Flussi 2013

By the concept-title “displaycement”, 2013 Flussi identifies a research path that is placed simultaneously inside and outside of the reflection on digital culture. On one hand, If we can take it for granted now that the historic transition to a regime medial innervated and structured by digital technologies (with all the consequences in terms of social, cognitive, aesthetic, political), we are also aware of the gradual weakening of the rhetoric, the utopias and the belief system that supported and accompanied its first phase.

The social networks simultaneously produces an enlargement of the field of communication and the possibilities of action of individuals and groups, but at the same time is reversed in refined forms of control and profiling no longer based on repression and discipline but on the pleasure and freedom of sharing (I like!), all for the use and consumption of the great actors of global marketing, the free movement of ‘creativity’ and of spontaneous labor are recaptured in new strategies for the use and exploitation; visual and sound forms of digital experimentation are fully captured by the establishment spectacular system, so they can freely circulate in the market in the form of plug-ins and apps.

Old gurus believe now in the end of the digital revolution, so they can declare pitfalls and dangers while many critics are quick to identify the next paradigm and, finding no solution, they affix yet another “post-”: we are already living in a postdigital era in which the driving force, vital and full of  future that digital culture brought with itself, is revealing as un-consistent, spilling into a rampant retromania. The interpretation grids and the aesthetic forms that got the foundation in the digital culture, are becoming weaker and weaker.

In this scenario, Flussi, in 2013, puts itself in a perspective that takes once more the experimentation path, started already with the previous editions: the search for new visions, new ideas, new stories, new ways of ‘being in the world’, new modes of critical invention, through the use of recombinant reflection and imagination.

Displaycement is primarily a game of words, and, as indicated by Wittgenstein, the production of a lifeform, so as a universe of meaning. Displaycement is the place itself in an oblique perspective, outside the framework compared to the dominant narratives on culture and the electronic / digital arts, aware that it is no longer sufficient to refer to the pure technology to find a space of expression and invention.

This maybe means to be less serious, sure it means to be open to the unexpected, the irruption of the paradox, the useless, out of use, of what did not, or could not have a place in the circuit of economic exchange or scientific accepted methods.

Displaycement pushes our forces of emotional intelligence, maybe still little explored but capable to be a counterforce (which does not aim at the head-on collision, does not dig trenches, but rather slips out, splashing away, surprises and acts in fields of autonomous and free dynamics, critical but playful), a joyful antithetic resistance, capable of thinking-creating-living the new, through imagination, awareness, gaming and free flight.