This is the era of “crossover culture”, the culture of an incredible mix
“We have finally realized that culture and its most advanced forms are not only the fanciful ambitions of a few fanatics of artistic creativity -explained Senaldi- but are capable of creating culture”.
The Italian university is now faced with important issues owing both to the university system’s internal structure and to the latest generations of students that have grown up with digital languages. In which areas do you feel should measures be taken for a real reform?
It is certainly no secret that the Italian university is not navigating in calm waters. Unfortunately, there are international rankings that place us close to the bottom of the list, but aside from this, it is the general atmosphere in the Italian universities that seems to be leading to nothing good. Reform can happen and it must, but I dare say that a “spiritual” renewal is necessary that has little to do with the path of “objective criteria” for selecting professors and requires opening to novelties, to international debate, to research centers, to the idea of outstanding campuses that interact with other social and territorial sectors, while rigorously respecting political, economic and cultural autonomy. Opening to new means of communication and languages is fundamental, but it must always be integrated with the idea that teaching is transmitting examples and practical experiences, not only notions. I feel the impasse in the so-called e-learning should carefully be considered: the unavoidable use of new technology and new media should always be included within the practice of transmitting knowledge.
In this sense, how do you judge the You tube phenomenon?
I would like to provide a small personal example: the planet’s largest video archive, Youtube, has been often idolized, as the Internet in general, as a communicative panacea of the new millennium, and often demonized as a place for infamies often arising out of school situations of total degeneration. Together with my assistants, I have thought of using You tube as a resource and of creating a specific playlist where students, or simply anyone interested, could find videos of topics discussed in the class or in the books, without having to include with the book a costly DVD which is difficult to make, non-modifiable and therefore immediately obsolete, or to refer to things that would otherwise be “invisible”. It was a success mediated by a cultural itinerary built piece by piece and face to face.
For some years, art and design have often been associated with the worlds of business and innovation. Which connections can be established between these two types of knowledge and these worlds?
between the worlds of more advanced and free creativity and entrepreneurial ones linked to the market needs are no longer a utopia, but a consolidated reality. It is sufficient to think of the connection between contemporary art and fashion, or between the more established link between design and industry: usually it is mentioned only generically, but there are many firm examples that are visible, such as the creation of foundations devoted to contemporariness, of prizes linked to leading fashion trademarks or to leading companies or firms, to the opening toward production realities of authorities that at one time were purely self-referential, to partnerships and long-term sponsorships for periodic events, and so on.
Which is the real novelty?
We have finally realized that culture and its most advanced forms are not only the fanciful ambitions of a few fanatics of artistic creativity, but even when they seem so and appear detached from any possible practical materialization, in reality they generate interest, they polarize the attention and can shift masses of users, re-orient consumption and transform the experience of a territory: In one word, they can create value. Art, design, and why not, also critiques, philosophy, debates, once taken out of the academic context, have an enormous performing force. Personally, I believe that we are on the verge of a transformation similar to the one that affected music in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Once music became a form of popular entertainment, it was transformed from aesthetic pleasure reserved only to an élite of connoisseurs to an irreplaceable mass experience. It would be difficult today for a “classic” economist or a ruthless marketing professional to dare say that music is not, in contemporary terms, a phenomenon of the planetary market.
How has visual culture changed in relation to the new media languages?
Visual culture, by definition, is an open field, a “contested terrain”, a field where forces, rightfully or not, enter into conflict with one another. The new media, with the possibility of continuous and ubiquitous access to all the archives of all the images of history of art, have certainly overturned our way of thinking and of practicing every form of art. Today it is the task of the new media to open onto new creative scenarios, particularly if for new media we don’t only mean digital technology applied to the visual, but also immersive technology, holographic, interactive, advanced communication technology, nanotechnology, creating new materials and biotechnology.
What has changed in respect to the recent past?
We have a greater awareness: a very unexpected aspect was that we have realized that the advent of a new medium is not limited to erasing the previous one, but they both become integrated into a new horizon. The fantastic thing is that the most advanced and immaterial media do not prevent form of expressions to exist such as painting, sculpture, design or even the body, in what some researches such as Bolter and Grusin have rightfully named as “Remediation”, and others as “convergence culture”. I would definitely say that we have entered the era of “crossover culture”, the culture of an incredible mix, a total “fusion”, not free, naturally, of paradoxes, but certainly very lively and unpredictable.
The Terna Prize 02 intends to join best corporate practices with cultural ones, favoring a reflection on the need to look ahead to the planet’s future with a responsible approach to the environment and energy. Do you feel that today this is an attainable objective and is art still capable of encouraging a greater critical awareness?
Art either shows a critical awareness, or it doesn’t. A non-critical art would produce new methods of thinking and of looking at things, it would be limited to confirming that which exists, it would not be art. Therefore it is quite natural that art sets the high ambition of representing a key ingredient in enhancing the collective awareness, which is man’s awareness towards his environment and ultimately towards himself. Since the Homo sapiens appeared on Earth 300,000 years ago, the trend has always been the same: the continuous mixing and fusion, at first only scattered, but gradually becoming more homogeneous, of the various human groups until reaching, including counter-movements of conflict, the shared notion of mankind, is a process that cannot be stopped. This process was taken for granted, but, it should make us stop and think that today, in the 21st century, the most advanced artistic expressions substantially speak the same formal language in all the corners of the planet, something that had never occurred before. We are approaching the fusion point: we now have global means of communication, in a global language, everything can be communicated to everyone instantly and everywhere.
This would seem a positive goal…
But this type of holism, even though judged by many as being a wonderful goal, tends to spark a counter-movement, a conflict of proportions that are just as gigantic. This is the ecologic catastrophe which perhaps rightly many are comparing to a third world war and which ultimately should be properly read not as an imbalance between man and the environment, but as a crisis of awareness belonging to all of mankind, an imbalance between man and himself. We have recently discovered the existence of a sixth continent, five or six times the size of the Iberian peninsula, formed by all the waste accumulated in the oceans over the past decades. The Pacific Trash Vortex, the name given to it, is a new continent made of waste and located in the North Pacific that we have created, the most faithful reflection of our present human condition and of the problems that our existence creates. In the 17th century, the philosopher Francis Bacon believed that, just as explorers were capable of discovering the new American continent, man would have soon discovered new mental lands; with the Pacific Trash Vortex we can sadly say that we are discovering the level of deterioration our civilization has reached. Perhaps, however, it could be considered a positive element as the final test of man’s inventive and human capabilities, the true challenge that is adequate to our thinking and our creativity. Don’t the best minds of our generation have to face mega-phenomena like these? Won’t the force of art and of a future thought have to be measured against this scale?
2009-09-30
