Unfinished. Jonathan Monk e l'Afghanistan di Alighiero Boetti.

Per il progetto Untitled and Unfinished (Afghanistan) l’artista Jonathan Monk ha organizzato insieme alla gallerista Sonia Rosso una spedizione in Afghanistan, presso i laghi di Band-E-Amir, sulle cui acque Alighiero Boetti avrebbe voluto che le sue ceneri venissero disperse dopo la morte, azione che tuttavia non è mai avvenuta. Tra le difficoltà dovute alla situazione politica e a vari problemi logistici, nel 2004 Mustafa Sahibzada, un ragazzo Afghano incaricato dall'artista, seguendo le istruzioni sul luogo e riguardo alla tipologia di materiali da raccogliere, ha potuto realizzare filmati e fotografie, che hanno permesso a Monk di produrre cinque film in formato 16mm, ciascuno corredato da 16 fotografie scattate durante il percorso per raggiungere i laghi. Questo articolo si propone di ricostruire il progetto dietro l’operazione artistica, contestualizzandolo nel dibattito contemporaneo attorno alle riletture dell'Afghanistan di Alighiero Boetti.Jonathan Monk organized, for the Untitled and Unfinished (Afghanistan)project and together with gallerist Sonia Rosso, an expedition to Afghanistan to find the Band-E-Amir lakes, where Alighiero Boetti would have liked his ashes to be scattered after his death, an action which never took place. Among the difficulties due to the political situation and various logistical problems, in 2004, Jonathan Monk had entrusted the documentation of the lakes to Sahibzada Mustafa, an Afghan boy, who,following precise instructions about the place and about the types of materials to be collected, was able to take many films and pictures and send them to the artist, who produced five films depicting the lakes in 16mm, with a strictly fixed camera shot, each one accompanied by 16 photographs taken during the route to the lakes.This article aims to retrace the project behind the artistic operation, putting the work in the context of the contemporary debate about Alighiero Boetti's Afghanistan

MoRE: un museo digitale dedicato al non realizzato / MoRE: a digital museum of the unrealised

MoRE è un museo digitale, e conserva esclusivamente documenti digitali, un elemento che ci impone un confronto con il complesso tema della realtà del web e delle proposte che in questi anni sono state avanzate sul tema della digitalizzazione e della possibilità di operarvi in relazione ai temi della conservazione e della tutela. Si propone di documentare un tessuto progettuale e artistico quasi del tutto sconosciuto che ha diritto di essere inserito a tutti gli effetti nella storia del progetto in senso lato (il “non realizzato” coinvolge del resto anche il panorama espositivo se pensiamo alle mostre non realizzate, gli allestimenti rimasti sulla carta e le occasioni abortite) e che, se letto dal punto di vista archivistico e documentaristico, offre materiale decisamente interessante. Contribuendo a definire non solo le singole storie artistiche e quelle attuali, l’archivio permetterà quindi di indagare le modalità di rapporto con le istituzioni e con i pilastri del sistema stesso delineabili anche grazie alle motivazioni suggerite dagli artisti per la mancata realizzazione di progetti commissionati o comunque pensati per essere realizzati, informazioni che contribuiscono a definire e a raccontare le difficoltà tecniche, economiche, morali, etiche ecc… con cui l’artista oggi si confronta.MoRE is a digital museum, and it collects only digital materials, an element that forces us to deal with the complex reality of the web and of the proposals advanced so far about digitization and the opportunities that it offers for the preservation and conservation of the works of art.MoRE does not aim at writing a parallel history of art, but to document a set of projects and works of art pretty much unknown that deserves to be included with no doubts in the history of the project broadly speaking (the unrealised involves after all the system of exhibitions too if we think at all the unrealized exhibitions and arrangements and the occasions failed) and that constitutes an interesting heritage from an archivistic and documentaristic point of view.The archive, by contributing to the definition of historical and contemporary art, will help to understand the relations with institutions and the pillars of the system itself, also thanks to the explanations given by the artists for the non-realization of the projects, commissioned or intended to be realized anyway, information that helps in describing the technical, economical and ethical difficulties that the artist has to face nowadays

Unbuilt art. Appunti per un dibattito sul non realizzato

L’articolo si propone di affrontare e ricostruire il dibattito intorno al tema del non realizzato nell’arte contemporanea. In relazione al museo digitale MoRE, l’obiettivo è quello di individuare specifiche linee di ricerca e prospettive, spesso interdisciplinari, che hanno posto le basi per un progetto di ricerca, guardando al dibattito legato al ruolo del progetto e alla sua messa in discussione come a più recenti pratiche curatoriali, per arrivare a una definizione del non realizzato.This article wants to take on and reconstruct the debate that, from the fifties until today, was built around the theme of the unrealised in contemporary art. In relation to the digital museum MoRE, the goal is to identify specific lines of research and perspectives, often interdisciplinary ones, who have laid the foundation for a research project, looking at the debate regarding the role of the project and how it’s been questioned, and at the same time at some more recent curatorial practices, to define what the unrealised is

Intervista a / An interview with Scott King & Matthew Worley - CRASH! Londra, 05.07.2013

Intervista al collettivo CRASH!, composto da Scott King e Matthew Worley, realizzata a Londra da Marco Scotti in occasione della donazione del progetto A Better Britain a MoRE.An interview with CRASH!, Scott King and Matthew Worley, taken in London by Marco Scotti on the occasion of the donation of the A Better Britain project to MoRE

A mesocosm concept for the simulation of near-natural shallow underwater climates: The Kiel Outdoor Benthocosms (KOB)

Biogenic, seasonal, and stochastic fluctuations at various scales characterize coastal marine habitats and modulate environmental stress. The relevance of most past studies into climate change impacts is weakened by the usually intentional exclusion of fluctuations from the experimental design. We describe a new outdoor mesocosm system for benthic research (“benthocosms”) which permit the control and manipulation of several environmental variables while admitting all natural in situ fluctuations. This is achieved by continuously measuring the relevant variables (e.g., temperature, pH, O2, CO2) in situ, defining these in real time as reference values in the control software and simulating target climates by delta treatments. The latter constitute the manipulative addition of predefined changes (e.g., “warming”, “acidification”) to the reference values. We illustrate the performance of the system by presenting the environmental data of four seasonal experiments which together represent an entire year. The “Kiel Outdoor Benthocosms” allow realizing near-natural climate change experiments on complex benthic communities under controlled scenarios

A network analysis of cofactor-protein interactions for analyzing associations between human nutrition and diseases

The involvement of vitamins and other micronutrients in intermediary metabolism was elucidated in the mid 1900's at the level of individual biochemical reactions. Biochemical pathways remain the foundational knowledgebase for understanding how micronutrient adequacy modulates health in all life stages. Current daily recommended intakes were usually established on the basis of the association of a single nutrient to a single, most sensitive adverse effect and thus neglect interdependent and pleiotropic effects of micronutrients on biological systems. Hence, the understanding of the impact of overt or sub-clinical nutrient deficiencies on biological processes remains incomplete. Developing a more complete view of the role of micronutrients and their metabolic products in protein-mediated reactions is of importance. We thus integrated and represented cofactor-protein interaction data from multiple and diverse sources into a multi-layer network representation that links cofactors, cofactor-interacting proteins, biological processes, and diseases. Network representation of this information is a key feature of the present analysis and enables the integration of data from individual biochemical reactions and protein-protein interactions into a systems view, which may guide strategies for targeted nutritional interventions aimed at improving health and preventing diseases

Single species features in ecological networks

Le reti alimentari descrivono le relazioni trofiche (flussi di materia o energia) tra le specie di un ecosistema. All’interno di questo ambito, una metodologia diffusa ed ampiamente utilizzata è denominata “ecosystem network analysis” (ENA). La maggior parte delle applicazioni di teoria delle reti utilizza indici globali per caratterizzare struttura e funzionamento degli ecosistemi, mentre pochi esempi sono indirizzati all’indagine delle proprietà dei singoli componenti. Attraverso questo lavoro, partendo dalla struttura metodologica dell’ENA, mi propongo di estendere la comprensione del ruolo delle specie in funzione della posizione occupata all’interno delle reti. In particolare, analizzo l’importanza di quantificare l’intensità delle relazioni trofiche (pesi) rispetto alla semplice distribuzione binaria dei legami (presenza/assenza), garantendo informazioni funzionali in aggiunta alle caratteristiche topologiche. Confrontando diverse tipologie di reti (preda-predatore, pianta-impollinatore, ospite-parassita), dimostro come l’importanza del peso vari con la tipologia di interazione considerata. Inoltre, esploro come la posizione trofica, espressione del flusso energetico nei sistemi naturali, condizioni la topologia delle reti ecologiche. Descrivo, quindi, la distribuzione di abitudini alimentari specialistiche e generalistiche lungo la catena trofica, discutendo aspetti connessi all’onnivoria. Analisi matematiche, algoritmi e regolarità sono testati ed analizzati su dati reali, enfatizzando il bisogno di un’azione sinergica tra studi empirici ed approccio simulativo.Food webs describe feeding relationships between species, depicting road maps for the flow of energy and matter in ecosystems. In this conceptual framework, a prominent collection of quantitative methods consists of ecosystem network analysis (ENA). Few examples focussing on single species features, as emerging from roles they play in complex systems, have been stressed. By this research, starting from ENA procedure, I try to extend the knowledge on properties displayed by species in relation to whole system structure. I stress the problem of considering weights in ecological networks, since dealing with unweighted graph we are simply paying attention to the topological organization of nodes and links, while analyzing a weighted network we are including functional information that can obscure significantly the topological characteristics. Comparing different ecological networks (e.g. predator-prey, plant-pollinator, host-parasite), I demonstrate how the importance of weighting may vary depending on interaction types. I explore how species trophic position (energy delivery) affects food web topology, evaluating distribution of trophic specialization and generalist trophic behaviour towards the trophic chain and defining omnivory composition. Within my thesis, mathematical developments, algorithms and patterns were tested and analyzed on real data, stimulating the need of a coupled action between empirical studies and simulations

Ettore Sottsass. Il viaggio e l’archivio

Ettore Sottsass Jr. (Innsbruck 1917-Milan 2007) was an architect, artist, designer, photographer, and writer, who always had a nomadic approach to events. This led him to travel incessantly around the world ever since his university years and till the end of his life. Starting from his archive, this article aims at investigating the design methods and processes around his journeys by considering both his business trips and the ones fostered by his curiosity. Travelling represented a tool for the search of his own identity, a parallel path in his long and seminal career, always intertwined with his design methodology

Feste in Brianza. Le grafiche di Ettore Sottsass e gli eventi nella falegnameria di Renzo Brugola

Within the design career of Ettore Sottsass, in the second half of the Sixties, it is possible to find three apparently surprising projects: three invitations for as many parties, organized in the carpentry shop of one of his collaborators and friends, Renzo Brugola. This article aims to reconstruct the context of these works and the respective parties, starting from the designer’s archives, to try to focus on their importance with respect to the pacifist cultural scene called “beat” and the counterculture of which Sottsass and his wife Fernanda Pivano were entertainers