19-20 maggio/may 2007
(@ via bogino 9 torino)

Meeting-Laboratory
WRITING TRANSFORMATION II

A pretext to find the words, images and sounds to describe a fluctuating existential condition that requires continuous redefinition and to bring to light what of History and stories may remain, migrate and mutate.

: desiderio/migrazione?
: desire/migration?

programma/full program @
www.letteraturedisvolta.it
(cittadellarte - fondazione pistoletto)


Xpanding Orhizones
Presentation hypermedia project 0rhizone

0rhizone
0rhizone (zero(0)rhizone) is an ongoing hypermedia project which takes as its starting point the 30 books selected as seminal texts for social transformation for the Letterature di svolta/Living Library exhibition, initially held at Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto in 2004 and recently on show again at the Biella-based Art Foundation.

The name 0rhizone combines the conceptual/affective sprawl of Deleuzian rhizomatics with a quest for Tarkovsky’s elusive zone of memory and desire (passing on its way through Burroughs’ interzone of translation and hybridity). It implies a degree zero (0) of hypermedia “writing” and construction of subjectivity (alert but empty) navigating between the zeros and ones of binary digital logic, combing a deterritorialized, degraded signscape for traces of a lost or overlooked event-horizon. A “writing” through, with and against, rather than about, the effluvia of electronic media saturation.

He(u)retical Readings
The first stage of 0rhizone, 0rhizone #1, takes the form of a web-based hypertext, a he(u)retical development or dérive of the traditional philosophical essay but within a ‘smooth space’ where what is produced are sense and sensation (rather than meaning) and where critical interpretation gives way to the space of ‘not-knowing’ that lies or emerges in the interstices, silences and gaps between the planes of composition (text, music, images layered or juxtaposed).

0rhizone #1 errs around Mike Davis’s City of Quartz (one of the 30 “libri di svolta”) bringing into play our own experiences of ignoring, forgetting, pretending to have read and then finally reading the book, somewhat distractedly, intermittently, thinking about other things, other places along the way, frustrated and inspired in turn by a fundamental inability to think Los Angeles beyond the cliché of the Hollywood ‘sign’, and so resigning ourselves to a movie version of speculative reflection on some of Davis’s themes: lost utopias, film noir as a critique of corporate boosterism, the militarization of urban space, the city as war-zone, the politics of fear. Here the hypertext form serves more than anything else as a way to map a certain mood of reading and inhabiting Davis’s text and the city it attempts to anatomize.

A Living Library?
The 0rhizone project is not simply or not only a hypertext but aims to consider the practice of hypermedia in the broadest way possible, hopefully bringing into play the ‘readings’ of a wide range of international artists, writers, researchers, thinkers and diggers. Each of the 30 books will become the springboard or drawing board for an image, text, work, form of resistance, situation, event or non-event specific to a particular capture of its problematics and constituency of reception, for which the primary medium may be electronic, visual, aural, spatial, physical or a combination of these.

The “Living Library” from being an actualization will thus be reversed into the problematic field or constellation that constitutes it. What is a library and what is it for? What type of public domain does it inscribe in the social fabric (mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion, panopticon/invisibility, emancipation/ oppression)? What kind of readings, uses or performativities of texts does it foster or permit? As the project develops, the letterature di svolta website will continue to document, map and connect these diverse he(u)retical ‘readings’ that will ideally involve many different subjects (both individual and collective) and an array of institutional and non-institutional frameworks, as well as bringing into play numerous strategies and practices (from video and photography to text, hypertext, sound art, militant actions and relational art) in the hope of becoming an open platform for discussion, shared narrative, creative appropriation, molecular desire.

> 0rhizone under construction website

> letterature di svolta website