Last month our friend Thomas Artur Spallek invite us to the exhibition Wasting Time on the Internet 2.0, at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. The idea is “to get lost on the internet to reflect on its political, social, and economic aspects, to become hazed by its rich content and to get distracted and split by its versatility”.
After a year of hard work, we’re very proud to present you L’Atlante dei Classici Padani (Atlas of Padania Classics).
Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin are two highly anomalous figures within the European cultural landscape of the early twentieth century. It is precisely because of their anomaly that their thinking and works have proved so fruitful and full of meaning, anticipating contemporary practices and methodologies. Today, their critical attitude and research methodology offer interesting points of reflection on the disciplines and practices that revolve around the figure of the contemporary designer. Read More
The era of radical concrete: a photographic archive mapping a urban utopia collapse
We’re big fan of atlas, and we’re very interested in investigating its potential as a communicative tool as well as in testing its possibilities and consequences for the real world.
So, here a nice and smart way to conceive and represent a kind of atlas, Friction Atlas, a project by our friends Paolo Patelli and Giuditta Vendrame:
“Friction Atlas addresses the issue of legibility of public space, its programs, and the laws that regulate its uses. […] Friction Atlas aims to make regulations – that are always implicitly present in any public space – explicit and visible, through graphical devices.”
Here a nice interview by We Make Money Not Art
“What does it mean to learn in the field of design? How can one learn to design? And how can one learn from design?”
Those are the leading questions in About learning and design, a book edited and curated by Giorgio Camuffo and Maddalena Dalla Mura for the Libera Università di Bolzano. The volume collects several points of view – interviews, essays, visual essays, projects reviews – around learning and teaching in the field of graphic design.
From 25th till 29th of june, the fifth edition of Aiap Limited Edition will be hosted in Genova.
Among several events – workshops, exhibitions, roundtables, etc. – we’ve been invited to the conference “Graphic design, quale professione? Il caso italiano fra ricerca storica e riflessione critica” (Graphic design, what kind of profession? The Italian case between historical research and critical reflection).
The discussion, organized by Daniela Piscitelli e Carlo Vinti, will be joined by us, Brave New Alps, Caterina Giuliani, Elio Carmi, Pino Grimaldi and Riccardo Falcinelli.
More info here.
1. The city and its imaginary: from the urban as spatial form to the urban as a signifying whole
Since its appearance in the second half of the XIX century, the metropolis has not been limited solely to the physical space occupied by its buildings, streets and squares – however enormous, crowded and complex that space may be. Neither the city and its more simple and ordered form can be reduced to the spatial extension defined by its walls. One could think as a prerogative of the homo sapiens the capacity to transform an activity at first simple and natural as inhabiting into an articulated form – stratified of meaning, values and functions of a social, political, economical and cultural nature. Read More
We’ve been invited to a roundtable organized by the collective Ogino Knauss.
Along with Franco La Cecla, Gianni Biondillo, Bertram Niessen e Lorenzo Tripodi, we’ll discuss about urban centralities and peripheries, the relation between spatial production and image production, and contemporary moods of Milan facing Expo 2015.
Monday May 12th, h. 18
Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, via Romagnosi 3, Milano
More info here.
On Saturday 22nd march will be at bruno, in Venice, presenting krisis | orientation with a small exhibition of the work of Unità di crisi, Foundland, Detroiturbex.com, Filippo Minelli and Pavel Maria Smejkal.
We propose hereinafter two interviews, conducted via e-mail between October and November 2011 with the Dutch collective Foundland and the graphic design historian and critic Rick Poynor. The interview is part of the research carried out by Andrea Facchetti for his Master’s degree dissertation in Multimedia and Visual Communication.
Sternberg Press seems to offer a good example of how the print editorial production can still offer much not only to the contemporary cultural debate, but also to some fruition modalities “anchored” to the physicality of the object-book. The little German publishing house, founded in 1999 by Caroline Schneider, can boast a catalog composed by hundreds of titles in which curators, critics, designers, artists, writers and philosophers give life to a solid multidisciplinary platform, committed to expanding the critical debate concerning the status quo of art and contemporary culture—and engaged as well in providing historical re-readings and redefinitions and in examining possibilities and perspectives of the near future.
It is almost obvious that the scientific research, in Italy as well as in other European countries, is not experiencing its best moment. It is sad to affirm that the research in the humanities is limping as a dying being, but also fairly true. Many could justify this near-death condition making reference to the financial crisis, but this reveals itself to be nothing more than an excuse, if we go compare the funds—and thus the chances to support the research in a specific field—available to scientific and humanistic research. In a lecture at Harvard concerning the future of the research in the humanities, philosopher Homi K. Bhabha framed the problem in the simplest way possible: it appears that in 2011, in the USA, the research in the humanities received less than half of the 1% of the total sum allocated to scientific and technological research.
After conducting a long research work into the use of social networks in the Syrian conflict—and after staying in Cairo during the Tahrir Square protests—the collective Foundland, already guest and contributor of Krisis | Orientation, investigates again the collective visual imaginaries taking form in Arabic societies in a period of strong political, social and religious infighting.
Read More
Even if it dates back to May 2002, the project of Korean designer Sang Mun has received a new and truly actual meaning in light of the recent scandal involving NSA—US National Security Agency—and the US government.
“We all knew this was happening.”
That’s the beginning of Vinay Gupta’s reflection concerning the meaning of the NSA/PRISM scandal and its consequences on the social relations between single private individuals, professionals, social groups and nation-states. Read More
The kiss between Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Palestinian President Abbas in Benetton’s Unhate campaign, 2011. The postpolitical condition of Western democracies is now promoted primarily on the communications level.
Krisis | Orientation
October, 3 / Out.
Why a dis-orientation archive? Modern society lives today within the contradiction between overproduction and loss. Material production, and particularly the immaterial production of information, has reached levels able to render critical any classification and archiving attempt. At the same time this new complexity of reality, and the immense quantity of stimuli to which individuals are submitted, requires a constant process of selection and elimination of information. This process, from which a definite orientation model ensues, is today more than ever influenced by subconscious, circumstantial and accidental components. From this proceeds the importance of everything that in the first place was removed, rejected, or simply not considered—and the necessity to recompose these lost fragments.
Why Gramsci? Why New York? Artist Thomas Hirschhorn explains the meaning of his new “universal monument” in New York, describing a new idea of art within today’s public spaces.
9-Eyes, the project of Canadian photographer Jon Rafman started in 2008, collects hundreds of pictures taken by Google Street View cars—the vehicles that since 2007 are mapping each square meter that can be travelled over by car, by means of dedicated 9 lens cameras—today 11—mounted on the vehicles’ hood. The idea itself is not new: since the launch of the Street View service, there has been no lack of virtual explorers navigating through Google Maps in order to find strange, unusual and unexpected pictures. Even those websites collecting images portraying crimes—most of them being simple traffic violations—immediately after they are committed, suggest how the most used search engine is assuming the appearance of a gigantic and ubiquitous Panopticon, whose sole presence functions as a deterrent for behaviours judged as wrong. Read More
Our brief intervention on La Stampa‘s special insert, curated by Cantiere per pratiche non-affermative within the context of Designer’s Inquiry—an investigation into the social and economical condition of Italian designers.
Occupy Mordor: Wu Ming 4 describes Blu’s work covering a wall of the self-managed social centre XM24—which according to the local administration will be demolished, together with the murals, in order to make room for a traffic circle.
For the presentation of Krisis | Orientation at the Aiap Office in Milan, we designed a poster intended to show the architecture of the publication’s content and its internal navigation system. Read More
Memories of a broken utopia: Jan Kempenaers’ photographic project, a valuable record concerning many monuments and commemorative sculptures built between the 60’s and the 70’s by the regime of Titus in Yugoslavia.
We’re happy to finally present you the second issue of Krisis Magazine, krisis | orientation.
krisis | orientation, curated by Unità di crisi and edited by Aiap, will be published in september, but it’s already available online here. Read More
Slavs and Tatars, interviewed by Ingrid Chu, talk about visual communication, the history of winners and losers, identity representation, graphic design as a strategy to represent complexity and open new shared symbolic spaces.
The militiaman shot to death during the Spanish civil war; the Russian soldier that unfolded the flag of the USSR on the Reichstag; the Kennedy assassination in Dallas; the execution of a Vietcong in a street of Saigon; up to the more recent demonstrator that barred the way of a tank in Tienanmen Square. These episodes and incidents, and many more, beyond being of particular importance on a historical level, have another thing in common: they have all been “immortalised” by the photo camera (or in some cases by the film camera) and crystallised on film. Read More
Ubiquitous Computing, often abbreviated as ubicomp, is a model of human-machine interaction aspiring to completely surpass the current desktop environment paradigm—the graphic interface through which the interaction between man and computer takes place, and which is based on the notion of desktop. Hypothesized for the first time in 1988 by Mark Weiser, ubicomp imagines a reality in which an ever increasing number of activities are filtered through and executed by dispositives and computers—remarkably imagining an everyday life in which these operations are dislocated and diffused in the human environment, instead of being located in a single device. Read More
According to the public opinion, the term “archive” means and designates the collection of documents and materials—public as well as private—destined to be preserved; and thus also the place where these are stored and systematized—ordered according to specific criteria. Thus the archive would refer to an activity of conservation and preservation from the natural deterioration process, in order to hand down and leave to posterity a certain body of information and descriptions. In this sense, the archive fulfills the function of preserving and transmitting the historical memory. Read More
During March 2013 Professor Giorgio Camuffo invited us to hold a workshop within the Visual Communication course taught by him at the Free University of Bozen – Bolzano. The workshop, lasting three days, consisted in an investigation around the different modes through which the theme of disorientation reintroduced each time itself within visual culture—and culminated with the production of various posters and of a little publication.
Atlas as a life-long project: Gerhard Richter
Gordon Matta-Clark’s work, a pioneer in the use of disorientation as a practice within urban spaces.
On the February issue of Abitare magazine, Back to students: the words of students and young graduates as a visual map of Italian design. Giorgio Camuffo tries to provide an examination of the Italian design schools and the expectations of thirty young planners.
With two interventions by Andrea Facchetti and Francesco D’Abbraccio from Unità di Crisi.
Thomas Hirschhorn explains us the meaning of his Ur-Collages: collage as a resistance technique.
“I live in this complex, chaotic, cruel, beautiful and wonderful world. I want to be happy in it and I want my work to reflect that. The «Ur-Collage» is a basis for this. I affirm the world in which I live and I want to affirm also the negative side of this world. I affirm the world in which negativity is also shown and in which the hard core of reality, of negativity is not bracketed off. I want to show also this hard core.”
Foundland realized a visual essay on the 24th issue of Graphic Magazine, dedicated to the city of Amsterdam. The intervention consists in a visual comparison between the Dutch resistance during the Second World War and the Syrian rebels opposing Assad’s regime today.
Massimo Vincenzi, on Repubblica.it, talks about Gramsci Monument, a public installation-work of art realized in The Bronx by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn. The monument, which will be inaugurated today, is the fourth of a series of artistic interventions taking place in public spaces—the other three being a monument dedicated to Spinoza in Amsterdam, one to Deleuze in Avignon and one to Bataille in Kassell. Read More
Trevor Paglen is an American artist exploring topics concerning geopolitics, the state of emergency, biopolitics and military dispositives. Terminal Air is a project, curated together with Applied Autonomy, which “explores complex interconnections between government agencies and private contractors involved with the United States Central Intelligence Agency’s extraordinary rendition program.”
For more than a year most nations—being them democracies or regimes—have been witnessing the rise of protest movements “from below”. From Spanish Indignados to the Occupy movement, up to the Arab Spring, thousands of people raised their voice to call into question the effectiveness of people’s sovereignty in front of authoritarian regimes or big industrial and financial powers. A constant feature of these movements has been the use of the new social networks as instruments to mobilize and inform, as well as to extend the debate. Read More
Julian Bleecker, designer, futurologist and specialist in technology, explains his idea of Design Fiction, a practice exploring the symbolic relation between science fiction, science, technology and society. In other words: in which way the science fiction imaginary interferes and collides with the planning and development of technology?
New Orleans prior to, during, and after Katrina—seen through the eyes of its residents. How the emergency management can transform itself into a compulsory dispositive of urban control.
Our global consumption culture is the biggest over-design example
B. Mau
Today graphic design is everywhere. It answers to individual and public needs, produces culture and money, communicates and constructs identities. It is somehow involved in any activity. Graphic design is, to make use of Tibor Kalman’s words, the medium. And it can be traced in everything we do, see and buy. Read More
On out invitation, Foundland—graphic design studio composed by Ghalia Elsrakbi and Lauren Alexander—designed four posters for the collective exhibition L’Edicola, participating together with Unità di Crisi to the presentation of the next issue of Krisis magazine and thus introducing the topic of orientation crisis.
At the beginning of the 90’s the New York administration decided to renew the area of 42th Street, a critical area since the Great Depression times—when the commercial activities were substituted by low-profile theaters, porn shops, illegal activities like drug dealing and prostitution. The project, supported by large subsidies provided by the state and the government, was intended to renew the old buildings in order to transform them into brand new shops, hotels and restaurants. Read More
L’Edicola is a biannual event, curated by Saul Marcadent, gathering magazines about art, design, fashion and architecture. During the first edition Unità di Crisi presented two works introducing the disorientation theme. In addition to the series of posters—concerning the use of social networks in the Syrian civil war—realized by Foundland, Unità di Crisi arranged Re-Orientation. Myth’s unpredictable destinations. The project consists of a case bringing together approximately one hundred materials concerning the myth of Ulysses, in the attempt to offer a retrospective of the modalities through which the theme of disorientation has been each time represented, narrated and thus assimilated to a particular culture and society.
Intercollective Picture is a collection of pictures and artistic works created by artists making use of the Internet as the main instrument or concept of their works. Intercollective Picture’s goal is to show a new approach to the production of images and start a critical debate concerning new practices in visual art.
An Introduction to Critical Cartography by Jeremy W. Crampton e John Krygier: disorientation as a practice and cartography as production of space.
The cartographic culture’s paradigm shift
It is not at all new the conception according to which a corpus of graphic representations and communicative artifacts can be regarded as a textual work. For sure one of the examples better structured in this sense is that of cartographic culture and the production of map and atlases. Cartography here represents a precious case study about how an entire visual culture can undergo a radical epistemological transformation, and notably a valorisation of its narrative and literary elements. Read More
Veneto 2100: Living with Water is a project of Latitude examining how three different urban territories—the Delta del Po region, the Monti Lessini Creeks, the Piave dry valley—can be transformed taking into account the threats and opportunities ensuing from the presence of water.
Unità di Crisi collaborated on the project as a territorial communication consultant. The investigation produced a series of strategies to develop a territorial communication aimed to point out the critical aspects—and to engage and involve the population in the new scenario imagined by city planners.
Steve Jobs dies the 5th of October 2011. The news appears on the first pages of all newspapers; TV channels, magazines, the Internet—every media talks about it, commemorates him, sings the praises of the man that changed the world’s future. And obviously the funeral vigils outside the Apple Stores. Few people received a similar treatment, maybe nobody. The first similar event coming to mind is the death of Pope Giovanni Paolo II. It is curious that the comparison is between Jobs and the major authority of one of the world’s most powerful and diffused religions. Read More
The election of Herman van Rompuy as President of the European Council inspired graphic designer Jonmar Van Vlijmen to start a research project into the development of the issue concerning European identity. The project, named EUrope, our homeland / Hello Herman, began with a letter addressed to the Belgian politician right after his appointment. Read More
Krisis | Reading. The Attention Crisis – Reading of fragments of important texts was arranged as a reading performance taking place inside the Queriniana Public Library during the White Night Festival in Brescia, the first March 2011. The floor of the reading room was scattered with hundreds of photocopies, each one obtained from a different book’s page. During the three hour performance the readers of the Accademia della Voce H. Vox collected, in turn, a page from the ground and read it aloud.
Help is an installation visualizing, in real time, help requests and offers mediated by Tweets. A software application selects, through Twitter’s Streaming APIs, all messages containing the word help and visualizes them on the screen. At the same time, the relevant words are extracted from the texts and represented in a graphic form highlighting their recurrence and persistence in time—and their possible reciprocal relations. Read More
Furio Jesi was a mythologist, germanist, historian, translator, militant critic. After his untimely death at 39 years of age, his thought and work has become an essential contribution for anybody interested in the issue of myth, through “an intense essayistic activity concerning the myth in Antiquity, its modern resurgences and its political technicalization during the 19th century. Read More
During last year companies and institutions from all around the world have been investing considerable capital in the so-called “social spreading experience”.
The most daring experiment was certainly the Coca-Cola Village in Israel. By means of bracelets equipped with RFID signal—Radio-frequency Identification—linked to individual Facebook accounts, the Village participants could share their “like” appreciation for a specific area of the park, by means of dedicated Like-Machines. The action was directly shared on Facebook, in the format User-name likes area-name of Coca Cola Village. The boys could then tag themselves—again using the bracelet—in the pictures taken by Coca-Cola’s photographers. With a data traffic amounting to more than 300.000 clicks, it seems that the project was a huge success. However such event raises a series of questions regarding the possibility to transmit branded experiences within social networks. Read More
The image and political meaning of the time machine through a century of movies—in other words how we lost the ability to imagine our future. An article by Robert Barry published on Mute Magazine.
Art handling in oblivion is a catalog concerning conspiracy, theft, property and inheritance. Born as the thesis project of Rob van Leijsen, the catalog examines the circumstances of some collections and works of art stolen during wartimes, describing the theft of works of art as a feature inherent to any military campaign.
TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT PROVO is a retrospective exhibition curated by Dutch graphic designers Experimental Jetset, concerning the activities of the subversive group Provo—active in the Netherlands during the 60’s and the 70’s “to explore the notion of the ‘printer as an auteur’, the relationship between activism and archivism, and the connection between the city and the printing press”.
The thin red line running between urban practices, the space and its representations: theorist and architect Eyal Weizman examines how the Israeli army makes use of philosophical and architectonic theories in order to apply new military strategies to the urban context.
Starting from the Die Hard movie as an architectonic premise, thefts, lock-pickings and robberies represented and narrated by 20th century’s movies open a new approach to the city, to its uses, its imaginaries. In an article by BLDG BLOG
In September 2010 we were invited to take part to the fourth number of INNOVeTION VALLEY, a monthly magazine about art and culture distributed together with the Corriere della Sera newspaper and whose editor-in-chief is the curator Cristiano Seganfreddo. We submitted a visual statement, on two double-page spreads, that represents the scenario of permanent crisis and introduces the identity emergency, an issue tackled in the first volume of Krisis magazine.
In this article Matthew Flintham concern himself with works of art that tackled the representation of military landscapes, reflecting on the way war related images modified themselves through time, how the landscape have been absorbed to the military imaginary, and on the strategies adopted by the artists.
Nulpunt: a direct instrument to publish, control, diffuse and discuss governmental documents—that is to say the Public Sphere in the digital era.
Among American sports imported to Mexico, wrestling is the one with the largest audience. Actually lucha libre—that’s its Mexican name—has some technical and sociological features that distinct it from its Yankee version. The luchadores are quite proud of their diversity.
A famous wrestler of the 90’s, named Mascara Sagrada, recently admitted to consider as a shame the fact that, mostly due to television demands, the discipline is increasingly resembling North American wrestling. It is a matter of identity. Read More
During the research activity conducted into the identity emergency and the crisis of its representation models, Unità di Crisi concerned itself with the issue of the United States of Greater Austria. The visual identity project developed for the hypothetical federation of states served as a pretext to investigate the mechanisms involved in the construction of national identities—and the relative contradictions—from the graphic designer’s point of view. The project was exhibited in August 2010 at the collective exhibition Open Studios, curated by Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation. It was subsequently adapted for the volume Krisis | Identities and the relative exhibition.
Nigel Ball is a British graphic designer and professor at the University Campus Suffolk. Since 2001 he has developed a photographic project, McJunk, documenting the omnipresence of the McDonald’s brand in places such as urban streets and sidewalks, in the country, and even along coastal areas. What makes Ball’s project relevant is the fact that the brand of the most famous fast food chain is depicted exclusively in the form of junk: in each picture the yellow M is found upon a can thrown to the ground, or on the remains of a polystyrene package that once held a BigMac—or on a French fries wrapping left at the side of the road. Read More
We propose here one of the most interesting reflections concerning the critical issue of national identity appeared in recent times. The passage is taken from a seminar held by Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 2 at the Public Library of Rastignano (BO). The seminar’s name was “Homeland and death. The Italian identity from Carbonari society to Benigni.” Read More
About 50 years ago branding theories and strategies started to undergo a shift so violent and radical to involve not only the commercial communication sphere but communication as a whole, hence spaces and people involved in any communicative process (this applies to neo-liberal countries). The paradigm shift is perfectly clear: the brand shifts from being a guarantor of the product’s quality to become an “abstract machine designated to the reconfiguration of the product”. Read More
The ancient art of map construction and drawing is the critical object of An Atlas of Radical Cartography—curated by Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat and published in 2008 by the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press. The publication gathers ten essays—each one accompanied by a map—dealing with different topics from globalization to garbage, from surveillance to migratory movements, but always inside a broader question: how to represent them, how to give them a paper form, how to translate them into cartography? Read More
It happens increasingly to hear discourses about the so-called dynamic identities, representations able to adapt themselves to constantly mutating situations and contexts. They are an attempt to give a design answer to the uncertainty and complexity characterizing our times. Read More
Unità di Crisi is part of the multidisciplinary group composed by the urban designers of Latitude Platform—that is Fabio Vanin, Tullia Lombardo, Enrico Anguillari, Marco Ranzato and Andrea Masciantonio—and by anthropologist Valentina Bonifacio, which will present the research project Living with Water in the context of the 5th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam – Making City—opening in April 2012. Read More
Krisis | Identities is the exhibition gathering a selection of the materials published in the first volume of Krisis magazine, focussing the attention on the crisis of the representation of identities in contemporary societies. Unità di Crisi, Valentina Ciarapica, Collectif_fact, Nicolò Degiorgis, Emanuele Kabu and Jonmar Van Vlijmen took part to the exhibition.
Krisis | Identities was hosted by Wave Photogallery—Brescia, February 2011—and by Fondazione Spinola Banna per l’Arte—Poirino, Turin, March 2011.
Workshow is the collective exhibition of the winners of the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation’s artist-in-residence. For the occasion, Unità di Crisi arranged a retrospective exhibition about Bailey bridges. The Bailey bridge is a bridge constituted by a modular structure; this makes it an extremely versatile construction, easy to assemble, cheap, and suitable for those discontinuity situations requiring an emergency intervention. In addition to an informative pamphlet and a scale model, a case, displaying different materials presenting a retrospective of the bridge and its metaphorical meanings, was arranged.
One of the problems at the core of representations—geographical, social, political—is certainly constituted by the necessity to find a right compromise between a fixed and motionless image of a state of being, and the dynamics that constantly alter its nature and form. The problem presents itself, in all its complexity and drama, mostly in the representation of borders—being them the borders of a political map or of any other thematic map—when the use of the segment marks inescapably the inside and the outside of a territory, thus condemning it to a closed identity. The historian and cartographer Bill Rankin experimented a formal alternative which brings with itself ideological consequences: the dot. Read More
National languages seem to have entered a critical situation. First of all the mass migration movements, followed by the recent transformation of the communication technologies and systems, have allowed the proliferation of a number of dialects, jargons, slangs, contaminations between languages—that on their own were not at all pure. Read More
In a 2011 blog post Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine and cyberculture guru, pointed out something that Apple has been doing for some years: to label its products with a caption stating “Designed in California” and, less visible, “assembled in China”. Something that, according to K.K., is the same as stating: “Yes, Apple stuff is manufactured in China by robot-like young people in precision synchrony, but it is designed — that high art — in California — where the sun always shines — by wild haired groovy mac guys who like to question authority. At least that is the branded myth.” The author notes that also other companies, like the sneaker brand Vans—Designed in California—or Nokia—Designed in Finland—are adopting a similar strategy. Other examples are pointed out by the readers of the blog. Read More
Headed by three artists—Francisco Camacho, Luigi Coppola e Danilo Correale—and organized by AIR Antwerpen in association with Extra City, Enacting Populism is an ongoing project that will end in February 2012. The project raises from a simple realization: since the fall of Berlin’s wall the new European political parties, founded on a populist approach—and often oriented toward right—have been winning the trust of an ever increasing segment of the population and the constituency. Read More
It is well known how the Internet and the new digital technologies have rendered much fainter the boundary between public and private, and how this sudden exposition and visibility, to which more or less consciously we entrust ourselves, is being increasingly used toward ends which are at least controversial—it’s enough to think of the companies filling out veritable dossiers about their employees by monitoring their Facebook profile. But, at the end of the day, how much of us remains effectively entangled in the Internet’s web after our passage? And, most of all, who can access this huge amount of information? Read More
Where Krisis and the Unità di Crisi group come from? What are the previous experiences?
Unità di Crisi arises from our perception of a lack of awareness, on the part of the world of design and communication, about the general scenario of permanent crisis through which our culture advanced itself. Better, the impression is that the direct responsibility of these professional roles, with regard to the cognitive discomfort of the people, citizens and consumers of this new century, isn’t adequately perceived. Who gives form to things has more or less the same responsibility of those providing the content (idea and matter), because it is only through the form that we can get to know the content. Something had to be done. Read More
At the art fair ArtVerona 2010, in the Indipendents Pavilion, Unità di Crisi arranged a wall covering it with a blow up picture portraying several soldiers assembling a Bailey bridge in Italy during the Second World War. On the opposite wall a scale model of the bridge, chosen as a metaphor for Unità di Crisi’s operative modalities, was arranged.
Examining the cases of Apple and Amazon, Wu Ming adapts the Marxist concept of fetishism to the production in the time of Web 2.0.
