HOLOTOPIA
contemporary experimental music festival
intercommunication project
at Punta Campanella

Who participates

HOLOTOPIA Festival 2004

Phill Niblock makes thick, loud drones of music, filled with microtones of instrumental timbres which generate many other tones in the performance space. Simultaneously, he presents films / videos which look at the movement of people working, or computer driven black and white abstract images floating through time.

Excerpts from reviews:
"Phill Niblock's music and films are concerned with detail and simplicity . . . dense, imposing sound mass . . . . Sum and difference tones pile up until they sound like an orchestra of voices . . . one listens first to one level of detail, then to another, only gradually learning to hear everything at once." Robert Palmer, New York Times

"[Music] consisting of sustained, closely juxtaposed notes knitted together in slowly but sometimes suddenly shifting texture . . . tense, tight beats, lazily cyclic curves and floating colorational shifts induced by clashing overtone patterns." John Rockwell, New York Times

"Waves of sound roll over the audience . . . the piece began to swell in emotional intensity, but it was not overtly dramatic; the intensity of this piece was in its didactic nature… As if putting your ear to a seashell, you listen and hear the roar of the familiar." Charles McCurdy, Philadelphia Inquirer

"One can say that he works with loud sustained tones, that he piles them together in multi-track versions, that the tones are produced originally on conventional wind and stringed instruments, that they are purposely out of tune, and that the resulting frequencies beat wildly against one another . . . rhythmically active these sustained pieces are, due to the many beats or pulsations which come about as the 'out-of-tune' notes jar against one another." Tom Johnson, Village Voice

"The music has a steady kinetic push that makes you feel like you're riding on some slow vehicle taking you directly into the details of the picture." Wendy Perron, New York Native

Phill Niblock is an intermedia artist using music, film, photography, video and computers. He makes thick, loud drones of music, filled with microtones of instrumental timbres which generate many other tones in the performance space. Simultaneously, he presents films / videos which look at the movement of people working, or computer driven black and white abstract images floating through time. He was born in Indiana in 1933. Since the mid-60's he has been making music and intermedia performances which have been shown at numerous venues around the world among which: The Museum of Modern Art; The Wadsworth Atheneum; the Kitchen; the Paris Autumn Festival; Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Akademie der Kunste, Berlin; ZKM; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard; World Music Institute at Merkin Hall NYC. Since 1985, he has been the director of the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York (http://www.experimentalintermedia.org/) where he has been an artist/member since 1968. He is the producer of Music and Intermedia presentations at EI since 1973 (about 1000 performances) and the curator of EI's XI Records label. In 1993 he was part of the formation of an Experimental Intermedia organization in Gent, Belgium - EI v.z.w. Gent - which supports an artist-in-residence house and installations there. Phill Niblock's music is available on the XI, Moikai and Touch labels. A DVD of films and music is available on the Extreme label.

Takehisa Kosugi (b.1938, Tokyo), was one of the founder of Group-Ongaku (1960), the first Japanese group for free improvisation in music and for event performance. In the early 1960's he participated in Fluxus, then performed event pieces and live electronic music in New York (1965-67). He co-founded Taj Mahal Travellers in Tokyo (1969), a group for intermedia music in various environments, toured in Europe and UK (1971/72), and to Taj Mahal in India. Since 1977, Kosugi has been a composer/performer for Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and was appointed to the musical director of the company. Utilizing electro-acoustic mixed materials, his performances and sound installations have been presented at various festivals and museums.

Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta is an architect, urban planner, photographer and composer of classical contemporary music. He won the Marketing Prize in 1977 by the Brazilian Association of Marketing; the APCA Prize in 1986 by the Art Critics Association of Sao Paulo; and the Lac Maggiore Prize in 1994 by the Regional Government of Lombardia, the International Association of Art Critics, the Unesco and the Council of Europe, in Locarno, Switzerland. In 1993 his works were selected by the Unesco, in Paris, as one of the most representative intermedia researchers of the world. He is member of the SACD - Societè des Autheurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques in Paris. He also was an active member of the European Environmental Tribunal, in Brussels, where he worked as a member of the board since 1995. He is an active member of the New York Academy of Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC. He is member and advisor for the AIVAC - Association Internationale pour la Video dans les Arts et la Culture, in Switzerland. He was a founding member of the International Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Symmetry - ISIS Symmetry, in Budapest. He studied, among others, with Hans Joachim Koellreutter (Paul Hindemith, Marcel Moyse), Eduardo Corona, Eduardo Kneese (Alvar Aalto, Walter Gropius), Decio Pignatari, Holger Czukai (Karlheinz Stockhausen) and Roti Nielba Turin. He took part in various workshops and master classes with Kenzo Tange, Oscar Niemeyer, Yona Friedman, Peter Cook (Archigram) and Charles Moore among others. He collaborated with John Cage, as commissioned composer for Merce Cunningham, from 1985 until his disappearance in 1992. He remained commissioned composer for Merce Cunningham in New York. Not only, he has been composer for several companies like the MC4 in Portugal and the Appels Company, in New York, since 1990, among others. Legendary musicians like David Tudor, Takehisa Kosugi, John Tilbury, Martha Mooke, John DS Adams, Maurizio Barbetti, Michael Pugliese and the Manhattan Quartet among others have performed his compositions. He is Editorial Director of the art and culture magazine RISK Arte Oggi, in Milan - considered one of the best European magazines of culture. He is member of the jury of the BES Fellowship (Experimental Intermedia Foundation of New York, Luso American Foundation and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) since 1995. In the early 80s Emanuel Pimenta coined the concept "virtual architecture", later largely used as specific discipline in universities all over the world. Since the end of the 70s he has developed graphical musical notations inside virtual environments. Mr. Pimenta has been frequently invited, as professor and lecturer, by several institutions, among then the universities of New York, Lisbon, Lausanne, Tsukuba, Sao Paulo, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Monte Verita Foundation in Switzerland and the Technion Institute in Haifa, Israel. His works are included in the Universalis Encyclopaedia (Britannica), in the Sloninsky Baker's Music Dictionary (Berkeley) as well as in the All Music Guide - The Expert's Guide to the Best Cds. With more than 400 musical compositions already recorded, 15 compact discs, 4 cd-roms, he has wrote and published several books and papers. His works have been regularly published in England, the United States, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, Italy and Spain. Articles on his works have appeared in different newspapers and magazines, like the New York Times, Le Monde, Le Parisien, O Estado de Sao Paulo, O Expresso, and O Globo, Il Sole 24 Ore, la Reppublica, among others. He develops music, architecture and urban projects using Virtual Reality and Cyberspace technologies. He has also been curator for various institutions, like the Bienal de Sao Paulo Foundation in Sao Paulo, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Triennial of Milan and ExperimentaDesign 2001 in Lisbon among others. His works are present in some of the most expressive collections, like the Whitney Museum of New York, the ARS AEVI Sarajevo Contemporary Art Museum, the Biennial of Venice, the Computer Art Museum of Seattle, the Kunsthaus of Zurich, the Durini Contemporary Art Collection, the Bibliotèque Nationale de Paris and the MART - Modern Art Museum of Rovereto and Trento among others.
His site in Internet is http://www.asa-art.com/edmp.html

An atypical figure of the contemporary art system, Lucrezia De Domizio, Baroness Durini has been operating for over thirty years in the field of international culture, as cultural operator, journalist, writer and patron. The end of the Sixties saw the launch of her first challenge, with the opening of Studio L.D. in Pescara, a gallery-house structured by Getuliano Alvani, Ettore Spalletti and Marco Ceroli. She organised exhibitions by Burri, Fontana, Capogrossi, Rotella, Pistoletto and proposed American Pop Art and International Constructivism. Married to Baron Giuseppe Durini of Bolognano, in the Seventies the villa of San Silvestro Colli (PE) became a meeting centre for the protagonists of the art scene at that historic moment. All the protagonists of Conceptual art and Arte Povera would meet at her house in the name of excellence and friendship. Mario and Marisa Merz, Kounellis, Calzolari, Bagnolari, Vettor Pisani, Paolini, Mattiaci, Isgrò, Boetti, Ontani, De Dominicis, Fabro, Agnetti, Job, Russo, Giuli, Salvadori, Clemente, Chia and many others. This permanent cenacle saw the participation of critics including Bonito Oliva, Celant, Tommassoni, Trini, Menna, Corà, Salerno, Gatt and Izzo, at the same time transforming the stable of an old Bourbon fort in Pescara into a space for events and anti-traditional artistic operations. In 1971 she met the German artist Joseph Beuys on the ferry to Capri. This meeting led to the first discussion Incontro con Beuys (Meeting With Beuys) in 1974. While the greatest events of aesthetic research in twenty years were taking place in Pescara and the Villa in San Silvestro Colli, the work of Joseph Beuys was becoming the guiding thread which would transform Lucrezia De Domizio's entire existence, profoundly sharing as she did the whole Beuysian philosophy and becoming its scholar and firm supporter. Venice, Kassel, Bolognano, Tokyo, Naples, Paris, London, Düsseldorf, the Seychelles, New York and Rome were the stages of the Operazione Difesa della Natura (Operation Defence of Nature) entrusted to her by Joseph Beuys. In the historic refuge of the Abruzzi countryside, this Operation to safeguard the environment and standing in anthropological defence of man and human creativity found its most creative moments in the last fifteen years of the artist's life. One of the most significant figures of the international artistic scene after the Second World War, Beuys made Bolognano his Italian residence. Active interlocutors included the intellectuals Harald Szeemann, Pierre Restany and Thomas Messer. Since Joseph Beuys' death (23 January 1986), Lucrezia De Domizio Durini has dedicated her energies to the diffusion of Beuysian philosophy through discussions, debates, conferences, publications, conventions, theses, essays and exhibitions, in particular the anthology of the Operacio Difesa della Natura at the Museo Santa Monica in Barcelona promoted by the Generalitat de Catalunya 1993, the exhibition Diary of Seychelles, Difesa della Natura promoted by the Province of Perugia at the Rocca Paolina 1996, the first Convegno Mondiale (world conference) in Budapest in 2000, the exhibition Joseph Beuys. L'immagine dell'Umanità (Joseph Beuys. The Image of Humanity) at the MART museum in Trento in 2001 and Piazza Beuys with the Bosco Sacro di Beuys (Beuys' Sacred Forest) in Gibellina. Author of twenty books on Beuysian thinking, perhaps the most significant is Il Cappello di Feltro (The Felt Hat), translated into seven languages and languages and adopted as a reading text in many schools of art both in Italy and abroad. Collector and publisher of works of art, president of the Italian Free International University, awarded the title of Chevalier, the Order of Arts and Literature in Paris by J. Lang in 1993, member of the Tribunale dell'Ambiente (environmental tribunal), she has made donations of many of Joseph Beuys' works of art, most significantly to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and the university of architecture in Venice, while abroad she has donated to the Zurich Kunsthaus ("Olivestone"). the Mitterand Foundation of Paris and to the museums of Sarajevo and San Marino. Since 1988 she has been living and working in Milan in a loft converted from the old Caproni industrial buildings, now an international meeting place and editorial office of the periodical "RISK Arte Oggi", Cultural Intercommunication magazine founded by Lucrezia De Domizio Durini in 1990. She has been featured in newspapers including "Le Monde", "Figaro", "El Pais", "New York Times", "Corriere della Sera", "Vogue", "Il Sole 24 Ore", "Abitare", "Giornale dell'Arte" and many other international weekly and monthly magazines. She is currently working towards the establishment of the JOSEPH BEUYS International Documentation Centre with the aim of safeguarding the environment and promoting interrelations between the various cultural situations of daily life. On 13 May 1999, in collaboration with Harald Szeemann, one of the world's most renowned art curators, she inaugurated Piazza Joseph Beuys in Bolognano. A place created according to Beuysian concepts, a phenomenological unicum in the world history of art. She has restructured the historical residence of Palazzo Durini in Bolognano, bringing to life the exclusive and unrepeatable project la casa di lucrezia (the house of Lucrezia), bearing testimony to life and events, unique in Italy. To mark the eightieth anniversary of Beuys' birth, she promoted the Difesa Della Natura Stamp in collaboration with the State Philately of San Marino, in tribute to the German master. She collaborates with architects of international fame such Jean Nouvel, Mario Botta and Renzo Piano, with poets such as Sanguinetti, with philosophers like Sgalambro and with art critics such as Harald Szeemann and Pierre Restany. She is currently curator of the Italian section of the new Sarejevo Museum. She has collaborated for approximately six years with Edizioni Charta of Milan, managing Charta/Risk, a special series of cultural intercommunication publications. She is currently managing the series Il Clavicembalo (the harpsichord) for publishing house Editrice Silvana in Milan, and has written and published 57 art books. She has directed pieces at the Gobetti Theatre in Turin (1977), at the Quirino in Rome for Michelangelo Pistoletto (1980) and has devised two unusual pièces The Thought Take Shape and The Felt Hat Joseph Beuys A Life Told. She is curator of important exhibitions in prestigious museums in many countries of the world. A rare figure in international culture, Lucrezia De Domizio Durini lives a broadened vision of art in her philosophy of work, an art which is one with life and is an existential practice at the same time, a practice of all those teachings which only art knows and can give. In 2001 she was awarded the title of Chevalier, the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic by President of the Republic Hon. C. A. Ciampi and the Medaglia al Merito della Cultura (cultural merit medal) by the city of Sarajevo. In 2002 she was awarded the Maiella Prize. Lucrezia De Domizio Durini should be considered an independent cultural operator who has made art and culture along with humanitarian and environmental issues the primary purpose of her own existence, proudly defining herself a collector of human relationships.

Professor Alberto del Genio    Antonio d'Avossa                Massimo Doná                 Renzo Tieri                       Aldo Roda

Marcos Novak is the invited observer philosopher of the first HOLOTOPIA Festival

Marcos Novak is a global nomad, and an artist, theorist, and transarchitect. His projects, theoretical essays, and interviews have been translated into over twenty languages and have appeared in over 70 countries, and he lectures, teaches, and exhibits worldwide. Drawing upon architecture, music, and computation, and introducing numerous additional influences from art, science, and technology, his work intentionally defies categorization. He is universally recognized as the pioneer of architecture in cyberspace, of the critical consideration of virtual space as architectural and urban place, and of the use of generative computational composition in architecture and design. He originated several widely recognized concepts, such as "transvergence," "transarchitectures," "transmodernity," "liquid architectures," "navigable music," habitable cinema," "archimusic," "eversion," "allogenesis," and others, anticipating many of the developments in digitally derived art, architecture, and music, and in virtual, augmented, mixed, and alternative reality research. His current research involves nano~ and bio~ technologies, and explores the hypothesis that we are in a cultural phase characterized by "the Production of the Alien," paralleling the Renaissance "Production of Man." He has participated in many international exhibitions, including this year's 9th
International Biennale di Venezia, where he is included in the main international pavilion, and the 7th where he represented Greece. In recognition of the pivotal role he has played and is continuing to play in the acceptance and integration of the digital in advanced architecture, and as part of "Digital|Real," a major architecture show hosted by DAM (Deutsches Architektur Museum, Frankfurt, Germany), he was invited to write a combined history/biographical chronology of the ascent of the digital in architecture and his part in it. His essay can be found here: http://www.a-matter.de/digital-real/eng/main.asp?es=6
Professor Novak is based at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is affiliated with CNSI (the California NanoSystems Institute), MAT (Media Art and Technology), and Art. He was born in Caracas, Venezuela, grew up in Athens, Greece, has traveled extensively, and lives in Venice, California.

ASA Art and Technology UK London