Johannes Birringer: from Literature to Dance, Choreography, Digital Architectures and then Deep Underground.

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During this interview we discussed ideas around embodiment, re-embodiment, kimospheres, atmospheres, technology and issues related to the practice of Johannes Birringer as a choreographer, director and professor of performance technologies. His publications have taken up important issues surrounding the body and technologies, theatre, dance, and choreography. Birringer underlines the pivotal moment when he attended a Pina Bausch performance, as a young student, and how it affected and redirected his career. Other figures like Stelarc haunt this discussion. With the DAP-Lab he has created numerous stage works, installations and short films. Recent research, conducted in Texas in 2019, explores underground space and caves and how they are linked to deep listening methodologies proposed by Pauline Oliveros.

Johannes Birringer / Interview by Luca Forcucci – October 20th 2020 / Genova-London

Johannes Birringer is a choreographer/media artist and co-director of DAP-Lab at Brunel University where he is a Professor of Performance Technologies. He also directs the Houston-based AlienNation Co. and is the founder of the Interaktionslabor (http://interaktionslabor.de). He has created numerous dance-theatre works, films and video installations that have been shown in Europe, the Americas, China, and Japan. DAP-Lab’s “Suna no Onna” was featured at festivals in London; the mixed-reality installation “UKIYO” went on European tour in 2010. The dance opera “for the time being [Victory over the Sun]” premiered at Sadler’s Wells (2014). DAP-Lab’s most recent dance installations, “kimospheres” III-VI (2016-2019) explore the convergence of physical-sensory and augmented VR spaces, and were shown in Madrid, Paris, London and Durban, SA. The dance performance “Mourning for a dead moon” (December 2019) addresses the climate crisis. His books include “Media and Performance,” “Performance on the Edge,” “Performance, Technology & Science,” “Dance and ChoreoMania,” “Tanz der Dinge/Things that Dance,” and a new book, “Kinetic Atmospheres: Performance and Immersion” (Routledge) that probes the implications of environmental immersion and mixed reality digital architectures.

LASER NOMAD LA CHAUX-DE-FONDS / Invisibility and Omnipresence

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10.09.2020 / 18.15-midnight (Exhibition, Talks and Concert) / Club 44 at La Chaux-de-Fonds

Video of the talks and concert with Al Comet aka Mahadev Cometo and Luca Forcucci at the end

We explore the links between art and science through an exhibition, a talk and a concert. The 2020s of the 21st century have apparently wrecked our experience of the normality.
Invisibility and Omnipresence refers here, among other possibilities, to organisms / parasites / viruses, perceptions (virtuality, augmented or not), social and territorial prejudices (racisms), or our biosphere for example. What are the major challenges waiting for us in such context ? What will be the new normality ? Where is the reality, is it a virtual construction ? Which is the role of consciousness in such context ?

Pictures: Xavier Voirol

Jeremy Narby
Indigenous people mention since a long time ago, the existence of an invisible world supporting the world we perceive, establishing it to a certain extent, and with which we needs to
negotiate. Science, on the other hand, tell us about DNA molecules and virus, which are actually visible, and influencing our life. We know now that all the living beings of the planet, including
viruses, are integrally part of the ecological web of the planet, and altogether we are part of a planetary mega entity fully interconnected: the biosphere. This delicate layer of life surrounding the planet is self regulated on multiple levels, but its scale is so broad that we struggle to perceive it. Could a dialogue between science and Indigenous knowledge extend our way of dealing with the world, and help us to conceive the biosphere too ?

Biography
In charge of Amazonian projects for « Nouvelle Planète », Jeremy Narby is an anthropologist, who
supports Indigenous amazonian people initiatives since thirty years.

Al Comet / Alain Monod / Mahadev Cometo
In dialogue/interview with Luca Forcucci about his career as a musician with The Young Gods,
his experiments with electronic music and lately his study in India of the sitar instrument. Moreover, Al Comet is a trained military pilot, who continues to fly.

Biography
Member of The Young Gods during more than twenty years, Alain has contributed to define the industrial sound of the 1980s. In 2014, Al Comet leaves the Young Gods et focuses his energies on his very own self development under the name Mahadev Cometo. Always looking for new sonorities, he studies classical music in Benares. and publish a sitar record in 2017. Today, with his new generation modular sampler, he works on the elaboration of a new sitar album more revolutionary that ever “ the futur is now”.

Isabella Pasqualini

The environment shapes our experience of space in constant interaction with the body. Architectonic interiors amplify the perception of space through the bodily senses; an effect also known as embodiment. The interaction of the bodily senses with the space surrounding the body can be tested experimentally through the manipulation of multisensory stimulation and measured via a range of behaviors related to bodily self-consciousness. Through the association of egocentric, first-person view of a dancer to a virtual point of view, the choreography creates a virtual architecture.
Isabella Pasqualini is an architect (ETHZ 2000) and a scientist with a PhD in architecture and cognitive neuroscience (EPFL 2012).

Biography
Her works explore the mutual and intimate relationship between body and space using immersive and interactive multimedia, with a particular interest in the multisensory enhancement of the user’s horizon. For her post-doc project Visual Touches, touching Views at the Center of Neuroprosthetics EPFL, she received the prestigious fellowship grant from the cogito foundation in 2013. Currently, she is a faculty member of the >> LeaV at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Versailles and of the NAAD Master class at IUAV University of Venice. She has been a guest researcher at the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience EPFL. Isabella has planned a new City in Angola and built a temporary bank building in Luanda. She is a scientific reviewer, and works as an expert for Innosuisse as well as other innovation platforms.

Bruno Herbelin
Our body is our anchor in the world. Neuroscience of bodily self-consciousness investigates how this primitive subjective experience emerges into consciousness and, thanks to recent developments using new technologies for evaluating the impact of artificially mediated disruptions of this subjective experience, is now providing the first pieces of evidence of its complexity and multisensory aspects. Virtual Reality is particularly suited for this experimental research on bodily consciousness but, in parallel, it follows a massive industrial development that neglects the impact it can have on our experience of the self. Self-body representation is, for technical reasons, simply ignored in most VR experiences, although in effect this means providing the user with the strong and uncanny experience of invisibility. What I question and propose to discuss here, is if it makes sense to consider VR as the ultimate technology of telepresence (and omnipresence) if in practice it abstracts us and removes our body from the world.

Biography
Bruno Herbelin is senior researcher in virtual reality and cognitive neuroscience in the laboratory of Prof. O. Blanke at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland). From 2012 to 2019, he was deputy director of the EPFL Center for Neuroprosthetics. From 2005 to 2009, he was Assistant Professor at Medialogy Department of Aalborg University, Denmark. He obtained his PhD from EPFL School of Computer and Communications in 2005 for his research work on virtual reality exposure therapy under the supervision of Prof. D. Thallmann (Virtual Reality Laboratory). 

Luca Forcucci: Chair & Exhibition

Eleonora Oreggia/xname: Electromagnetism and gestures

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Eleonora Oreggia / Interview by Luca Forcucci – June 22nd 2020 / Berlin-London

xname is the digital identity of media artist, performer and composer Eleonora Oreggia, originally from Milan and currently based in London. She creates performances and interactive installations using light, sound, dust and self-made sensor-driven synthesizers. Her music features elements of techno, ambient drone and industrial. In 2013 she has been selected by the Barbican to represent the artist Marchel Duchamp in the digital era. Her artworks, consisting of audiovisual pieces, software, sculptures, interactive installations and live performances, have received several prizes and awards and have been consistently shown in institutes, museums, galleries and festivals over Europe, UK, Asia and America – and over the Net. A Design alumna from renown Dutch post-academic institute Jan van Eyck Academie, Eleonora has also obtained an MPhil in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths College, a PhD in Media & Arts Technology from Queen Mary University, and a Laurea (summa cum Laude) in DAMS (Drama, Art and Music Studies) from University of Bologna, IT. She is the founder of Nebularosa Records – a label promoting music and musicians who challenge established production practices.
http://xname.cc
http://xname.cc/rebus
http://nebularosa.net

Art x Science Dialogues on Sonic Arts x Neuroscience

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Artists explore sound in its pure state, simultaneously bridging and muddling barriers between sound, noise, and music in the contemporary or historical sense. Others investigate the political and cultural implications of certain sounds, using their work to bring human rights to the fore. This event puts spotlight on yet another group of artists who connects Sonic Arts with Neuroscience, attempting to unveil the mystery of human brain and consciousness by playing with the frequency and wavelength of a soundwave.

Register

LASER Nomad Porto / Sense of Place and Migration: Embodiment, Cognition and Borders

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28.11.2019 / 17:00 – 19:30 / School of Fine Arts / University of Porto

Av. de Rodrigues de Freitas 265 / Aula Magna / Porto, 13 4000-421 / Portugal

The sixth edition of Laser Nomad at the Fine Arts School of the University of Porto explores contemporary issues of migration. The focus is about the sense of place from a cognitive perspective. Neuroscientists have already proposed the existence of a grey zone around us named peripersonal space, which is an extended boundary of our body. From a technological perspective, mobile devices and gps helped war migrants, for example, to stay in touch with their families and share migration routes. What is the relation between embodiment and borders?

CHAIRED BY: Luca Forcucci


Rosemary Lee (ITU Copenhagen) Rosemary Lee will speak about themes from her PhD research on the influence of algorithms on notions of the image. Several consequences arise from the formalisation of the image as sets of instructions to be executed, including variability, a turn toward non-opticality, and increased automation by machines. In this way, machine learning not only affects the image on an ontological level, affecting what an image may be considered to be, but also its aesthetics and its symbolic relation to the real.   Rosemary Lee is an artist and PhD fellow at the IT-University of Copenhagen, where she is researching how notions of the image are impacted by algorithmic media. Her PhD project analyses and contextualises artistic and technical examples in terms of their earlier precursors and considers what this means for what an image is today. Lee’s research and artistic work have been shown in international contexts including SCREENSHOTS: Desire and Automated Image, machines will watch us die, a new we, and her book, Molten Media, which was published in the context of the transmediale Vilém Flusser Archive Residency for Artistic Research.    

Rui Penha (ESMAE) Existence and Extension / Lenses and Lentils   Rui Penha was trained to see the world through the lenses of musical composition and media art. He is a father of two, a professor of a few more, a thinker and a tinkerer. He is currently employed as an assistant professor at ESMAE and as a senior researcher at INESC TEC. More info at http://ruipenha.pt

Miguel Carvalhais (FBAUP)

Host

Miguel Carvalhais teaches design and computational media at FBAUP. When asked for a short bio he normally presents himself as a designer and a musician, two activities that he finds closely connected and central to his practice. In this talk Miguel will explore how his work hinges on space: on using it as canvas, on manipulating or transforming it, on creating entirely new spaces. http://carvalhais.org

Laser Nomad Palermo / Consciousness, Representation and Embodiment

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07.11.2019 /14:00 – 17:30 / Edificio 12 – Aula Magna / Viale delle Scienze, Palermo

Edificio 12 – Aula Magna / Viale delle Scienze, Palermo

Laser Nomad Palermo

We explore Consciousness, Representation and Embodiment with the contribution of researchers from the University of Palermo. These keywords are observed through the lenses of human cognition. Why and how do I know that I am experiencing something ? Moreover artificial systems are pervasively entering multiple aspects of our life, what if instead of artificial we focus on extended ones ? Does embodiment applies to artificial forms ?

14:00 – 14:10 Intro Laser Nomad
14:10 – 14:30 Salvatore Tedesco
14:30 – 14:50 Carmelo Calì
14:50 – 15:10 Davide Rocchesso
15:10 – 15:30 Maria Mannone
15:30 – 15:50 Antonio Chella
15:50 – 17:30 Laser NOMAD Discussion / Q&A pubblic


Prof. Antonio Chella

Consciousness and Creativity

Abstract

The research field of conscious AI systems concerns the computational models of consciousness. The talk will outline the current state of research of conscious AI systems and it will discuss its relationships with creativity, with particular emphasis to musical creativity. The field of conscious AI systems is tightly related with topics as information integration, embodiment, adaptation, emotions, which are all of interest in order to model musical creativity. On the one hand, facing the problem of consciousness could be a decisive move towards the design of effectively creative systems, on the other hand the study of models of creativity could be helpful in order to better understand human consciousness.

Biography

Antonio Chella is a full professor of Robotics at the Department of Engineering of the University of Palermo, where he is the founder and director of the Robotics Laboratory. He coordinated several Social Robotics projects including Cicerobot, a museum robot guide at the Archaeological Museum of Agrigento; Robotics and Autism, in collaboration with the Child Neuropsychiatry of Palermo; Robotics and ALS, in collaboration with the ALS Center of the University General Hospital of Palermo; RoboDanza, in collaboration with the cultural association Tavola Tonda; Robot Orchestra Conductor in collaboration with the Alessandro Scarlatti Conservatory of Palermo. In 2017 he was awarded the “James Albus Medal” by the BICA Scientific Society (Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures). He is a member of the Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts of Palermo. His main research concerns the study of consciousness in robots and machines; he is the co-author of the main reference text in the field. He is the author of more than 200 international publications.



Prof. Davide Rocchesso

Designing Sound with Vocal Primitives

Abstract

What are the fundamental elements of sound? What is the
best framework for analyzing existing sonic realities and for
expressing new sound concepts? These are long standing questions in sound physics, perception, and creation. In everyday life, it is our body that helps establishing bridges between distal
(source-related) and proximal (sensory-related) representations of
sound. In particular, it is our vocal apparatus that offers body-based
representations of sound, so that vocal imitations can be used as
probes into the world of sound at large.

Biography

Davide Rocchesso received the Ph.D. degree from the University of
Padova in 1996. He is professor of computer science at the
University of Palermo. He was the coordinator of EU FET
projects SOb (the Sounding Object) and SkAT-VG (Sketching Audio
Technologies using Vocalizations and Gestures). He had been chairing the COST Action on Sonic Interaction Design. His main research interests are sound modelling and synthesis, interaction design, evaluation of interactions.



Maria Mannone

Can Beauty be Translated? A Journey between Mathematics, Music, and Nature

Abstract

Contemplating the majesty of a tree, listening to an orchestral piece, and studying a mathematical equation might not be too far activities. Mathematics can constitute a bridge to compare objects and transformations between them, as well as to map them from a domain to another one. In particular, musical structures, with their themes and transformations, can be investigated through the language of mathematics (and categories in particular). The same formalism can be applied to nature, comparing shapes and their variations. I present methods of investigation and examples, including trees, ammonites, and flowers. They can be analyzed and translated into music, keeping some essential features and considering specific cognition criteria. From organized musical structures to the sound itself, the presentation includes some hints of how the quantum mechanics formalism can be applied to the analysis of human voice. Might a melodious soprano voice be not too far from the Schrödinger equation’s solutions?

Biography

Maria Mannone (Ph.D.) is a theoretical physicist and a composer. She graduated in Italy, France (IRCAM-Paris VI Sorbonne), and in the US (University of Minnesota). Her research involves mathematics, music, and images. Author of books, she gave talks and invited lectures in America, Europe, and Asia, where she is collaborating with the Tohoku University for the development of a new musical instrument, the CubeHarmonic. Currently, she is a subject expert (‘cultore della materia’) at the Department of Mathematics and Informatics in Palermo.



Prof. Salvatore Tedesco

Aesthetics and Embodiment

Abstract

Construction of form, emotions and aesthetic appreciation can usefully be rethought in the context of an interaction between philosophical knowledge, theoretical computer science and new technologies for production and control of images and sounds. The short report proposed seeks to clarify the terms of reference and to suggest some interpretations.

Biography

Salvatore Tedesco teaches Aesthetics at the University of Palermo, and coordinates the Dams course of studies. His main research projects deals with Morphology, evolutionary aesthetics, history of aesthetics, contemporary theories of literature. He has published 11 monographs on various aspects of modern and contemporary aesthetics, more than 80 papers, and is currently editing (with Federico Vercellone) a “Glossary of Morphology”.



Carmelo Calì

Perceptual Grammar of Sounds

Abstract

Music cognition complies with the perceptual grammar which consists of the properties of sounds as units and the grouping factors as preferential rules. The units have emerged through the interaction with the environment as crucial features in conveying information. The rules are the heuristics that enable the cognition of the environment in the forms of the auditory modality by solving problems of ordering and structure derivation. The specialization of the perceptual grammar of sounds plays a foundational role for music cognition. It provides composers and listeners with shared capacities to build and extract meaning from musical shapes and their relevant qualities in space and time. Musical examples will be presented to argue that the specialization of the perceptual grammar is consistent with historical and geographical variability of musical systems and styles, which draw from the expressive potentialities it affords with a high degree of freedom.

Biography

Carmelo Calì is associate professor at the University of Palermo.
His main research interests are theories and models of visual,
auditory and tactile perception, cognitive foundations of aesthetics,
human-robot interaction and industrial design.

Chair: Luca Forcucci

Jocy de Oliveira / A Trajectory into New Forms of Music (In Portuguese)

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Not only her work spans over more than 50 years and englobes music composition, performance, theatre and sound installations, but she also has worked with the biggest names in the field, like Stravinsky, Berio, Cage, Stockhausen, just to name a few. Here she comes back on the stories of these unique encounters, and also how she firstly brought this kind of music to Brazil.

Jocy de Oliveira / Interview by Luca Forcucci – August 7nd 2019 / Berlin-Rio de Janeiro

Jocy de Oliveira has been involved as a composer/author in a variety of media since the early 1960s utilizing acoustic and electronic instruments, music-theatre, installations, texts, graphics, video, and audiences in an approach to an organic development of performance/composition works.

Her operas were released on 6 DVDs distributed by NAXOS Video Library. Her most recent work is a cinematic opera Liquid Voices – A história de Mathilda Segalescu is a feature film in process of finalization and distribution to International Film Festivals in 2019.

Author of five books published in Brazil, France and the USA, Jocy de Oliveira recently launched Dialogue with Letters, published by SESI SP, 2014, which was acclaimed by the media and received the most important literature prize in Brazil – Jabuti Literature First Prize, 2015. This same year the French edition of this book was very successfully launched in Paris by Editions Honoré Champion as part of the Sorbonne musicology collection. In 2016 the book was selected as finalist for the Premio Rio de Literatura. In 2018 a book Leituras de Jocy coordinated by Rodrigo Cicchelli and Manoel Correa do Lago was released by Editora SESI SP compiling analyses and reflections from 27 authors on her work. FLIP – the most important Brazilian International literature Festival held in Paraty July, 2018 focused on her works and honored her during its opening and two other different presentations.

She was honored with the invitation to write a chapter on Stravinsky ‘s new book – Abécédaire Stravinsky, organized by the Stravinsky Foundation and being published by Éditions La Baconnière, Genève 2018/2019.

She received a number of grants and awards, such as Guggenheim Foundation (2005) Rockefeller Foundation (1983 and 2007), Bogliasco Foundation (2004 and 2016), CAPS (New York Council on the Arts), besides Vitae and Rioarte Foundations in Brazil. She was elected a life member of the Academia Brasileira de Musica, holds a Master of Arts degree (1968) from Washington University, St. Louis, USA and received an Honorary Doctorate from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 2016.

In Portuguese

Pioneira no desenvolvimento de um trabalho multimídia no Brasil envolvendo música, teatro, instalações, texto e vídeo, é a primeira entre os compositores nacionais a compor e dirigir suas óperas buscando reformular o formato convencional operístico.

Suas peças tem sido apresentadas em teatros e festivais como Berliner Festspiele, Haus der Kulturen der Welt , Hebbel Theater em Berlim, StaadtsTheater – Darmstadt, Bayerischer Rudfunk – Munique, Festivals Dresdner Tage der Zeitgenössischen Musik – Desden, Expo 2000 Hannover, Ludwigshafen Opera Festival, Salzburg Festival – Aspekte, Hayden Planetarium, Carnegie Hall, Brooklyn Academy – em New York, New Music America Festivals, Miami Planetarium, Bellas Artes – Mexico, Teatro Avenida, Buenos Aires, Orquesta Sinfonica del Sodre, Uruguai, Orquesta Sinfônica Nacional de Cuba, Radio France – Paris, Gaudeamus e Gulbenkian Foundations, Chengdu University – China. No Brasil, suas obras têm sido apresentadas anualmente em diversos teatros e festivais incluindo os Theatros Municipal de São Paulo e do Rio de Janeiro e em diferentes capitais.

Como compositora e pianista, gravou 25 discos no Brasil, Inglaterra, EUA, Alemanha, Itália e no México; registrou nos EUA e no Brasil a obra pianística de Olivier Messiaen (selo NAXOS). Oito de suas óperas multimídias foram gravadas em DVDs distribuídos pela NAXOS Video Library e pelo SESC, SP.

Eduardo Kac / From Poetry to Space (In English)

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An unusual trajectory discussed here, from his early poetry works to bio art experiments where his dna is implemented into flowers, to space research, minitel works (french own internet version) and their restoration, to artworks visible from google earth. A fascinating iconic artist.

Eduardo Kac / Interview by Luca Forcucci – August 15th 2019 / Berlin-Paris

Eduardo Kac, (born July 3, 1962, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Brazilian American artist who was best known for his works featuring genetically altered organisms in ways that frequently had conceptual or symbolic import. He termed these endeavours “bio art” or “transgenic art.”

Kac began staging performance art pieces in Rio de Janeiro as a teenager. He frequented the city’s beaches and, especially, Cinelandia, a square that served as a hub of bohemian activity. There Kac would declaim pornographically inspired poetry, often wearing only a pink miniskirt. During that period he also experimented with other forms of poetry, graffiti, and multimedia art.

Kac began investigating the use of holograms as a medium for poetic expression, and in 1983 he published his first “holopoem,” “Holo/Olho” (“Holo/Eye”), which rendered the words of the title in holographic text that shifted as the viewer changed position. The next year, he debuted a digital poem, “Não!” (“No!”), which comprised a block of text that scrolled across an LED display. Kac created a number of other holopoems and digital poems, some of them more elaborate. He also made his first forays into art transmitted via Minitel, a videotext precursor to the Internet. He received a bachelor of arts degree from the School of Communications at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in 1985.

In 1986 Kac debuted what he dubbed a “telepresence” work, a radio-controlled robot that served as a transmission system for conversations between viewers and a remote operator. While at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (M.F.A., 1990), Kac began a collaborative telepresence work, Ornitorrinco (“Platypus”). It involved the remote manipulation of a robot, first by telephone signal (1989) and eventually through the use of the Internet (1994). In 1996 Kac created another telepresence work, Rara Avis, which consisted of a robotic bird with a camera inside that was positioned in an aviary with live zebra finches. Visitors to the exhibit could don a headset connected to the camera and experience the view inside the aviary. Get unlimited access to all of Britannica’s trusted content. Start Your Free Trial Today

Time Capsule, a combination of performance and conceptual art, was staged in 1997 in São Paulo. The piece centred on the injection into Kac’s leg of a microchip normally used to track pets; he registered himself in the tracking company’s database. That year he became an assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Increasingly preoccupied with the corporeal and visceral, Kac in 1998 first suggested the possibility of transgenic art with an article on a theoretical genetically engineered fluorescent dog. Though the creation of a glowing canine was ultimately infeasible, in 1999 Kac debuted Genesis, a work that represented his first foray into actual bio art. He translated a passage from the Christian Bible into Morse Code and then into the four-letter code that represented the base pairs of DNA. He commissioned the creation of synthetic DNA using that sequence, and it was injected into bacteria, images of which were projected onto a gallery wall.

In 2000 Kac premiered what would become his best-known and most-controversial work, GFP Bunny. Again mixing conceptual and performance art, Kac centred the project on a rabbit engineered to express the green fluorescent protein (GFP) from the jellyfish Aequoria victoria. The animal, named Alba by Kac and his family, was seen by the public only in photographs. Though Kac claimed to have commissioned the rabbit, the French National Agronomic Institute (INRA), which owned it, had actually, of its own volition, created multiple rabbits that expressed the protein. GFP was a common tool in cellular research; cells of a certain type could be engineered to express the protein and thus would be more easily visible. And, though Kac promoted images that suggested that the animal glowed a uniform green, in fact only its living tissue glowed green under blue light of a certain wavelength (meaning that its fur would not glow). INRA ultimately refused to give the rabbit to Kac, a turn of events that the artist used to further promote the project through several shows centred on “freeing Alba.” GFP Bunny was, Kac claimed, the provocation of the controversy, rather than the rabbit itself. Debate did indeed ensue; though many questioned the ethics of using genetically modified organisms in art, some applauded the initiation of a dialogue on the subject.

In 2001 Kac exhibited a project that consisted of a collection of transgenic animals contained in an acrylic dome. Two years later he began another transgenic project, which involved the insertion of a sequence of his own DNA into the genes that coded for the veins in a petunia flower. He dubbed the resulting plant—engineered by a botanist at the University of Minnesota—“Edunia” and made it the centre of a new installation, Natural History of the Enigma (2009).

Kac’s various projects toured widely, and he frequently lectured and wrote about the theoretical foundations of his work. Among his publications were the essay collection Telepresence and Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits, & Robots (2005) and the poetry compilation Hodibis Potax (2007). His artist’s book Escracho (1983) became part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. (Richard Pallardy)

Luca De Luigi / Musical director (In Italian)

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During is long career as photographer, cameraman first and director then, Luca de Luigi introduces here his view on filming musical events, from the arena of Verona, to Bayreuth with the director Werner Herzog and then a long series of live concerts at the Montreux Jazz festival including Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock among many others.

Luca de Luigi / Interview by Luca Forcucci – July 24th 2019 / Gordevio, Valle Maggia

Artisan video director for music and documentary films. He has created also cultural shows for the Swiss Italian TV RTS , photographer, cameramen, and since 23 years director.

Artigiano regista video musicale e documentario. Ha creato Emissioni Culturali alla RTS Fotografo, Cameraman e da 23 anni Regista.