Intermedia in Italy. From Futurism to Digital Convergence

Abstract

In Italy at the turn of the twentieth century, the arts drew suddenly closer: a curtain was raised on a magical new hybrid art, cinema. There followed an escalation in the birth of new hybrid genres like sound art, video art, graphic art and performance art and new sites and technologies for hybridity were developed: television, video projection, museums as white boxes, computers, the Internet. Some of Italy’s best-known artists and groups got involved in various ways, from the Futurists, to Bruno Munari, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Gruppo 63, Gianni Toti, Niccolò Ammaniti, and Wu Ming. Many artists we know less well often charted this in-between creative world. This book is rooted in the hypothesis that the ever-closer relations between artistic practices have been a key cultural force driving creativity since the start of the twentieth century. It attempts the first large-scale mapping of this force, providing a new framing, and along the way attempts to uncover some of the reasons behind this change.