Netmage

The tradition & historical record

Netmage is an international festival dedicated to electronic art curated by Xing and produced annually—in the city of Bologna—as a multidisciplinary program of works, investigating and promoting contemporary audiovisual research. The festival was born in 2000 with funds provided by the European Union, when Bologna represented one of the nine major European capital of culture. The festival concentrates on an amalgam of Happenings, environments, and audio/visual installations, it does through a concentration on creative scenes and subcultural communities. The experience of Netmage (eleven editions from 2001 to 2011) was merged into the annual Live Arts Week. ¹

The mission of Netmage is to investigate the relationship between the "liveness" and the "ambient space". At the crossroads of these two terms is situated the notion of "post-cinema": defined as an environmental construction capable of gathering widely diverse attitudes in a public space. ¹

Post Cinema/Postmemory It is a cinema made of multi-projections on a number of screens with no seating, a multiplication of narrative traces, possible points of view, physical positions of the spectators; achieving a removal of the forced estrangement of the 20th Century spectator (the darkness of the room, physical and perceptive isolation, a monodirectional viewing perspective) that evoke the world of the first Happenings of the 1960s, the philosophy of expanded cinema, and successive multimedia installation experiments of the 1980s. ¹

"Live Media is an open-ended term which has come into currency amongst artists and theoreticians. Live-media relates to the gathering of relatively diverse practices capable of calling to mind the wide range of research by video producers, visual artists, musicians, sound artists, VJ's, filmmakers, designers and a range of creative people issued by creative scenes and subcultural communities. Netmage and its curators have been instrumental in coining and promoting this term. ¹

utilization of electronic, digital or analogue platforms to generate images and sound; interaction consisting of visual and audio elements; inclusion of liveness (or randomness) as in any kind of performance. Playing with stimuli, what is created in the live-media experience is a "privilege of variation" that in the first case goes from designer to public, in the second from public to executor. The confrontation is direct, dictated by the logic of the event. "Dispositif" (post-cinema) and practice (Live Media) thus represent two types of continuous variation through which Netmage questions possible currents in new media aesthetics, summoning artists and visual operators from diverse disciplines, in a context reminiscent of the Happening. Despite the complexity born from the exploration of this kind of space, ideal internal space, the two axes—post-cinema and live media—intertwine and simply state what may be called a gathering, a togetherness of the community of producers, protagonists in the field of contemporary media, who both find themselves isolated; creating then a direct, interdisciplinary confrontation, thus filling a growing gap between hyper-connectivity on one hand, physical and social experience on the other. ¹

The first edition of the festival was born in an historic watershed with a view on one side from the experiences of one of the last bastions of the Twentieth Century avantgarde, video art, and on the other toward a new front that was as yet undefined while the entire world of research visual production was poised to turn fully digital. In the field of music, the 1990s had already anticipated a great deal of what was later to come in the visual world, pointing the way to a radical transformation in techniques, languages and methods of cultural consumption. Netmage, different from a number of other festivals dedicated to electronics born in the world of clubbing, has concentrated on the production of images, imagination and universal vision. In eleven editions Netmage has produced and hosted over two hundred projects from over thirty countries (including Europe, Asia, The Americas, Oceania) offering a smattering of the most recent evolutions in the technological imagination and multiple currents. Follows the list of the guests of the festival (Nationality follows standard notation) ¹

Venues: Link • Hangar del mercato Ortofrutticolo • Teatro Testoni • Rifugio Antiaereo Giardini del Guasto • Salara • Ex Scuderie di Palazzo Paleotti Artists: ¹

Venue: Scuderie Bentivoglio Artists: ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Netmage”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

Netmage is Electronic art festival, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 2 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²