MCD #74 - Art Industries

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Mag MCD #74 - Art Industries
Presentation: Thursday 19/06, 6pm, NUMA in Paris
Carte Blanche curated by Marco Mancuso, Digicult


Digicult is happy to announce that the new MCD Magazine issue #74 is finally out. The French printed version will be followed by the English digital free version, soon next July.

For this issue Marco Mancuso (Director at Digicult) curated a special section, focused on his recent researches around what he calls "Art Industries", so giving the title to the issue itself. He focused on the most valuable case studies of Open Innovation strategies in the world of media art, looking at those hidden forms of collaborations between artists, designer, scientists, practioneers, curators, critics, universities, institutions and industries in the world of ICT technologies, applied and medical sciences, open hardware and free software, computational design…

With critical texts by Marc Garrett (Furtherfield), Claudia D'Alonzo (Digicult), Caroline Heron (Metamute) Nik Hafermaas (Uebersee) and interviews to Philip Dean (Aalto Media Factory), Gerfried Stocker (Ars Electronica), Carlo Ratti (MIT Senseable City Lab), Michael John Gorman (Science Gallery), Jeffrey Huang and Alex Barchiesi (Sinlab), Joachim Sauter (ART+COM). Thanks to Donata Marletta and Giulia Baldi for the translations

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For more than a decade, the economies necessary to set processes of media art and culture production have come from banks, private entrepreneurs, external sponsorships on markets that are apparently virgin but obviously ready for commercial contamination just to guarantee their own survival. The common sensation is that even these models are shortly destined to failure. We have to give place to more virtuous processes which correlate closely the research field with the production sector. I am speaking about “production” in a wide sense, and I am advocating to pay close attention to what is rather defined “cultural production”.

In a time of economical crisis and cuts to art and culture, it’s increasing, ideed, the number of international examples, cultural subjects, creative professionals (artists, designers, hackers, makers, musicians, filmmakers, graphic designers …) and industries – ICT, science research, manufacturing processes, robotcs, biotechnologies, artificial intelligence and more - involved in the standardization of sustainable research and development models in order to activate processes of Open Research that are functional to the creation of a "cultural object".

It has been observed, over the past years, a growing phenomenon for which different cultural subjects, not necessarily institutionalized but making "value" on a new scale of socio-economic models more connected to Internet, Networks, Bottom-Up cultural production, can therefore provide guarantees by relating industrial companies with a network of universities, media & research centers, institutions, as well as creating an exchange mechanism among artists, professionals and practitioners (such as professors, former students, researchers, etc.) that may be even linked to these institutions themselves. Under the so-called "Art Industries", these new cultural players are also able at setting dynamics of diffusion and circulation of the “cultural object” produced, within exhibition and museum itineraries which industries would probably have no access to. It may be that the interest of an entire productive sector to invest in art and culture will be greater than it was in the past.

The ability of "Art Industries" is therefore to act as a catalyst and incubator of a new form of bottom-up economy and culture, linked to the use of technology, even though, to do so, it is necessary that a network of contacts is created; it is necessary to be integrated in the right professional circuits and, above all, it is necessary to know all the underworld of artists and designers who have taken an active part for about twenty years. It’s important to know the most important case studies at international level, it is necessary to draw a specific literature, between that relating to the "creative industries" and that concerning the "media art", to know also how paradigms of production of a cultural and artistic object are changing, as they are influenced by the relationship with companies and the mass production market, as meccanisms of free expression and research on the medium are changing. But the outcome is already determined.

http://www.digitalmcd.com/mcd74-artindustrie/