[aha] PLAYLIST. PLAYING GAMES, MUSIC, ART

[Domenico Quaranta]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE


PLAYLIST.  PLAYING GAMES, MUSIC, ART

CURATOR: Domenico Quaranta
DATES: 18.12.2009 – 17.05.2010
VENUE: Mediateca Expandida de LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación
Industrial (Los Prados, 121, 33394 Gijón - Asturias)
MORE INFOS: www.laboralcentrodearte.org

ARTISTS:

Paul B. Davis (UK), Jeff Donaldson / NoteNdo (DE), Dragan Espenschied  
(DE), Gino Esposto / Micromusic.net (CH), Gijs Gieskes (NL), André  
Gonçalves (PT), Mike Johnston / Mike in Mono (UK), Joey Mariano /  
Animal Style (US), Raquel Meyers (SP), Mikro Orchestra (PL), Don  
Miller / No-carrier (US), Jeremiah Johnson / Nullsleep (US), Tristan  
Perich (US), Rabato (SP), Gebhard Sengmüller (AT), Alexei Shulgin  
(RU), Paul Slocum (USA), Tonylight (IT), VjVISUALOOP (IT).

CATALOGUE:

Texts by Matteo Bittanti, Kevin Driscoll and Joshua Diaz, Ed Halter,  
Domenico Quaranta. Music CD included.

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Along the Twentieth Century, music has often been the driving force  
behind crucial innovations in visual arts, and the starting point for  
many artists. Without forgetting the role played by music in the  
development of abstract art, it was mainly during the Sixties that  
music provided a fertile ground for new approaches, new theories, new  
art forms, new aesthetics. John Cage was a musician working with  
artists and engineers. The very first performance (the Untitled Event  
at Black Mountain College in 1952) was a musical event, such as many  
Fluxus events during the Sixties. Furthermore, Fluxus adopted music  
notation for its peculiar “scores”. It was thinking to music that  
Umberto Eco first introduced the concept of “opera aperta”. And at the  
very beginning of Video Art lies the manipulation of the electronic  
signal, first experimented by Nam June Paik in music.
PLAYLIST is an exhibition that wants to explore the role played by  
music in the adoption and manipulation, since the mid Nineties, of  
obsolete, digital as well as analogue, technologies: vinyls, old  
computers, game platforms and alikes. It's our feeling, on the one  
hand, that electronic music culture has been of great importance for  
the development of low-tech, home-based media art; and, on the other  
hand, that – such as for the early Video Art – the manipulation of the  
digital stream is mainly grounded in musical research.
The core of PLAYLIST will be the exploration of the “8bit movement”,  
spread out from the manipulation of obsolete game technologies in  
order to create new instruments to play music. The show will  
demonstrate that the retrogaming phenomenon in visual arts can be  
considered an outfit of a pretty musical phenomenon, that in a bunch  
of years spread out all over the world through festivals and clubs,  
occasionally influencing mainstream musicians; and that visual and  
musical research progressed on parallel paths, in the quest for lo-res  
sounds and aesthetics, synthetic colors and notes. For the first time,  
retro-gaming will be explored through the lens of musical production  
and distribution, displaying not only tracks, but instruments, tools,  
softwares and hardwares, skins and graphics, but also discographies,  
platforms and communities. Thus, PLAYLIST will serve as a starting  
point for an archive / collection of materials produced by artists and  
musicians, and as a relational context where visitors can practice  
with tools produced by artists, and take part in workshops, lectures,  
improvised performances.
Furthermore, PLAYLIST will try to provide a context for this kind of  
research, not necessarily game related, selecting seminal projects and  
artists that helped forging the conceptual frame in which retro-gaming  
took place.

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Domenico Quaranta

web. http://domenicoquaranta.com/
email. info at domenicoquaranta.com
mob. +39 340 2392478
skype. dom_40