s Illuminations and, in some respects, is intimately interconnected to his research and vision.
The diegetic rhythm of Carmen runs on the tracks of metafiction, with images’s accelerations of postmodern matrix and contemplative brakings aimed at the “deconstruction” of the sense, reflecting on the same reflection, with a restitution of a highly imaginative storytelling, totally renewed and in momentum cathartic, aiming to plunge into the deepest meanderings of thoughts which animates the acts of Carmen. Ultimately, Carmen suggests “potential finals” that open the scenario on a reality in progress which gets rid of its end and that is modeled, however, with the viewer’s sensitivity and conceptually referring to ontological freedom which tries a deeper meaning in life and to be reunited with the transcendent dimension.
Portraits confront us on the most fundamental level of the self. Self-portraits, even more so.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the current obsession with social media self-portraits via the selfie. Is this a trend of collective narcissicism peaking in our increasingly mediated, digitized and posted lives? Or, is the selfie merely the result of the awesome technology literally in the palm of any smartphone wielding global citizen? Through visual and digital anthropology, aesthetic and media theory, citing art and photographic history, I will explore the digital aura and its significance in culture, art and media.
“Selfie” was a top 10 buzz word in American culture by 2012, though in use before then. “Gaze” has been in use much longer.
The “Renaissance Gaze Shift” is a concept used to describe the evolution from profile to a direct gaze in Renaissance portraiture, paralleled by a socio-economic shift in European…
Parla con Me: design e la comunicazione tra le persone e gli oggetti Paola Antonelli
“(…) E lo stesso con il” segno @ “che abbiamo acquisito alcuni anni fa. Fu il primo esempio di un acquisto di qualcosa che è di dominio pubblico. E quello che dico alla gente, è quasi come se fosse una farfalla che vola da e abbiamo catturato l’ombra sul muro, e solo stiamo mostrando il shadow.So in un certo senso, stiamo mostrando una manifestazione di qualcosa che è veramente importante e che è parte della nostra identità, ma che nessuno può avere. Ed è troppo lungo da spiegare l’acquisizione, ma se volete andare sul blog MoMA, c’è un lungo post dove spiego perché è una così grande esempio di design. ” Paola Antonelli
Ho apprezzato molto l’intervista con Paola Antonelli di Randall Packer su Talk to Me mostra, uno spettacolo innovativo che ha rivelato il ruolo della comunicazione in arte contemporanea e design.
Questa intervista e il Catalizzatori corso mi hanno fatto pensare molto, innescando off riflessioni sul rapporto tra arte, tecnologia e social network. A mio parere, social network e comunicazione online sono l’esternazione del nostro spirito del tempo. Sono un grande happening e narrazione collettiva.
L’arte non è interessato a costruire i codici sulla stabilità, si sofferma sulla indicibile, a tempo indeterminato, il caos, tipico della condizione di instabilità. Paradossalmente, la stabilità del pensiero deriva dalla instabilità del linguaggio comune, la pubblicità, la musica pop, chat, blog, social network, attraverso i quali emerge in forma simbolica una immagine abbozzata, ma non ancora definito, che esprime lo spirito del tempo.
L’ le parole sono dinamici, metaforico, allegorico e allusivo. Essi racchiudono una simbologia straordinario, secondo Wittgenstein, in ogni parola c’è un simbolismo nascosto che rivela la contraddizione, il non detto, l’indefinito. Dobbiamo mettere al “auscultazione” la nostra attenzione sulle parole perché danno voce a tutti quei rumori che non possono essere catturate da un metodo logico-matematico ordinario, che emerge al di là di tutti quei processi che non sono imbrigliati di un ragionamento logico.
I Mythos, che emerge come un linguaggio di immagine, è il preambolo di quello che sarà perché contiene la verità si è svolto in forma di immagini.
Secondo Platone con la lingua logos e mythos lingua, possiamo dire la stessa cosa: il logos è la parola nel suo formalismo astratto, il mythos è il linguaggio della narrazione. Il logos è il linguaggio del logico e rifiuta il pathos mentre la lingua mythos è caratterizzato dal pathos.
linguaggio della narrazione non è degradata, ma esprime la verità, la “voce fundi” del tempo attraverso le metaphorizations e per la sua capacità di affermare la verità, per due millenni, si è preferito il linguaggio logos. La storia ci permette di capire la nostra vita e lo spirito del nostro tempo attraverso la metaforizzazione degli altri.
Pour Your Body Out by Pippilotti Rist erases the boundary between art and entertainment. The artist captivates the viewer, full of all sorts of provocation media, working on body perception, the unconscious, the size of sensory and emotional experience.
The screen and space are like an infinite and immersive dimension that incorporate the viewer into the projection’s flow until to open his vision. It’s like a big window that opens up on a parallel world made of the same stuff as dreams.
Is it not Pour Your Body Out by Pippilotti Rist a contemporary Panorama?
In 1787 Robert Barker patented The Panorama, the pre-movie 360º painted spectacle.
Catalysts: Artists Creating with Video, Sound, and Time, the MoMA Course by Randall Packer helped me a lot to reflect on our role in social networks and in various media, considering our role more as an experience of collective narration and as a social happening of contemporary and artistic mold.
We’ve become content’s producers and the Nam June Paik’s lesson resonates still alive today: everyone’s a broadcaster. In New York, Nam June Paik with his Porta Pack has experienced shooting outdoors and made the first broadcast run by an artist focused on a chaotic moment in New York: the day of Pope Paul VI visit in NYC. He showed the video the same evening in Greenwich Village, the Cafe Gogo, virtually live. Paik was the first of artists who made a real art event of the video’s report.
My connection with social networks has always been confrontational, perhaps because of need to protect my privacy.
Now I re-evaluated my position on that and I think we must be present at the forefront on the social networks for two simple reasons: to clarify our point of view and to convey the meaning of our thought in the best way possible.
Technology has been of great help to me both as regards the production aspect and both for what concerns the storage and communication of my art. I record my art works with the video camera and than I share them online on Instagram or others social networks, I like to remix my art and to make it transmedial.
I remember that I have always documented everything, even when there was a movie stills photographer where I worked, I liked to shoot everything and have my own point of view.
For years I carried my video camera with me, in my bag, for the need to document what happened around me.
My Panasonic camcorder that I took in 2006, has allowed me to produce and document a lot of works and therefore it is my analogic object of the heart, which I keep as a relic.
I still remember a video that I’ve filmed in 2009, the storyboard that I’ve written was ambiented in the subway in Rome. My video wasn’t a commercial video, however, the Subway Direction had refused permission because it demanded a lot of money to approve it, but I didn’t want to give up the project or to change my storyboard.
I still remember the excitement while filming in Rome Metro. I was aware that if I had been surprised to shoot with my video camera the security men would have seized my videotape and maybe also my video camera ..
It’s been a few years since I shot my short film, but now, turning to the subway I see everyone to film everything, the privacy is dead, but maybe there is a positive side: if anything happens, it’s possible to acquire new trials because today our view is expanded, it’s stereoscopic: we’re all under surveillance but we also can monitor the others.
The video camera is my third eye, with which I record everything: everyday events and those things related to my work. I replaced my Panasonic video camera with an iPhone and a Samsung Tab 3, most technologically advanced.
And I think it’s important to document everything because otherwise a piece of reality would not have existence, it could be the access key that it could return an important point of view to better understand the contemporary reality.
“I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.”
Leonardo da Vinci
I really enjoyed the video interview on the Soundings: A Contemporary Scoreexhibition by Barbara London at MoMA that I’ve seeing at Catalysts Course MoMA. The exhibition shows the connection between the artists and the sound that they create as social, connecting visitors in space.
My vision on the sound design is not the same anymore: after I’ve seeing the Soundings: A Contemporary Score video, reading the Sonic Manifestations lessons of Randall Packer on the visual artists that have played a leading role in the evolution of sound as art, like Luigi Russolo, John Cage, Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman. etc..
I had never experienced, at first hand, with the sounds, considering the musical and sound research purely a territory of the musician’s competence. I’ve changed now my mind about it and I’ve found that the sound design in the art is a wonderful and exciting area!
I love these quotes:
“Musicians will not admit that we are making music; they will say that we are interested in superficial effects, or, at most, are imitating Oriental or primitive music. New and original sounds will be labeled as ‘noise’. But our common answer to every criticism must be to continue working and listening, making music with its materials, sound and rhythm, disregarding the cumbersome, top-heavy structure of musical prohibitions” John Cage
“We don’t see much difference between time and space, we don’t know where one begins and the other stops. (…) People expect listening to be more than listening. And sometimes they speak of inner listening, or the meaning of sound. When I talk about music, it finally comes to peoples minds that I’m talking about sound that doesn’t mean anything. That is not inner, but is just outer. And they say, these people who finally understand that say, you mean it’s just sounds? To mean that for something to just be a sound is to be useless. Whereas I love sounds, just as they are, and I have no need for them to be anything more. I don’t want sound to be psychological. I don’t want a sound to pretend that it’s a bucket, or that it’s a president, or that it’s in love with another sound. I just want it to be a sound. And I’m not so stupid either. There was a german philosopher who is very well known, his name was Emmanuel Kant, and he said there are two things that don’t have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter. Don’t have to mean anything that is, in order to give us deep pleasure. The sound experience which i prefer to all others, is the experience of silence. And this silence, almost anywhere in the world today, is traffic. If you listen to Beethoven, it’s always the same, but if you listen to traffic, it’s always different.” John Cage
I’ve found this amazing sound art project on the web:
This experiment has not only awoken the curiosity of the scientists at CERN, but it has also created a shower of ideas for a bigger piece by Collide@CERN artist Bill Fontana with Subodh Patil and scientists from the CERN community. The experiment with a loudspeaker in the LHC is just the beginning of what Bill Fontana calls “Acoustic Time Travel” which is his ongoing project at CERN.
For this new media review, I decided to find a work by an artist I was completely unfamiliar with. My goal was to walk in fresh and see what happened. I perused the gallery guide. Nothing much ignited my interest until I saw a listing at the Asia Society. A multimedia installation by Indian artist Nalini Malani had just opened. The Asia Society Museum galleries are usually quiet and still. Buddha statues. Temple paintings. Chinese calligraphy. The exhibits, so often presenting objects from the distant past, seem to compel the visitor into a kind of meditative silence. Most of the time you can hear a pin drop. I decided to go.
Upon entering the gallery featuring Malani’s multimedia installation Transgressions, I was immediately immersed in a world of light, floating shadows, poetry recitation and folkloric imagery. Female Hindu deities. An Englishman aiming his rifle. A giant brain. A kidney. A…
“30 Days of Running in the Place” is the multimedia installation of Ahmed Basiouny, a multimedia artist Egyptian that has represented the Egypt at 54. International Art Exhibition in Venice, at Biennale Gardens. I was impressed by 30 Days of Running in the Place for the power of the social and political message that was transmitted.
Before we get to the work’s meaning, it is best to take a step back to remember Ahmed Basiouny.
Ahmed Basiouny was an artist and university lecturer, he has been one of the most significant figures in the new generation of contemporary Egyptians artists. He was been a great pioneer of the New Media Art in Egypt and a symbol of the new “digital generation”, who taking advantage of media spread (social networks, blogs, etc..), he has tried to abolish the authoritarian regime opening the way to democracy.
Ahmed Basiouny is killed in Tahrir Square by snipers and then crushed with a police car during the third day of protests and he became a symbol of the sacrifices endured by the revolutionaries. Basiouny is killed while filming the protests in Tahrir Square with his video camera that is confiscated then by the police near his body. “30 Days of Running in the Place” has been possible to realize it because the artist had documented all things also with a phone and therefore his work is an exceptional document that exceeds the concept of art.
Ahmed Basiony: 30 Days of Running in the Space. Egypt Pavilion at the 54th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2011. Giardini della Biennale, Venice / Italy. Photos by Magdi Mostafa; Copyright the Ahmed Basiony Family
” 30 Days of Running in the Place” is an installation that involves with a great narration creating a strong bond with the historical events of the Egyptian revolution.
The five giant screens in the Egyptian Pavilion have shown raw footage of the revolts on the streets of Cairo: men, women and children that fight for freedom against the regime.
In parallel with the images of the revolution ran on screens even the pictures of a performance which refers to a project that Ahmed Basiouny had exhibited outside the Palace of Arts in Cairo, near to Tahrir Square. For 30 days, the artist was jogging everyday for an hour in a square structure enclosed in transparent plastic sheets. Ahmed Basiouny wore a suit that measured the artist’s number of steps and levels of sweat produced. This data was wirelessly transferred to a large screen, thus altering the displayed grid of colors.
” 30 Days of Running in the Place” is an installation that shakes the foundations of all our smaller residual certainties bringing us back to a central and critical role in the story through the powerful narration returned by the artist.
Copyright the Ahmed Basiony Family
I think that the media, like television, continually remind us of human tragedies and revolutions talking about those ones as statistical data, creating a sort of barrier between our certainties and the rest of the world. This is the other cynical aspect that emerges in our consumer society: the violent and tragic breaking news arrive continually and they’ll be forgotten every day. Andy Warhol gave an idea of the death as denial implemented by our society. Since it has become taboo fetish, Warhol has rehabilitated the advertising image, impoverished of any emotion.
The Ahmed Basiouny’s multimedia art, through the technology, it can be read as a caustic attack on the indifference of the regime and television that reduce the people to simple statistical data, not giving voice to the needs of individual freedom .
In this case, the open source technology has been chosen to denounce an imposed power while the mobile technology, such as the phones, to push as far as possible his desperate cry for freedom and justice, creating a moment of intense reflection and collective narration.
The Times of April 27, 1937 has written with heartless tones and without comments about the Guernica’s tragedy while Picasso with Guernica called for all the intellectuals and the people to stand in defense of the democracy and freedom.
Guernica, 1937 by Pablo Picasso. Copyright Pablo Picasso Org.
“What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes if he’s a painter, ears if he’s a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he’s a poet – or even, if he’s a boxer, only some muscles? Quite the contrary, he is at the same time a political being constantly alert to the horrifying, passionate or pleasing events in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How is it possible to be uninterested in other men and by virtue of what cold nonchalance can you detach yourself from the life that they supply so copiously? No, painting is not made to decorate apartments. It’s an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.” Pablo Picasso
The Picasso’s Guernica, developed a system full of symbolic references to art history and cinema using the filter of artistic transfiguration, which has the same strength of the Greek tragedies .
The Ahmed Basiouny’s body, performance and video images are the message of the revolution, it’s an art so radical that connects art and life. The Ahmed Basiouny’s Swan song which rises to universal loud cry of pain against oppression and abuse. And the death of the artist becomes an event that echoes in his art, which is part of “30 Days of Running in the Place”.
The art becomes so a device supported by reasons civilians in order to avoid subjectivism and individualism, a best practice to demonstrate precise stances on the reality.
This is an utopia: if we think that the art can renounce to the ethical and political meaning.
I have been visiting the Ahus hospital frequently the past year. On the way to the main entrance there is a 30 meter long roofed passage that takes you from the bus stop to the main door. If it is raining, snowing or too hot weather it´s natural to walk along this passage, which protects you from the weather. The first time I walked there it was in the middle of the day and not many people entering the hospital. When walking under the passage suddenly one chord came from the roof as I passed. I took notice of it and wondered where it came from. After a few more steps a new sound came from the roof. I stopped and looked trying to understand where it came from and if it was me who elicited the sound. Standing motionless no more sounds were produced, and it was first when…