Digicult.it

Arts Manager: Tell us about conception of your project. Who was the initiator, how have your project been created and developing?

Marco Mancuso: Digicult was born 5 years ago (January 2005), with the idea of starting a project that could collect my backgrounds, my studies, my passions, my professional skills and my wish to do something important for the cultural economy of my country, in terms of sharing the project and the «original» idea with other Italian people working around that was so called «new media». The idea of Digicult was to start a project that could be challenging for a new kind of economy and culture, something really independent, not linked with any institution, made without any money and help, based on a networking philosophy, something that could be able to use the Internet as a free and worldwide communication platform. At that time I was still working as a critic and journalist, focusing on audiovisual art and design work that linked the experiences and historical developments of electronic music, visual arts and experimental cinema. At the same time I was totally interested in all the possible artistic and creative branches of disciplines using digital technologies as a creative tool, concerning their impact on art, design and contemporary society: netart, software art, electronic music, sound art, video art, experimental cinema, performing art, graphic design, interaction design, architecture, robotics, bioart, generative art, hacking, possibly without any restriction. All these items became the centre of a project that is a web journalistic portal (Digicult, that is based on taking news and collecting and translating them into Italian from lists like Rhizome, Spectre, NetBehavour, Nettime, Syndicate and other sources, and re-pushing Digicult activities inside them) and a critical magazine (Digimag), which I wanted to be monthly in order to follow the constantly changing world of digital creativity. With the idea of sharing the project on a national level, I contacted the first 20 people, some friends and colleagues working in Italy as curators, critics, journalists, presenting the project, shared ideas and asked them to write for the magazine Digimag, concerning their different knowledge and backgrounds focuses on those disciplines I listed above. In these years some people left and some others still remain. Of course, the Network enlarged, including at the moment around 40 people that write every month for the magazine Digimag in different sections. I quickly decided to enlarge the project, opening the Digipod podcast, the Diginews newsletter, the web 2.0 social networks (like Facebook, Twitter, Flicker, Vimeo, Delicious, LinkedIn) and lately the Digimade art agency. I decided to open the art agency for the same reasons as I started Digicult: to work with Italian artists values, promote them outside Italy, showing that something important could be done also without money and institutional help...

Read the complete interview at http://www.artmanager.ru