Il piede e la sincope Note su Edipo sveglia il tempo di Chiara Guidi

The essay is based on the direct observation of the Edipo sveglia il tempo, a workshop directed by Chiara Guidi with a group of twenty-six teenagers. This Socìetas director, author and actress starts with Oedipus Rex by Sophocles to promote a mythopoeic exercise that suspends the «radical myth» involving custody and deviation, enacting it in a bodily-vocal practice. In this scenic writing, Oedipus’ limp becomes the pivot of a rhythmic dramaturgy with a syncopated gait, able to orient voice, words and movement.

L’invenzione della tv in Italia nell’ esperienza di Mario Sasso.

Mario Sasso, painter and videoartist, has gradually made the expressive exploration of new technological languages the privileged area of his experience. However, he is also known to the general public for being the most sensitive "art director" of television graphics, an activity in which, since the 1960s, and in particular for Rai-Radiotelevisione italiana, he has transfused the richness of his plastic research. Sasso is the main architect of the "image" of Italian public television: of that particular way of presenting himself and being recognized, beyond the programs, in peculiar signs and graphic layouts that the artist himself has conceptually contributed to conceiving: innovating and proposing in new ways the languages of nascent television. Made by him are the first “covers”, the first broadcast opening credits of Rai and its flagship programs; as well as a whole series of expressive innovations that have marked the history of the audiovisual sector. Furthermore, operations of destructuring and intersection of artistic languages that have contributed to building the identity of the medium in Italy even before the official affirmation of the electronic arts and up to the pioneering experience of RaiSat.

Obladì Obladà e Immagina: sperimentazioni tra video e computer art in tv

During the Eighties, with the spread of personal computers, the image of the Italian television was revolutionised by computer graphics. Broadcasts like Obladì Obladà (1985) and Immagina (1987-88), both directed by Ranuccio Sodi, made extensive use of computer graphics and combined analogue and digital post-production techniques. These programs were dedicated to contemporary audio-visual production: from videoclips to video installations, from advertising to computer art and, more generally, to artistic forms related to electronics. For Obladì Obladà, Massimo Iosa Ghini designed the graphic line and created a futuristic studio that revealed the style of bolidismo. While in Immagina, Fabrizio Plessi’s scenographies dictated the aesthetics of the transmission, dialoguing with Mario Convertino’s graphics. The article aims to analyse the two programs as products of an aesthetical and technological experimentation in which the collaboration between the director and the artists involved represents an attempt to create a “television art”.

La tv come casa dell’arte. Sperimentazioni e utopie

The involvement of art in tv devices is examined from a double point of view: on the one hand, the use of tv as a divulgation tool that compares the history of art, entertainment and spectacularization; and on the other, the interpretation of tv as a tool for artistic experimentation. The hypothesis of a cultural use of the potential of audiovisual communication is elaborated in particular by numerous art historians, with different initiatives that reflect the variants of the very notion of art history and art criticism. The hypothesis of TV as a possible tool for making art according to unprecedented linguistic modulations starts from Lucio Fontana in the context of spatialist theories and then develops autonomously in the specific of new technological languages: the programs, the devices and the physicality of the television itself were in fact the first "material" that the artists used to elaborate what went down in history as "videoart". In the paths outlined in this short essay, television has taken on the significance of a strongly symbolic medium, in the alternation of different and often contrasting messages and models, linked to a variety of cultural and ideological positions.

Didattica d’artista in tv: Costruire è facile di Bruno Munari

Through the examination of the old issues of the “Radiocorriere”, the contribution measures the size of an artist’s work for tv, that was surprisingly lasting and structured: the television serial program Costruire è facile [Making is easy], written and presented by Bruno Munari (Milan, 1907-1998). Broadcasted throughout 1956 on the Rai national program, the program earned the artist/designer a certain reputation also as a television presenter. Still little investigated, Munari’s work for television responds to one of the main tasks which, according to him, are proper to the artists in the mass society: unveiling the “secrets of the trade” in order to build a future in which the art of the few can be replaced by an art freely made by everyone. Obviously, one has to learn to be creative, therefore the artists have to start teaching. The masterpiece that society expects from them has a didactic reason, and to convey it, television proves to be a very effective vehicle.

«Noi non riprendiamo la realtà: la inventiamo»: Eugenio Carmi

In the late 1960s, at the invitation of Umberto Eco, Eugenio Carmi began to collaborate with Servizio Programmi Sperimentali in Rai. After some research on perception, the artist proposed an actual “transgression” for the use of television medium: using cameras not to film the reality, but to create a completely abstract color video work. From an exchange with Rai technicians, the idea was born to use in an artistic way the disturbance generated when you point a video camera at its own playback video monitor. Thus began the first Italian videoart experiments of so-called “feedback” process, to get between 1972 and 1974 to the documentary Arte elettronica, arte della luce and the video work C’era una volta un re, and then, in 1977, the animated fairy tale Olivo verde vivo created by the painter’s daughters Antonia and Francesca Carmi with Giulio Masoni.

Rincorrere per non acchiappare. Un viaggio nell’esistenza di Wile E. Coyote e Road Runner, performer

The article introduces the theory of a ludic acting approach to drama, formulated by the Russian director and drama theorist Anatolij Vasil'ev in the 90s. Subsequently, the array of analytical devices of this theory are applied to Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner the cartoon series produced between the 1940s and the 80s by Warner Bros, directed by Chuck Jones. The analysis outlines some of its dynamic make up and focuses attention on the rich poetic impact of these works. Finally, the essay focuses on the specific dramatic function of acting looking into the camera, seen as a cinematographic analogue of the particular type of "apart" which in the theater is defined as “coup de masque”.

La colpa in gioco Elementi del Trauerspiel (a partire da Benjamin)

The article discusses the theatrical form named Trauerspiel (baroque drama or mourning play), starting from the very elements that form its concept – play and mourning. Far from being identifiable with tragedy or from being reducible to a sort of anticipation of Romantic features, Trauerspiel expresses the traumas of subjectivity in early modern age, as it deals with religious and political turmoil. Taking inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, the article investigates some crucial elements of baroque mise-en-scène such as sovereignty, guilt, empathy, searching for further intersections with the theories of play by both Johan Huizinga and Georges Bataille.

Se la tv è un white cube. Trasmissioni dell’arte nella televisione italiana degli anni Novanta

During the 1990s, artists, critics, animators and tv authors saw the possibility of a fruitful dialogue between their respective areas of expertise. This relationship between art and television, however, took place under the banner of a reciprocal rethinking of the two entities: in some cases the medium conditioned artists to the point of inducing them to define specific operating methods or to transform their own works, in others, on the other hand, it was the transmission of the works themselves that “reinvented the medium”. The performative incursions carried out by the duo Formento Sossella and Arpiani Pagliarini for popular programmes such as Blob, Forum and Uomini e Donne are indicative of a thinning between reality and fiction that is typical of the television world and that, not by chance, also affects a good part of Italian art of the decade. The broadcast on Rai Tre of shows such as Prima Puntata and Arte Video TV in the mid-1990s attests to the unexpected possibility of redefining television as a sort of artistic installation connected to specific exhibition occasions. The activity of Leonardo Carrano for L’Angelo (Fininvest) and the collaboration between Paolo Canevari and Alberto D’Amico in the context of Blobcartoon (Rai Tre) are two interesting cases of semantic shift of the work and the dissolution of its unity within the new visual paradigms. The contribution examines these experiences verifying each time their respective implications.

Note sul rapporto tra artisti e televisione italiana delle origini

This paper aims to reconstruct some of the issues that revolve around the role played by artists in early Italian television in a discursive and non-exhaustive way. The principal aim is to discuss how the study of the television experiences of many visual artists can help to re-read some issues in the field of television historiography. First of all, the importance of the sources and their necessary integration in the study of this relationship will be underlined, with particular reference to the problem of accessibility (see the Rai experimental programs produced between 1952 and 1954). Secondly, we will focus on the relationship between arthouse and popular culture, as it emerges from early Italian television and develops, over the following years, in the debate between entertainment television and art television. As a third question, we will focus on a marginalized element, that of the audiences, and we will discuss what kind of negotiations the art consumption through television implies. Through these three issues some possible lines of research will be drawn in order to try to broaden the approaches and perspectives of television historiography.