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.

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.

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”.

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.

Integrazione VS decostruzione nelle collaborazioni degli artisti visivi con la tv e qualche nota su Foligno ’67 di Alfredo Di Laura

The contribution gives an overview of the way visual artists have intervened in television production and within its specific audiovisual languages. Against the background of some famous and prolonged international experiences, the reflection focuses on Italian television between the 1960s and 1970s. Integration, experimentation, deconstruction are some of the categories in which such interventions can be steal, in relation to the way in which painters, sculptors and multimedia artists have intended to relate to tv, on the one hand attracted by the communicative and technological potential of the medium, and on the other critical of that type of visual universe and cultural offer in general. In the same position is also placed Alfredo Di Laura, television director and author of the program Avanguardie ‘60: a particularly representative case study both as an innovative reading of the seminal contemporary art exhibition, Lo spazio dell’immagine, and for the marginalization in the schedule. The intent of the contribution, moreover, is also to underline the ineffectiveness of critical formulations that in assimilating television to electronic technology tout court absorb peculiar formal exercises, born in dialectic with the pervasive means of mass communication, within the wider history of video art.

Dalla formazione in scenografia alla Rai. Giosetta Fioroni costumista e Pino Pascali scenografo per la nascente televisione italiana

Giosetta Fioroni and Pino Pascali have worked in different years for the nascent national television. Fioroni was engaged as a costume designer between 1955 and 1957; while Pascali as set designer between 1963-1967. For both – educated in scenography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome – these commissioned works precede their debut as research artists. The programs examined, Gli interessi creati and Biblioteca di Studio Uno, represent case studies of Fioroni and Pascali's way of working with the scenic and then with the television language. This contribution intends to examine the works commissioned by Rai to Giosetta Fioroni and Pino Pascali, highlighting how these episodes are exemplary to understand the impact of the academic training from the intermediate stage of their artistic career, up to the synthesis made in the mature works of the two artists.

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.