Gladly I found out other rants about the italian situation in Matteo Bittanti’s blog. The star of Italian game studies (who actually works at Stanford, Berkeley and the California College of the Arts in San Francisco) has a lot of interesting (and terrible) links to explain to the world why is Italy going down; here, here (in italian), and from the New York times here.

I am adding a new link, real wealth of information, about grassroots media productions, often bordering with media activism. It is not by chance that many of these productions or actions involve the use of different media, employ cross media storytelling or cross media distribution strategies.Their name is Produzioni Dal Basso (bottom-up productions), unfortunately only in Italian, I will try and translate all their posts regarding cross media productions.

Technorati Tags: media activism

A quick link to a research group in Rome that seems kind of interesting, readapting the strong tradition of italian ethnographic research to mobile audiences.

A friend just send me a very depressing article about the situation of PhD students in Italy, actually reality is much more depressing, but if you are so lucky to work in another country perhaps you can’t imagine how it is like - please take a look.PS I notice now the article is old, from 2001; well, the last time I looked around for a PhD scholarship in Italy was 2004, and the situation was even worse.

Technorati Tags: educational, Italy

I quote directly :
“The competition jury will award a prize of 2,500.00 euro to the work (published or unpublished) which best represents experimentation between arts and new technologies. The candidates for the prize (a short list of a maximum of 6 competitors) will be guests at the 4th edition of the Share Festival, taking place in Turin March 2008 at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti, Turin. In order to be declared winner of the prize, every artist has to take part in the 4th edition of Share Festival, by preparing his or her work of art, to be properly evaluated by jury and public.
The organization is available at offering all the costs regarding the preparation of the 6 selected works as well as travel and accommodation expenses for the artists, and, possibly, the prize itself.

Nomination of 6 candidates for the prize: by November, 2007. The announcement will be published on the following website: www.toshare.it The winner will be announced in March 2008 during the award ceremony at Share Festival”.

DEADLINE : 30 September 2007

Sort of interesting, and one of the first initiatives of the sort to be held in Italy…. I understand it also considers cross media productions

Not about cross media but remediation - from an italian magazine: “Roberto Bernocco, a programmer from Bra (small town near Cuneo, worldly renowned as the originator of the Slow Food movement), wrote a novel of 384 pages on his mobile phone, “Compagni di viaggio”, available at Lulu.com. The downloads have already reached the number of 19.900 copies”.
I wonder how the style has been affected by the (unusual) medium, will post soon about it.

H-Play, a sub-branch of H-Farm, italian cluster of media creation studios, has organized a urban game set in Venice called The Ruyi - GPS antennas and locative devices are just a tiny element in solving a big mystery layered with cultural references to the always beautiful city of Venice. The christening is December the 1st 2007.

After discovering the attempt made by Sky Vivo to produce participatory television in Italy, I kept thinking that was nothing new, and I remembered reading a post by Robin Good, one of my favorite blogs, in 2005 about Nessuno TV, wonderful italian experiment of participatory channel, dating back to 2002, 4 year earlier than Al Gore’s Current TV.
In this post, Robin Good describes a “virtual talk show” presented by Nessuno TV, with real guests in the studio and other guests on screens inside the studio interacting via webcam. The program was broadcasted in streaming and on satellite TV at the same time.
What I am trying to point out is how grassroots production most of the time leads the way for mainstream communication, and, like in Maurizio Costanzo’s case, how can we preserve the potential of the new communication methods so that they promote better communication, better understanding, a more democratic approach to media, and avoid cross media to be used just as a gimmick to add a novelty flavor to an otherwise very conventional approach to television.

Sky Vivo, italian satellite tv, is going to launch this July the first (? if I am wrong please correct me) officially cross media program, entitled “Stella: are you ready to change?”. One of the more venerable talk show conductors in Italy, Maurizio Costanzo, is going to moderate a daily talk show featuring every day via webcam connection four italian families, interacting with guests and stars in studio.
The conversation will also be influenced by spectators from home, via sms, email and the Stella web portal. Sms will be visually present in the studio through projection on a large luminous sphere in the middle of the studio.
The broadcast will be also available later on in streaming.
While the information structure might sound “young”, in fact the themes treated, like the debate on stamina cells and embryos (this is a hot theme in Italy, check out the lovely activist game of Molle Industria), safety on the streets, precarious work etc, seem to be addressing an older audience.

Costanzo himself, age 69? 71?, an institution in Italian television since 25 years, is hardly as cool and young as the network tries to portray him. Maybe this is the only way to introduce innovative forms of communication in an “old-fashioned” country such as Italy. I wonder how the situation like is in Spain, Portugal, Greece, and other countries where “institutions”, like in Italy, tend to slow down change and innovation.

Technorati Tags: iTV, Web 2.0