Simonetta Fadda

EVENT: FROM EXPANDED CINEMA TO MACHINIMA (FEBRUARY 3 2024, MILAN)

MEMORIES OF THE SCREEN #3

FROM EXPANDED CINEMA TO MACHINIMA

Saturday February 3 2024, 09:30 - 13:30 FREE ENTRY

Accademia di Belle Arti, Brera

Sede di San Carpoforo, Via Formentini 12, Milan, Italy

Curated by Simonetta Fadda e Matteo Bittanti

Special Guest: GianFilippo Pedote: Artavazd Pelešjan and Godfrey Reggio’s special affinities

In the latest acclaimed lecture series organized by artist Dimitri Kozaris, Simonetta Fadda and Matteo Bittanti unravel the interwoven lineages from analog video art provocateurs to today’s game-based machinima practitioners. As digital media intensify our reliance on simulated realities, artists like the late Phil Solomon and Harun Farocki strategically repurposed gaming assets to unveil the affective and ideological functions of these persuasive worlds. Contemporary figures like Dutch filmmaker Bram Ruiter advance this tradition of appropriation-as-critique, harnessing the medium’s own tools to reveal otherwise hidden currents of awe and unease within emergent virtual topographies.

Yet as Bittanti’s historical contextualization underscores, contemporary artists build directly upon tactics predating the digital revolution — from the Situationists’ mischievous image hijacking to Peggy Ahwesh’s decontextualization of gaming imagery. While machinima constitutes a 21st century iteration, the deeper creative impulse persists: to remake perception by tearing open and radically recombining the fabric of the present.

This drive resonates with earlier aspirations like Gene Youngblood’s influential Expanded Cinema concept in the radical 1970s, which called for imploding and transcending the standard frame itself. From celluloid and analog signals to CGI, the desire endures to expose and transform the unseen dimensions, glitches, and bugs lurking within everyday media architectures. By spotlighting today’s vanguard remixers through their seminal precursors across eras, Fadda and Bittanti’s shared inquiry reveals the drive of the avant-garde tradition pulsating within creative digital disruptions past, present and future.

EVENT: SIMONETTA FADDA (MARCH 31 - APRIL 13 2023, ONLINE)

GAME OVER

One channel video (SD, 676x540), color, sound, 4’ 27”, 2002 Italy

Created by Simonetta Fadda


Driving at night in the video game-like suburban French city of Enghien Les Bains can be an exciting or demoralizing experience, depending on the driver or, perhaps, on the filmmaker. Simonetta Fadda’s carscapes are both delirious and hyper-real, suggesting a toxic convergence of realities.

Born in Savona, Simonetta Fadda is an artist, educator, essayist, and translator. Her teaching activities include the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti, Turin and Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, 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, 1999), the first Italian study on video as a medium of art and political activism, which was reprinted in an expanded format in 2017 by Meltemi Edizioni. In 2020, Franco Angeli published her new book, Media and art. She also translated into Italian and edited Gene Youngblood’s seminal book Expanded Cinema.

NEWS: ANNOUNCING THE MMF MMXXIII INTERNATIONAL JURY PANEL

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.

NEWS: SIMONETTA FADDA JOINS THE 2022 MMF JUROR PANEL

We are delighted to announce that artist, writer and educator Simonetta Fadda has joined the international jury panel of the Milan MACHINIMA Festival.

Born in Savona, 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). Her video works were featured at Fondation du Doute, Blois (2018), Museo di Sant’Agostino, Genoa (2011), Museo d’Arte Moderna (MAMbo), Bologna (2008), Museo d’Arte (MAN), Nuoro, Italy (2008); Cinémathèque Française, Paris (2008); Kunst Haus Glogauer, Berlin (2007); Mach’mit Museum, Berlin (2007). In 2009, with Giuseppe Baresi, she produced the documentary In One Photo, about the artists active in the Brera district in Milan during the Sixties, including Piero Manzoni, Nanda Vigo, and Ugo La Pietra. 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.


Siamo felici di annunciare che l'artista, scrittrice ed educatrice Simonetta Fadda è entrata a far parte della giuria internazionale del Milan MACHINIMA Festival.

Nata a Savona, Simonetta Fadda è artista, educatrice, saggista e traduttrice. Svolge attività didattica presso alcune delle più importanti istituzioni artistiche italiane, tra cui l'Accademia di Belle Arti "Giacomo Carrara" (Bergamo), l'Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera (Milano) e la Scuola Civica di Cinema "Luchino Visconti" (Milano). Dagli anni Ottanta lavora con la video arte. Le sue opere sono presenti in collezioni pubbliche e private in Italia e in Europa. Ha partecipato a eventi internazionali come Movimenta - Biennale de l'image en mouvement, projet Mondes Flottants: Grandes Images, Nizza, Francia (2017) e Parallel Program of the 13th Istanbul Biennial, Institut Français d'Istanbul, Instanbul, Turchia (2013). In Italia è stata presente, tra gli altri, al Festival del Nuovo Cinema di Pesaro, Pesaro (nel 2018 a We Want Cinema: cinema e video di ricerca e nel 2016 a Satellite) e al Bergamo Film Meeting (2010). I suoi lavori video sono stati presentati alla Fondation du Doute a Blois (2018), al Museo di Sant'Agostino di Genova (2011), al Museo d'Arte Moderna (MAMbo) di Bologna (2008), al Museo d'Arte (MAN) di Nuoro (2008), alla Cinémathèque Française a Parigi (2008), al Kunst Haus Glogauer a Berlino (2007), al Mach'mit Museum a Berlino (2007). Nel 2009, con Giuseppe Baresi, ha prodotto il documentario In una foto, sugli artisti attivi nel quartiere di Brera a Milano negli anni Sessanta, tra cui Piero Manzoni, Nanda Vigo e Ugo La Pietra. Scrittrice e critica, Fadda è autrice del seminale Definizione zero: origini della videoarte tra politica e comunicazione (Costa & Nolan, 1999), il primo studio italiano sul video come mezzo d'arte e attivismo politico (ristampato in versione ampliata nel 2017 da Meltemi Edizioni). Nel 2020, Franco Angeli ha dato alle stampe Media e arte. Tra i suoi numerosi lavori di cura editoriale e traduzione in italiano spicca Expanded Cinema di Gene Youngblood.