Pirate-Camp is supported and promoted by the non-profit organization Kaninchenhaus with the patronage of the City of Turin and GAI (Association for the Circuit of the Young Italian Artists) and with the collaboration of the Department for Youth policies of the City of Venice and of Art Enclosures (Residencies for visiting international artists in Venice – a residency program for international artists created and produced by Fondazione di Venezia).

FROM THE PIRATE ATTACK TO THE PIRATE CAMP…

Following Coniglioviola’s PIRATE ATTACK TO THE BIENNALE IN VENICE, performed by the group in 2007, PIRATE CAMP represents the next step in this story.
After the attack, time has come for the pirates to halt on the mainland: colonize the territory and share the treasures stored during their long trip, before taking the Sea route again.

The pirate camp – filling up the ideal gap between the sea, the pirates dominion,  and the land, the system’s dominion -  is first and foremost a work of art itself. It is the metaphorical representation of the natural and necessary condition of being-an-artist.
The analogy between the artist and the pirate/encamped is the pivot concept, both from a symbolic and a philosophical point of view: a status of extra-territoriality which grants the artist a privileged point of view to critically observe and depict the world.

Pirate Camp wants do be an answer to young artists’ needs since going to the great arts biennals, the most important art fairs and exhibitions can be very expensive. Hence, the creation of a campsite totally free of charge that will allow a specific number of artists – selected through a public competition – to experience these events.

A DIFFERENT ARTIST IN RESIDENCY PROGRAM.

Pirate Camp is an indipendent project designed by artists for artists.

The Residencies we are used to, are generally organized by institutions, museums or private mecenates, and seem to work on the unwitting assumption that, not just the work of art, but its creator as well, can be objectified and included in some sort of a private collection.
On the other hand, the Pirate Camp wants to be a living platform, and each and every participant becomes essential to its life.

The Pirate Camp wants to be a great platform supporting the exchange of new ideas and the mobility of young artists. Such a place wants to give life to a collaborative experiment of artistic creation and encourage the development of a collective and solid conscience, creating an international network able to experiment alternative and independent forms of intervention within the contemporary art system.

THE FIRST PIRATE CAMP EDITION WILL BE HELD DURING THE 54TH BIENNALE D’ARTE DI VENEZIA FROM MAY 31 TO JUNE 6, 2011 BREAKING FOR THE FIRST TIME THE NOTORIOUS “NO CAMPING” LAW IN THE CITY OF VENICE!

1^st edition

THE STATELESS PAV @ 54.Biennale di Venezia

VENICE/ITALY. MAY 31 – JUNE 6_2011

ON LINE SUBMISSION ONLY.
DEADLINE May 10, 2011

www.pirate-camp.org

Concerto senza titolo (Untitled concert) – the new theatrical show by ConiglioViola and Antonella Ruggiero – is a poetical investigation on the greatest taboo of contemporary culture: the Death. This reticence is particularly evident in a field of our culture that has always been one of the main centers of interest in ConiglioViola’s artistic research: pop culture.

In High Fidelity Nick Hornby wrote “In pop music there are no many songs about death, at least not many good songs”.

This statement of  fact  immediately became a challenge for ConiglioViola. Not only we have looked for some good songs about death, but – to make the challenge even more exciting – we have chosen only Italian songs.

Video-trailer :

The electronic orchestration gives to these classical songs of Italian tradition a new contemporary fit. We find interesting to put in relation the electronic scene with the Italian melodic repertory.

On the stage the songs are executed by Antonella Ruggiero suspended inside a skirt installation that makes her 3 meters tall, an electric string quartet, a moving touch piano and the electronic live set.

The choice of using classical instruments (like the string quartet) in their electric version is related to the concert theme, to the idea of dematerialization.

Each musical execution is accompanied by the projection of videos created by ConiglioViola and screened through the utilization of new technologies, such as holographic projections.

The use of these very new systems of projection is related to the concept of the project because consents us to materialize, on the stage, ghosts and spirits.

The center of the scene is occupied also by a moving-touch piano, whose keys move without the human intervention. The code of the piano, when opened, will assume the semblance of an open coffin.

Pics of the show:

Musicians and performers are  black dressed and move on completely black backgrounds, exclusively enlighten by VOOD lamps. This way, the reprise of another theatrical tradition, the Black Light Theatre,  gives to the audience the illusion that the instruments are played by ghosts…

The not-title of the project is also referred to this dimension of absence. When a new document is opened in any informatics application, this is automatically named “Untitled document”. This blank space, still to be filled, will be the aesthetic dimension of this new production.

For the 5th edition of Contemporary Art Day – organized by AMACI, the Italian Association of Contemporary Art Museums – PAC Pavillion of Contemporary Art of Milan open for the first time its doors to a very young artist with a big show that tells all ConiglioViola’s world.

An artistic name which is active in all fields of the contemporary art scene – from video art to photography, from electronic music to experimental theatre, from net.art to performance – ConiglioViola rapidly garnered public and critical attention for projects that cross the thresholds of contemporary art, in a transversal approach that invades all areas of creative expression. The group’s many projects are united by an ironic and tentacular investigation of the increasingly uncertain borders between the various compartments of contemporary culture and in particular between mass and élite culture.

Sono un pirata / Sono un signore (I am a pirate / I am a gentleman) draws on the Pirate Attack on the Venice Biennale carried out by ConiglioViola in 2007, in which it fired 52 cannon shots against the venue of the prestigious contemporary art event, from on board a giant pirate winged rabbit. This spectacular and symbolic action has been chosen as a manifesto to define the role that ConiglioViola plays on the art scene.

The exhibition at the PAC, designed to be a meta-work in itself, unwinds in a series of rooms, each dedicated to a different project. The visitor is led through the show as if undergoing a transformation in relation to the works and the space, in a sort of alchemical initiation rite. ConiglioViola, the electronic heir of the White Rabbit, thus leads the visitor, a novice Alice, through its fantasy universe, inhabited by both classic creatures and contemporary monsters, deceptively reassuring and subtly cruel.

Pirate Attack to Biennale: installation view

The exhibition (visited by almost 10.000 people in only ten days) examines all the stages in the creative evolution of this “Renaissance workshop in the digital era”, from the underground period (2001-2004) characterised exclusively by works of net.art, to the major project Recuperate Le Vostre Radici Quadrate (Reclaim Your Square Roots) (2004-2006), the groups’ most “pop culture” work which explores the aesthetic and pop music of the 1980s. As well as the project Nous Deux (2007), a poetic and melancholic escape to the moon, the enigmatic Rebus with Achille Bonito Oliva, and the installation Fine Primo Tempo (End of the First Half) which interprets the track “Ci sarà” by Al Bano and Romina Power in an eschatological key.

The vitruvian rabbit - sculpture m3x3

Sono un pirata / Sono un signore (I am a pirate / I am a gentleman) is the title of this first roundup of previous episodes, an ironic slogan which perfectly encapsulates the role of elegant “outlaw” that ConiglioViola has carved out for itself on the contemporary art scene, on its unique and entirely eccentric path.

The exhibition catalogue – published by SilvanaEditoriale and personally edited by Brice Coniglio – includes essays by Antonio Arevalo, Alessandro Bergonzoni, Achille Bonito Oliva, Martina Corgnati, Maurizio Ferraris, Tommaso Labranca, Milva, Domenico Quaranta and Laura Serani.

Brice Coniglio, founder and captain of the group ConiglioViola, born in 1977, is the youngest artist that the PAC has ever dedicated a solo exhibition to.

Ci sarà – escatological tribute to  Al Bano & Romina  Power / HDV video /  4’09’’ /  2008

Most of ConiglioViola research in the field of video art is strictly linked with the experimentation with electronic music. The process there consists in selecting well-known music hits from the past and re-arranging them with a new version developed by the artists. Once the song is so re-written, the artists then produces a video for it in which they also play as performers. Through the use of video, the artists unveil a double meaning implicit in a song that is already rooted inside the collective imaginary. It attributes new meanings to the song, distorting its common perception, that which Arthur Danto would refer to as “transfiguration of the commonplace”.

The case of the video Ci sarà (2008) is emblematic of this kind of research. The song Ci sarà was a hit by the singing couple Al Bano & Romina Power, stars of the 80s, and this song is commonly regarded as a love song. In the video by ConiglioViola the song lyrics are read like a text that talks about the afterlife. The artists here portray themselves like two children at the time of their funeral, but instead of a Church the ceremony takes place on the stage of the San Remo music festival.
In the installation, at the feet of the video-projection, the ghosts of the two singing children are projected onto two open coffins.

ConiglioViola also engraves the song Ci Sarà on a limited edition of violet vinyls.

The work turned out to be prophetic, as it was followed by a sudden interruption in transmissions connected to a separation, difficult private events and a deep-seated personal crisis.

Brice Coniglio spent almost a year in Paris thanks to a grant from the Dena Foundation, undecided whether to arrange his creature’s funeral or give it a new life. Symbolically and performatively the official website, www.coniglioviola.com, was shut down. For months the home page of the site, which had always been the point of departure and driving force behind the Coniglio’s undertakings, was emblazoned with the words “Fine primo tempo” (End of the First Half) and access to the site was blocked.

In the catalogue of the solo show Sono un pirata/Sono un signore the philosopher Maurizio Ferraris signs an interesting critical essay about this work .
Gallery:

The project is composed by eleven photographies plus the video Le vent nous portera. The eleven images are linked each to other by an ideal tale in which the artists – through a complex work of “digital body art” – modify their own presen images to represent themselves as two children. (watch the original backstage pictures)

Le vent nous portera / HDV video /  4’00’’ /  2007

The exhibition is composed by two section:

1. Tunnel with steroscopies. A completely obscured tunnel. On the walls eleven luminescent couples of holes invite visitors to look inside. Here the whole collection of eleven images appear in a miniturized and three-dimensional version, thanks to the use of the ancient techinique of stereoscopy.
   At the end of the tunnel is projected the video Le vent nous portera, featuring the artists-children beyond the bars of a prison.
2. Labyrinth with lightboxes

tunnel with stereoscopies : installation view

The prison – from which the two children dream to escape in the video – is a metaphor of the relationship between the artist and his work, that can give him eternal life but also immobilize his life. But the prison is also a metaphot of life itself, in its being determined, from which the art consent to escape to invent different possibilities.

nous deux: light-boxes installation view

Nous Deux tells in an autobiographical and sometimes melancholic fairy tale, an attempt to escape from time and from reality but also escape from Art.

Martina: I don’t know how much faith you have. But in my view, what is arguably your most lyrical and atmospheric project touches on this very subject, being built around sharing as a narrative as well as being an autobiographical strategy… I’m talking about Nous Deux.
Brice: Just a second though, to talk about this I have to go back to ConiglioViola, which sprang from an idea of mine, a need, and in the beginning it was almost like an anonymous creature crawling around the web, with no-one knowing who had given birth to it. At a certain point, however, I felt the desire to share this project with the person I was closest to. There was this obsession for the number two, which for me is a perfect and impossible number, as my astrologist told me. Well I wanted to go beyond the dream of “forever”.All artists tend to project themselves into the future, because their works inevitably outlive them. That wasn’t enough for me, I wanted to project my relationship, artistic or personal, it’s the same thing for me! Into the past too, so I could really say “forever”.
Nous Deux is an imaginary autobiography. Mine and that of my then partner in crime. There are 11 images (because 1+1=2) telling the story of two naughty children, us two. They were created by manipulating current photographs, by means of what I describe as digital body art, that I used a year before in the video Romantici.
The eleven works were exhibited using a stereoscope, a very old technique that once again recalls the number two…
How many times, when we meet someone important at a certain point in our lives, do we wonder what would have happened if we had met somewhere else, at another time, in another era? This is the tragedy of being able to live only one existence, one thing at a time, something I have always been obsessed with (and I think it shows a bit in ConiglioViola). It is also the dialectics of possible worlds. This is what I use art for, to live the lives I haven’t lived, as well as escaping from my own. The heart of Nous Deux is an image, tender but brutal, of the two children in prison, which also appears in the video Le vent nous portera. Here prison is the metaphor for the determination of our existence, Bastille-like… and art is the hot air balloon/rabbit that the children dream of escaping on. Martina: Brice, are we talking about you or about your work now?
Brice: The point is that I have no interest in documenting something that’s in my head, there’s no point in that, what I want and hope to do is create worlds that can be shared.

from “Interview with Mr. Rabbit ” by Martina Corgnati
In “Sono un pirata / Sono un signore” ed. Silvana 2009

(watch the original backstage pictures)

On June 7h, 2007 (day of the opening of the 52nd edition of the Biennale) an enormous Pirate Rabbit, almost 6 metres high, winged like the Lion of San Marco, with one eye covered with a classic pirate’s eye patch, crossed the whole Canale della Giudecca on board a large raft, as far as the Giardini (the official venue of the Biennale) and from there – at around 6pm – it fired 52 cannon shots at the buildings of the Biennale.
Then two rabbit-like pirates disembarked from the ship into terra firma to raise the Jolly Roger, with the logo of a large “Vitruvian Rabbit” over the gardens, the place traditionally used to host the flags of all the nations.

This action, that somebody read as neo-futurist, was intended by ConiglioViola as an act of conquest and reappropriation – although an ironical and provocative one – in relation to an Art System that is often revealed to be “blind” and with one eye “blindfolded”.
The fact that a Winged Rabbit – an animal symbolising “cowardice” – is leading the pirate attack is no coincidence, considering that the Winged Lion – which should in fact represent courage – seems to have ceased to inspire heroic choices and actions!

[…] IX. From the other side of the sea

Brice: That was the birth of the Coniglio. Then it got a name: I asked a girl during an exhibition what to call it and she suggested Gesù (Jesus). Prophetic! In fact in 2007 when I wanted to make some noise at the Venice Biennale I decided that I would make it “walk” on the water, complete with wings, with an eyepatch to turn it into a pirate, mocking the Lion of St. Mark’s and that… Martina: Why, because the Lion of St. Mark’s was a pirate? Brice: It was a parody – it had wings. From the allegorical point of view, the rabbit and the lion are diametrically opposed, one is courage and the other is fear, right? So now I’m going to make a rabbit more aggressive than this lion. The lion in this case became a symbol for the art system and… Martina: Were you already tired of it or did you still want to upturn stereotypes? Brice: I wanted a rabbit that would be more ferocious than the lion. Which seemed tired, blindfolded, bent over. So it was a spectacular, amusing gesture, which was also autobiographical, because that’s the way I felt, coming to art from the other side of the sea, who knows which one. You’re in the sea, you don’t know where you set off from… but you’ve got there and I wanted to arrive in that way: with a joyful but critical project, explosive and sensational, destructive and sensational: that’s what ConiglioViola is, that’s how I see it. The attack was directed to art – it was a warning: look, art has to look outside itself, not just to itself. It’s terrible when art only looks to itself, it’s a narcissistic mechanism… and you know what happened to Narcissus.[…]

from“Interview with Mr. Rabbit ” by Martina Corgnati
In “Sono un pirata / Sono un signore” ed. Silvana 2009

The series of eleven photographs of the Pirate Attack to Venice Biennale were exposed the first time in 2009 during ConiglioViola’s solo show Sono un pirata/Sono un signore at PAC Pavillion of Contemporary Art in Milan.

PAC: installation view

This funny video features an imaginary visit of the Italian pop-star Renato Zero at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Torino. Renato takes the control of the Foundation and explains  his curatorial (and a little subvertive) projects but he will have to face Francesco Bonami’s dogs….

Ecce Trans / 2007 / cm 40x30

In Ecce Trans – title of ConiglioViola’s work – the image of the transsexual is substituted by the image of Christ – according to Matthew’s Gospel that says that in every emarginated person it’s possible to see an imago Christi. On the photograph frame , the price is stuck, to underline that the artist can make even a greater scoop than a paparazzo, since its camera can see over appearance.

Unfortunately the work was never been exposed because it was censored on the same day of the exhibition opening. The scandal that was created and the polemic division that it caused among certain Catholic Church officials in its interpretation finally led to the closing of the exhibition itself.

[…] Martina: but you risked in another way, when one of your works was at the centre of a national scandal, and even caused an exhibition to be cancelled… Ecce Trans caused a massive scandal, everyone was talking about it, it started arguments, people taking stances, furious comments, TV reports. You messed up big time. I’m really not into provocation for its own sake – contemporary art is chock-full of it nowadays, and I see that as a symptom of its weakness, its crisis point, its emptiness. So can you explain what it was you set out to do?
Brice: Pasolini said that when the work of an artist is honest it always creates scandal because the artist’s vision bursts in on the lives of people. You see, when I was invited to take part in that exhibition, (which incidentally was not a great exhibition, or a necessary one) I got to thinking that I was one of the few living artists in the show and that it was therefore my duty so say something about the present. I don’t care for gratuitous provocation either! Provocation is only worthy of the name when it reveals truths, otherwise it is just vulgar, offensive, facile and useless, there is so much of it around these days, it just ends up being about getting publicity!
That time, however there was an emergency that had to be addressed, and I had the opportunity to do it. In that year (2007) the issue of homosexuality was a thorny political issue in Italy, and to talk about sexuality I wanted to focus in particular on transsexuals, who in my view are the only figures that effectively are not integrated, that are outsiders in our world. There was that ridiculous case, a simple photo in which Sircana, possibly quite by chance, was driving past a transsexual, and it caused such a scandal… The paparazzo who took the photo had sold it to an important publisher who however did not publish it… I got the photo off the internet and manipulated it in a fairly simple way to replace the figure of the transsexual with that of Christ, taking inspiration from a passage of the gospel according to Matthew, which was also, not incidentally, a favourite of Pasolini’s. In that passage Jesus, who in the first place was a great provocateur, a rebel, says that we can see him in every person “on the margins”. So the image of the transsexual in question, that caused such a furore, became a perfect Imago Christi.
But there was another level to it. I decided to put a price tag on the photo, €100,000, which was what the original paparazzo was paid for it. This was to highlight the stupidity of contemporary journalism, that feeds off easy scoops to distract our attention, and a way of underlining how an artist can create an even more scandalous revelation (on sale at the same price as the original, and with the price there for all to see!), because the artist’s camera, even when it is directed towards reality, captures details that escape the common eye. In the end the furore that Ecce Trans created showed that I hit the spot… but the scandal was not in the work itself, which was orthodox and faithful to the Gospel, but in the judgement of those who condemned it from behind a shield of facile, hypocritical moralism […]

from “Interview with Mr. Rabbit ” by Martina Corgnati
In “Sono un pirata / Sono un signore” ed. Silvana 2009

Romantici / HDV video /  3’50’’ /  2007

[...] At first glance, “Romantici” looks like a variation on a family photograph from the end of the nineteenth century, revisited with gentle humour, a tribute to Niépce and Daguerre. But the image is immediately shaken up by imperceptible, then more evident movements of the people in front of the camera. In a sort of semantics each body expresses its discomfort at the long wait involved in the daguerreotype pose. This necessary slowness, which photography has now left behind, is recreated thanks to the use of video, which shows a backstage version of the creation of the final image, an exploration of techniques and media without temporal frontiers.
The filming creates a kind of video clip, with music alleviating the slow passage of time, and words which interact beautifully with the images. The work evokes the complexity of ConiglioViola’s universe, where it is difficult to identify the conceptual, musical or visual genesis of the projects and the ideas that unfold like images in a kaleidoscope. [...]

To return to the image, at a closer look the resemblance between the people posing appears considerably more evident than the likenesses that are usually difficult to make out in family photos, even when you really look for them. It is the same actor playing the various roles, directly involved as an integral part of the work, as often happens in the collective’s work as authors/artists/actors. Identity, perception, objectivity: Pirandello’s One, No One & One Hundred Thousand all lined up together. Each playing the same shared role: intent on keeping their balance, striking a good pose, trying to achieve an image of dignified composure, and find the right way to hold that troublesome bag. Aware of posing for eternity, all responsible for the end result, except the cat, which must adroitly be kept out of the way, oblivious of the importance of the event.[...]

from “We are Romantic” by Laura Serani
in “ConiglioViola. Sono un pirata / Sono un signore” ed. Silvana, 2009

The artworks of the collection:

The reprise of 80s’ music and aestetichs become the pretext for a complete analisys about the different artistic genres, between mitology and irony. ConiglioViola rearranges and sing each of these songs and, finally, produces a video which during the live show becomes the background for live performances, drawing a mutable  scenography performers interact with, in a costant passing from a cinematographic dimension to a theatrical one.

The whole show is played within a huge inflatable televion from which characters come in and out confusing reality and virtuality, meat and projection so to envelop audience in atmospheres and worlds every time different for each of the songs which compose the show.

Nostalgia for the 80s is the medium for a project that is strongly contemporary: an investigation on the cutting edge of artistic genres and on the relationship between music and image. “Divas of the 80s” become,  ironically and mythologically, paladins of a critic to the contemporary visive culture: where image and narrration are no longer carrier of mith and signify but, too often, replica of the ordinary.

Video-trailer:

In the catalogue of the exhibit  Sono un pirata/Sono un signore (Silvana ed. 2009) the singer Milva herself signs an original text about this project.

On MySpace you can listen to some songs.

REBUS (3,8,10,7,1,10,3,6,8,2,8,7,1,8,8,3,3,7,2,5)
featuring Achille Bonito Oliva as actor

Rebus is a meta-artistic artwork that conditions the access to the work itself… because if you do not solve REBUS you cannot visit the exhibition that hosts it.
So it’s a gate, a closed door that you may open… because the key is held in the gate itself. A metaphor of the whole Art as a Door to Another Dimension
But it’s also an ironic operation: still today scientists try to decipher the mistery of Gioconda… here the enigma and its solution are the artwork itself!
The particularity of ConiglioViola’s Rebus is that the rebus is presented under the shape of a video (about 4 minutes)… so the elements of rebus, instead of being distributed over the space, appear during the time.

In the solo show Sono un pirata / Sono un signore at PAC in Milan to those who had solved the rebus was granted the access to a further secret room hosting the interactive installation “The Rabbit’s secret Mirror”.

[contact-form]

< Launch secret.room >

Note: secret-room does not work with recent browser. You need to download internet explorer 6 as standalone.

Secret.room (2004) is the first net.drama on the stage of The Violet Globe, fruit of the complicity between ConiglioViola  and IRAA Theatre (Renato Cuocolo and Roberta Bosetti), the italian-australian company that has performed this work worldwide.
To net.dramatize “The Secret Room” (this is the title of the original piece) has been a paradoxical choice because it was already an interactive show.
Ten people meet every night in the house where Roberta lives. Roberta and her guests talk, tell each other stories and experiences. Then something unexpected happen. Dinner is interrupted and you are taken to the depth: to the secret room, to the room of the secrets: of the life, of the show.

Secret.room is composed with two main different moments:

1) a long introduction where all happen is directed by the browser in a completely random logic
2) the access to the secret.room where the secrets are unveiled

Interior sites: computer is your secret room

“The secret room” is the second episod of the trilogy “Interior sites project”. This idea of the room as interior space was very linked to our concept of web as a private imaginary space (that we already investigate with Yolanda’s Meditation). So what does it happen when the screen of one own’s computer is invaded by a wild storm of uncontrollable windows? What is the inter-actor’s reaction who sees denied one’s possibility to control?

Fragments: computer is your director

During the night when the VioletRabbit was Roberta’s guest it filmed all that happened. It divided all this video footage into many short fragments to which it has addes some appositely created animations obtaining a total of 45 tracks and finally it delivered each track to a different html page. Trough the simple succession of the page VioletRabbit’s intent was to recreate an idea of cinematographic editing. The difference is that the author of such an editing is not the programmer neither the user. Pages are refreshed every time in a completely random way both in their duration as in their sequence. The whole mechanism is then multiplied through a serie of popup windows that invade the screen and purpose alternative editings, different possible paths to cross the labyrinth.

Getting out from the labyrinth: secret.room’s gate

Mechanism hardly proves the machine. But there is one chance on 45 to get out from the labyrinth… and from panic. One of the pages delivers at last the access door that will take us to the secret.room, to the web site. We only have to ring the bell and see if Roberta will let us inside.

The Violet Globe project and net.dramas: net.art versus theatre

The Violet Globe is the laboratory where ConiglioViola performs an inedited crossbreed between theater and net.art.
The Violet Globe is the first web theater of the history, the unstable theater , the online stage on wich the various net.dramas will go on scene.

The fundamental idea consists in taking some theatrical representations and transforming them into net.artworks. The project is born from the assume that the surfer is an inter-actor and the monitor his personal stage. The experiment lies, so, in seeing what can happen to a text or a theatrical miseenscene when you add to the story a new actor whose behaviour does not follow any copycat and is not predictable. The result will be an open story, a deconstruction of the theatratical text as much as of the web text. The term net.drama – coined to indicate this “new genre” – means at the same time dramatical representation on the net but also unveiling of drama’s net, of drama’s trap

The interest and charm that this idea exercise on us is also related to ConiglioViola’s net.philosophy. Our online operations often consist in representing web spaces as real spaces. The slogan is: a web site is a site. In this case it will happen the exact opposite, we will translate real spaces (the ones of a theater) into html & C.

[…] Before revealing its contents, let us consider for a moment the subtle game staged by ConiglioViola. Intent on translating a theatre show into a “net.drama”, ConiglioViola carefully avoids the path of “augmented reality”, namely taking part in the real event via the internet. The group prefers to use the web to create a situation which reflects the original version of the show, but at the same time is closely bound to the language and dynamics of the web. In place of the concept of interactivity, which on the net means little more than clicking here and there in search of links, comes that of participation: suffered, sought after and obtained by the user amid delays and surprises. The real scene, filmed by ConiglioViola during its visit to Roberta’s “secret room”, is present in the video clips which appear in entirely random and ever variable order, making it impossible to reconstruct with clarity. The appointment mechanism generates expectations, but at the same time violates one of the web’s unwritten rules, that a visitor forced to return in order to gain access to content is a visitor lost. Everything is engineered so as not to grant us access to the secret room, or to ensure that visitors undergo a strict selection process (another violation of the web’s unwritten rules). Those who were undaunted by the flood of pop-ups, and patiently sought out the way into the “secret room”, turning up on time at the appointed hour, will not be surprised to discover that the secret room is nothing more than the site’s root, the page in which the project shows not its interface, but its structure. As happened to Neo, the lead character in The Matrix (1999), the sight of the code, a routine vision for all those who programme the net, becomes a cathartic experience for common users, destined to render them immune to the allure of the web.[…]

from “Alice makes Yoga” by Domenico Quaranta
In “Sono un pirata / Sono un signore” Silvana Editoriale 2009.

< Start meditation >

Yolanda’s meditation (2001) is in absolute the very first experiment of net.based meditation as well as the very first net.art work by the italian group Coniglioviola.

The site – designed in Barcelona in 2001 – offers an unusual meditation path through the seven chackras, with the aid of hypnotic sounds and animations, and under the guide of a historical movie figure as your Yoga teacher

Yolanda’s meditation represents a digital reading of the oriental tradition of Chackras, which presents a perfect system of correspondance beetween the energy points of the à human body , vital functions, psychic functions, sounds, shapes and colors.

Through this system, Coniglioviola has created for each of the seven chackras some short animations which repeat in loop, using the colours and sounds indicated by the Yoga tradition.

Instead of the typical Buddha which appears in the traditional iconography, as our guide for this meditative/hypnotic path we find the Robot from Fritz Lang’s movie “Metropolis”. It’s essentially the presence of this robot that indicates one main provocative/ironic purpose in this work which brings along – in an apparently paradoxical way – an inner spiritual event such as meditation on a computer screen.

However, the relationship with one’s own computer has become more and more similar to the relationship with a part of the self: possibly an alter-ego, a digital unconscious. This may explain why nobody has cried shame, and why Yolanda’s cybermeditation has been largely used by the followers of oriental meditation, as well as by many psychologists and hypnologists.

Another provocation is aimed at the net.art culture, which has identified a certain number of web sites which are artworks in themselves, but whose fruition and enjoyment is often limited to the devout followers of such a “new muse”.

Yolanda’s meditation, on the pretext of being a usable artifact, all the while taking advantage of the popularity of new age culture, has succedeed in reaching a wide audience, at least within Italy, and in bringing the net.art also outside of net.art itself.

In December, 2003, Coniglioviola has given life to a new version of this cybermeditation, now enriched with a new chapter, Yolanda’s Temple, in which quotations from “Metropolis” become even more evident.The users/initiates now have the chanche to enjoy the meditation following a guided path, at the end of which, through a visual mechanism reminiscent of the one used in videogames, they are taken inside Yolanda’s Temple.

Once inside the Temple, it is possible to enjoy a further level of hypnotic self-suggestion. By the end of the experience, each initiate is invited to fill in a form in which the target of one’s own future trainings through this virtual meditation can be specified. Form results are automatically collected by an on-line database, whose content remains encrypted, completely unreadable by anyone. This database will thus become a sort of digital collective unconscious.

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