Second Life / Real Life @ Peam 2K6 - The Diamond

*The Diamond*
Pescara Electronic Artists Meeting 2k6
6 - 10 December 2006
Pescara, Ecoteca, Via Caboto 19

The fourth edition of the Pescara Electronic Artists Meeting, amongst the most important events concerning contemporary electronic/digital based arts, will take place from the 6th to the 10th of December. Organized by the Artificialia network, the P.E.A.M. is conceived to be an international meeting and confrontation point for those artists, intellectuals, experts, and others who work in an electronic context or make use of electronics as a basic means of expression. This edition will showcase a large and refined selection of visual artists, performers, musicians amongst the most innovative of the field. The leit-motiv of the whole event will be "the Diamond", an attempt to gather artists and experts coming from as many disciplines as possible (sculpture, dance, theater, literature, music, visual arts, etc.), all with a marked high-tech approach, and to extraordinarily have them converge to the stimulating location of Ecoteca, in Pescara.

Therefore, the idea is to let many intellectuals (critics and curators) converge and present one (inimitable) or two (dichotomy) artists in a single place (the diamond), and, as a consequence, the whole Peam2006 edition will be centered onto unicity and dichotomy - such as war and peace, big and small, good and bad, love and hate, cleverness and stupidity, beauty and ugliness, close and far away, fear and comfort, real and virtual, and so on - and onto their sense of existence. In other words, the meaning itself of the concept of opposites, defining different representations of an unique symbolic system, will be put to a test, artistically.

Info: www.artificialia.com/peam2006/english.html
Press Conference: Tuesday, 5 December 2006, 11.30 AM, Sala dei Marmi, Provincia di Pescara, Piazza Italia 30 - Pescara
Contacts: [email protected]

In this context, curator and critic *Domenico Quaranta* (www.domenicoquaranta.com/english.html) will introduce the work of Gazira Babeli and Damiano Colacito, two artists who, in pretty different ways, declare the reality of our experience of virtual worlds.

Born in Second Life on 31st March 2006, *Gazira Babeli* (http://www.gazirababeli.com/) is an artist who turns the performativity of the code into performance itself. Weedy and flexuous in her long black dress which covers fashionably her polygonal haunches, Gazira radiates a strange charm that makes her somebody in between a Voodoo witch and an X-men heroine. Her charm that becomes even more evident during her masterful performances, in which she activates scripts as if they were spells, makes earthquakes happens, provokes natural fatalities and invasions of pop icons (in the place of the biblical locusts). Gazira Babeli is NOT the project of an artist who works in Second Life. She IS an artist, who makes, records and signs performances based on code. She is real, like you and me, even if her action platform is a world of bits.

Born in Atri (TE) in 1973, *Damiano Colacito* (http://www.videoludica.com/news.php?newsC4) focuses his work on the basic elements of the contemporary media landscape and the complex relationship between the virtual and the real. In the last few years he devoted himself to the creation of wooden sculptures that portray objects coming from the FPS, such as med-kits, power-ups, weapons, and etc. The Scotchprint skins he puts on the sculptures allows the author to work on details so to obtain a pretty refined reproduction of the texture of those virtual objects, and the use of sound effects, every now and then, makes the realism of the reproduction even finer. As a Pino Pascali of the Doom generation, Colacito creates conceptual sculptures that result to be amazing for both the gamer and the people who don't play videogames: the former comes across familiar objects in the wrong context,while the second has to deal with unfamiliar objects seemingly coming from another world and culture. Somehow, Colacito orchestrates a kind of mental teletransport, and materializes the insubstantial nature of the electric energy.

More infos, critical text (in italian) and press images:
http://www.domenicoquaranta.net/peam2006.html