The MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL is delighted to announce the 2023 jury panel: Simonetta Fadda, Stefano Locati, Jenna Ng, Marco de Mutiis, and Henry Lowood.
Born in Savona, Italy Simonetta Fadda is an artist, educator, essayist and translator. Her teaching activity include the Accademia di Belle Arti "Giacomo Carrara" (Bergamo), Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera (Milan) and Scuola Civica di Cinema e Televisione “Luchino Visconti” (Milan). Since the Eighties, she has been working with video art. Her artworks are featured in public and private collections in Italy and in Europe. She participated in major international events such as Movimenta – Biennale de l’image en mouvement, projet Mondes Flottants: Grandes Images, Nice, France (2017) and Parallel Program of the 13th Istanbul Biennial, Institut Français d’Istanbul, Istanbul (2013). In Italy she was featured, among others, at Festival del Nuovo Cinema di Pesaro, Pesaro – Italy (in We Want Cinema: cinema e video di ricerca 2018, and in Satellite 2016) and Bergamo Film Meeting, Bergamo – Italy (2010). A prolific writer and critic, Fadda is the author of the seminal Definition zero: origins of video art between politics and communication (Costa & Nolan, Milan 1999), the first Italian study on video as a medium of art and political activism (reprinted in an expanded format in 2017 by Meltemi Edizioni, Milan). In 2020, Franco Angeli published her new book, Media and art. Among her editing and translation work into Italian is Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema.
Stefano Locati is a post-doctoral research fellow at IULM University in Milan, Italy. His research focuses on Chinese and Japanese cinemas, transmedia, adaptation studies, periodical studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Literatures and Media and a master’s degree in philosophy. Heis the author of Sistema media mix. Cinema e sottoculture giovanili del Giappone contemporaneo (The Media Mix System. Cinema and Youth Subcultures of Contemporary Japan, 2022), La spada del destino. I samurai nel cinema giapponese dalle origini a oggi (The Sword of Doom. Samurai in Japanese cinema from the origin to the present, 2018), Il nuovo cinema di Hong Kong. Voci e sguardi oltre l’handover (New Hong Kong Cinema. Voices and Sights beyond the Handover, 2014, with Emanuele Sacchi), and Evolution. Darwin e il cinema (Evolution. Darwin and cinema, 2009, with Elena Canadelli). He has co-edited with Dario Boemia the volume Book Reviews and Beyond. Critical Authority, Cultural Industry, and Society in Periodicals Between the 18th and the 21st Century (2021). He is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Ca' Foscari Short Film Festival in Venice and the artistic director of Sognielettrici/Electricdreams International Film Festival in Milan.
Jenna Ng is Senior Lecturer in Film and Interactive Media at the School of Arts and Creative Technologies, University of York. She has published widely on digital media and visual culture, with research interests as well in the philosophy of technology, the posthuman, computational culture and the digital humanities. She is the editor of Understanding Machinima: Essays on Films in Virtual Worlds (Bloomsbury, 2013) and the author of The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie (Amsterdam University Press, 2021). Her latest work is a creative multimedia portfolio online piece, “The New Virtuality” (2022).
Marco de Mutiis is Digital Curator at Fotomuseum Winterthur and an artist working with different media and technologies and with an interest in issues of perception and communication. Often re-engineering and transforming old analog and mechanical devices, De Mutiis creates kinetic installations that concern with communication, language and physicality. Graduated with distinction from the MFA program at the School of Creative Media (City University of Hong Kong), he has shown his works internationally in festivals and galleries. He has been the recipient of the Bloomberg Digital Arts Initiative in 2013. He has worked as a senior research associate and part-time lecturer at City University of Hong Kong and he is pursuing a Doctorate Program.
Henry Lowood is Curator for Germanic Collections and Harold C. Hohbach Curator, History of Science & Technology Collections in the Stanford University Libraries. As a curator, he is part of the Humanities Research Group in Green Library, the Department best known for the Lane Reading Room and a wonderful group of colleagues. Henry Lowood has written several essays on such topics as game studies, game preservation, and machinima. Among his most recent books are The Machinima Reader (2012) with Michael Nitsche and Debugging Game History (2016) with Raiford Guins, both published by MIT Press and Machinima! Teorie, pratiche, dialoghi with Matteo Bittanti in 2013, published by Edizioni Unicopli. Along with Guins, Lowood is now editing a new series for MIT Press about the history and culture of gaming. Since 2000, Lowood has headed a project first funded by the Stanford Humanities Laboratory and, since the demise of SHL, continued in the Libraries. Among other projects, Lowood curated the Machinima Archive for the Internet Archive, which is dedicated to the academic investigation and historical preservation of the emerging art form known as machinima. From 2008 to 2013, Lowood led the HTGG Stanford group in a project first funded by the U.S. Library of Congress called Preserving Virtual Worlds.
