Practices of independent actions and communication in the Internet.
A meeting with Ricardo Dominguez

Bologna, Salara (via don Minzoni 18)
April 7, 2001 - 5pm
Salara Medialab - Bologna City Council

This is the first of a new series of happenings and public presentations conceived in the program of the upcoming Salara MediaLab. Their purpose is to explore the most radical forms of artistic production and analyze the potential of the communication networks.

The exhibition/display styles used so far by the world of the arts result to be totally unadequate to represent net-based projects: the Salara MediaLab will try to present to the public new forms of artistic interventions, bringing the Italyn audience up to date on experimentation with digital media (which is already a purpose of big foreign institutions such as Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria or the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, just to name a few).

Salara MediaLab presents Ricardo Dominguez, a pioneer of Internet based activism and one of the founders of the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT / http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html). Former member of the well known Critical Art Ensemble collective, Ricardo Dominguez is senior editor for The Thing New York (http://bbs.thing.net) and also member of the digital art collective Fakeshop (http://www.fakeshop.com).

The convergence of hacking and activism allows to join the forces of those who critically use the digital communication media and those who reflects on some hot spots of contemporary societies, such as the free flow of information and the need for an unrestricted redistribution of knowledge.

The meeting with Ricardo Dominguez will also represent the opportunity of a dialogue between a successfull North-American experience and the Italyn reality, fueled by diffused autonomous networks and able to introduce hackers' practices into a social domain.

Ricardo Dominguez is one of the founders of the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), the collective that since 1998 spread the practice of the Virtual Sit-In as an activist tool. The SWARM project was presented at 1998 edition of the Ars Electronica Festival (Linz, Austria), whose theme was InfoWar. Senior editor of The Thing New York, from 1987 to 1994 Ricardo Dominguez has been part of the Critical Art Ensemble, the US based group which first developed the influential practice/idea of Electronic Civil Disobedience. Ricardo frequently collaborates with other internationally known artists or groups, like Fakeshop (at the 2001 Whitney Biennal of American Art), Francesca da Rimini (they procuced jointly Dollspace - www.thing.net/~dollyoko) and Diane Ludin (project Aphanisis). His articles, essays and interviews have been extensively published on the net.

Ricardo Dominguez will present a preview of the forthcoming book "Hacktivism", edited by Autonomedia Press, New York - a collection of practical and theoretical essays which reconstructs the story of the "hacktivism". Snafu e Subjesus of The Thing Italy will talk with Ricardo about this international scene and the Italyn landscape of electronic activists.