[spectre] PIXXELPOINT 2009 CALL FOR ARTWORKS

[Domenico Quaranta]

Dears,

These are the very last days to apply for the Pixxelpoint 2009 call  
for artworks. The application can be sent either via e-mail (to the  
address pixxelpoint2009 at gmail.com) or via traditional mail to the  
following address:

Pixxelpoint
Kulturni dom Nova Gorica
Bevkov trg 4
SI 5000 Nova Gorica
Slovenia

These are the guidelines for this festival edition:

We keep on talking about “new media”, while in actually fact these  
media are anything but new. The Net is twenty years old, if we start  
counting from the advent of the Web, forty if we start from Arpanet.  
Spacewar!, the first videogame ever, is more or less the same age.  
Virtual worlds are the updated, lighter versions of a technology  
acclaimed as “the future” when Second Life programmers were still in  
diapers; social networks are the bastard sons of Fidonet. As for the  
computer, it is younger than Lord Byron, but certainly not than his  
daughter Ada.


Once upon a time there was the electronic frontier, an abandonware  
myth which was able to regenerate itself thanks to the continuous  
advance of the frontier itself. Like in space, in technological  
progress there’s no ocean at the end of the trip. But, unlike the  
space race, the race to the next technology is endless, and  
endlessness is boring.


Yet, while we got used to innovation and the day-after rhetorics, we  
have never got used to the loss of the past. We look back to what was  
new yesterday and is trash today, and we feel a deep sense of  
nostalgia. Commodore 64 and 386dx. The first Apple Macintosh. Bulletin  
Board Systems. Animated gifs. Glittering images. Web buttons. Super  
Mario. Doom. Napster. Jennicam. Mosaic. ASCII art. MIDIs and MOOs. Not  
to mention VHS, vinyl, audio cassettes, cathode tubes, portable  
radios, faxes. It is the kind of nostalgia that we feel for a relative  
who died young, once the pain abates: you are left wondering what kind  
of man he would have been. Or for someone that, once grown up, does  
not live up to his or her promise. Sometimes nostalgia develops into  
historical research, and becomes media archeology. We don’t look for  
the technologies that we once loved, but those we have never seen in  
action.

But in both the cases, in the artistic field this sentimental look at  
the past is producing some brand new, interesting stuff. Reviving dead  
media and obsolete technologies, retrieving and rekindling their  
aesthetics, making them do things they were never expected to do, and  
telling stories about them with other means is proving to be a sound  
artistic strategy – undoubtedly more so than “the exploration of the  
artistic potential of new media” which became the mantra of most New  
Media Art. This happens because, when you give up on the rhetorics of  
novelty, what is left on stage is the human element: the man of the  
past who domesticated the media, put his own life into them and was  
changed by them; and the man of the present, who looks back on that  
past with the same sentiment as the venerable Sergio Leone looked to  
the West.

On the occasion of its 10th Birthday, Pixxelpoint festival wants to  
explore this feeling. Clean out your attic, the folders you haven’t  
touched for years, GIF repositories, your university’s warehouse, and  
the dumps of Silicon Valley – or its small-town emulators. Get your  
hands on this stuff, and send us your finds. Any media is allowed,  
apart from new!

Domenico Quaranta, curator


More infos:

http://www.pixxelpoint.org

http://domenicoquaranta.com

---

Domenico Quaranta

http://domenicoquaranta.com/

mob. +39 340 2392478
email. info at domenicoquaranta.com
skype: dom_40
home. vicolo San Giorgio 18 - 25122 brescia (BS)