Graffiti Research Lab
The Graffiti Research Lab is dedicated to outfitting graffiti writers, artists, pranksters and protesters with open source tools for urban communication. The goal of the G.R.L. is to technologically empower individuals to creatively alter their surroundings on the scale of advertisers, corporations and the state in order to reclaim public space from both authoritarian and consumer culture. GRL Weapons of Mass Defacement (WMDs) are the result of numerous grants, awards and commissions from rogue governments, educational institutes and arts organizations, including an Award of Distinction from Ars Electronica in 2006. They have shown their work in the streets on five continents and have been featured in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Tate Modern in London and similar toilet stalls all over the world. Their first documentary film, "GRL: The Complete First Season", recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and sold-out the MoMA. They have been featured in or contributed to publications, books and other mass media, like the New York Times, Time Magazine, Time Asia, The Taipei Times, Excelsior, Time Out New York, the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Wired, Il Corriere Della Sera, El Pais, Street Renegades, The Tate's "Street Art", NBC, ABC, CNN, Boingboing.net, Digg.com and on the front page of Youtube. But more importantly, thousands of ubiquitous, clandestine agents have been trained, via the web, to use GRL tools and techniques to create their own public interventions all over the world.
Marco Mancuso
Is a critic, art curator and consultant about new media, digital art and electronic culture, with a focus on contemporary Audiovisual Art and Design. He lives and works in Milan and he has been working and writing for many art and design Italian magazines He is the founder and director of the project DigiCult (www.digicult.it), of the monthly magazine DigiMag (www.digicult.it/digimag), the podcast DigiPod (www.digicult.it/podcast) and the newsletter service DigiNews. For DigiCult he worked as guest curator for some festivals like Piemonte Share Festival, Diesel-U-Music Award, Dissonanze Festival, Mixed Media Festival, Screen Music Festival, and organized the Graffiti Research Lab urban performance for Enzimi 2007, the solo exhibition "op7_Otolab" at Traffic Gallery in Bergamo and the Thorsten Fleisch retrospective at Galleria O' in Milan. He was also guest curator for some international events like Cimatics in Brussels, Strp festival in Eindhoven and Nemo in Paris. His interviews and articles can be read within Digicult archive, while his writings were pubblished in some festival catalogues (like Share festival, Mixed Media festival, Dissonanze and Screen Music) and exhibition catalogues (like "0006_Limiteazero" in 2006 at Hublab gallery in Milan and "op7_Otolab" in 2007 a Traffic Gallery in Bergamo). Finally, he's working with the new born agency DigiMade as curator/promoter for some Italian artists, pushing their work inside the main international festivals, events, platforms and cultural centers in Europe working with digital and electronics. Marco Mancuso teaches "Digital Creative Media" and "Audiovisual Art" at Naba-New Academy of Beautifual Arts and at Ied-European Institute of Design in Milan.
Pier Luigi Capucci
Is concerned with the communication's systems and idioms and with the new art forms. Since the early '80 he has been studying the relations among technologies, culture, society and among arts, sciences and technologies. His theoretical activity is concerned with the new art and communication forms. In the field of applied research he works on the social opportunities raised by online communications and multimedia. He has been professor at the universities of Rome "La Sapienza", Bologna and Florence. Currently he is professor at the University of Urbino and in some fine arts academies. In 1994 he founded and directed the first italian online magazine, NetMagazine, later MagNet, on the relationships between arts and technologies. In 2000 he founded Noema, a web magazine devoted to culture-sciences-technologies interrelations and influences, which he is the director of.
Laura Colini
She holds a EU Marie Curie research fellowship at the Architecture, Media and Urban Sociology department at Bauhaus University in Weimar, and works as urban politics and social inclusion European expert . Her research interests lie in the socio-political practices that use/subvert technology and the construction of mediascapes, criticizing the power of corporate global economy and neo-liberal urban projects. In so doing I investigate the relation between narrative, urban studies and the use of multimedia, looking at media art and tools like video, photography, community mapping as powerful channels for making visible tacit knowledge, social struggles and opening up discourse in the public domain.
Umane Energie
E' il primo evento in Umbria che tratta il tema delle energie rinnovabili e l'interazione dell'uomo con l'ambiente. Un evento che vuole parlare ai cittadini per sensibilizzarli al tema energetico. Lo strumento che utilizza principalmente è la comunicazione multimediale, utilizzata con ironia e gioco, uno strumento ludico ma non per questo non efficace. Il parco multimediale UmaneEnergie è un ambiente interattivo, un luogo in cui i visitatori sono invitati a partecipare e a modificare lo spazio espositivo proposto. La mostra si attiva solo se esiste un'interazione tra la persona "Umana Energia" e la macchina-installazione, sarà quindi la quantità di energia scaturita dall'azione dell'uomo a modificare l'evento. Il parco è allestito negli spazi dell'ex-chiesa di Santa Maria della Misericordia, accanto al percorso installativo vengono proposti dibattiti con esperti così da rendere ancora più completa ed esaustiva la base di riflessione sulle tematiche trattate.
Confinidigitali
It is a company which works in the field of embedded systems, microcontroller and Linux based. To talk about bits, the fundamental unit of the digital world, means to talk in simple and clear language. Confinidigitali wants to talk about bits. Again. Because it's needed to talk directly to the digital world, without intermediaries, in order to offer custom and reliable products and solutions . Products and solutions able to use in the best way the available technology. A step back to jump ahead. In collaboration with Umane Energie, the agency presented Beduino in 2007, an open source instrument, designed to simplify the process of creating electronic based art projects. It can be used for music controllers, VJ controllers, MIDI instruments, dance triggers and body suits, interactive installations, driving LEDs, motor and robotic controls and much more... It is based on the well-known Arduino platform, and 100% compatible with it, but intended to be used even without writing a single line of code.
