[rohrpost] Understanding New Media 2.2

[media/art/cologne]

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Understanding New Media 2.2
The German Scene:
The network, memory and identity: a challenge for digital art
Open Lecture by Wilfried Agricola de Cologne
Tuesday Dec. 12, 2006 4 pm - 6.30 pm
Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale", Palazzo del Mediterraneo
Via Nuova Marina 59 Naples (I)
Hall 1.1 / free entrance, English language
Video streaming on www.mediartsoffice.eu

Who's really Wilfried Agricola de Cologne? Nobody knows his true identity and his true age (he declares to be born on 1950). Surely Wilfried Agricola de Cologne is German, born somewhere in the Black Forest. And surely he is one of the most exceptional virtual artists and curators ever existed, who lived and worked truly practicing a permanent online exposure. He declares to have died as the artist AGRICOLA on 31 December 1998 as the result of a terrorist attack and also tells to be reborn as the artist AGRICOLA de Cologne on 1 January 2000. He is living and working since 1984 in Cologne (Germany).

MAO, Neapolitan no profit agency with an European mission that speaks English and like to import in Italy all that would remain unknown (while exports the best Italian practices), continues its mission to disseminate digital culture and the most relevant topics of new arts to Italian audience. MAO invites the German Artist de Cologne to open the new cicle of the talks Understanding new media dedicated to the stars of the German Scene by producing and curating an open lecture streamed on the web as every talk offered before in Italy, where audience is acclaiming such moments dedicated to indepth with strong quality issues the debate on digital culture.

The seminar, entitled The network, memory and identity: a challenge for digital art, is dedicated to explore the most recent Agricola's projects. Agricola tells, for the first time in Italy, about his Java Museum and the experience of [R] [R] [F]---> 200X (Remembering, Repressing, Forgetting), a flash video festival (as well as an online environment) that put together more than 800 artists and 50 curators of international standing and gives evidence of how is possibile, also in the art world, to apply the networking aptitude and culture. Curators select a numbers of artists on a theme base, after each selection and after the consequent online and offline exhibition, they put new visions and new culture insights, with the creation of new memories and connections. Therefore, after the different acquiring of further themes of selection and after having done further editions, Agricola created a network and an incredible database, either structural and performative - that is filled by all the viewpoint of the participating artists/curators but mainly assuring infinite other collective and rizhome-based visions. Since 2004, the festival selected just two themes, the memory and the identity, that are the core of the talk, curated by MAO, that the artist will offer on December 12, in Naples, starting at 4 pm. The lecture will be the first European occasion to appreciate the festival results, because it has been closed and just presented to MACRO (Museum de Arte Contemporaneo, Rosario, Argentina), on last November 14. So MAO offers, according to its mission, an absolute preview, that could be easily followed from each part of the world by the web streaming on mediartsoffice.eu website.

Agricola will be introduced by the MAO curators, that will announce also the next no profit projects. To give the salutation of the collaborating University, the madam professor Jocelyne Vincent, Director of Dipartimento di studi americani, culturali e linguistici of Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale", together with Tiziana Terranova, culture media and film science of the Essex University (UK), visiting professor to the department managed by Professor Vincent thanks to the "brain incentives" programme dedicated by Italian Ministry of Education to the mobility return of Italian researcher abroad.

[more info on: http://www.mediartseurope.eu - press office: press at mediartsoffice.eu]