Digital Landscapes. MEET for #Bauhaus100

A hundred years after the foundation of the school that completely changed design and architecture, an exhibition, curated by Aldo Colonetti, aims at recovering Bauhaus’ memory and rethink its influence on the future. The exhibition is called Bauhaus 100: imparare, fare, pensare (Bauhaus 100: learn, do, think) and tries to find out what is left of that revolutionary spirit and ponder whether it is still possible to design by focussing on “ideas” and not “things”.

The exhibition will be held in Macerata, and not by chance. One of the few Italians who attended the Bauhaus in the 1930s is the Ivo Pannaggi, an artist and multifaceted innovator from Macerata. The exhibition will be on Until November 3, 2019 and will be spread among the civic museum of Palazzo Buonaccorsi as well as Palazzo Pellicani Silvestri, the former headquarters of the Bank of Italy, and the municipal library Mozzi Borgetti.

Digital Landscapes

MEET is also part of Bauhaus 100. The founder of our digital culture centre, Maria Grazia Mattei, has in fact edited the section Digital Landscapes. Corpo linguaggio azione. (Body, Language, Action) through four installations of as many international creatives this event investigates the relationship between analogue and digital that the German school was able to intuit over a hundred years ago. The path defines some common founding characteristics that link the artistic movement born in 1919 to the present-day digital world, words such as interdisciplinarity, experimentation with new expressive languages and hybridisation of technological and humanist skills with goals that are not only creative but also productive.

“Telling the roots of the new is one of the MEET missions – declared Mattei – We have joyfully joined the” call “of Aldo Colonetti because Bauhaus 100: imparare, fare pensare views the past as the stepping stone for the future. A hundred years after his birth, the German school envisioned by Gropius inspires and shapes the work of artists and creatives from all over the world, as we recount in the Digital Landscapes section. Through four very different projects we travel the world, from Hong Kong to Berlin, passing through Miami and Emilia Romagna, finding parallelisms and legacies that hybridise the Bauhaus codes with the languages and processes of the digital age. Citing Gropius, we could say that the “new building of the future” has a founding element in the Digital Disruption. This exhibition allows us to welcome it and interpret it as a cultural ingredient of a global and paradigmatic process of change”.

The Digital Landscapes course – set up in the scenic Sala dell’Eneide e di Ercole of Palazzo Buonaccorsi – is organized around themes such as Immersion/Total Work; Body; Human + Machine; New Expressive Languages . Four stages of a single story, that of the advance of the digital in our lives, in an installation that “mirrors” the present and the past by Baldessari & Baldessari.

The works

• Das Total Tanz Theater 360 is the immersive virtual work of the Interactive Media Foundation, a direct tribute to the history of the Bauhaus. The choreographer Richard Siegal developed a piece of work that was digitized using body scanning and motion capture techniques and reorganized into three-dimensional space. The experts of Artificial Rome designed the scenery and costumes. The theatrical parts are accompanied by electronic music composed by Lorenzo Bianchi Hoesch.
• Audi Dresses are creations of the fashion-tech designer Anouk Wipprecht born from a joint cooperation between the artist and the car manufacturer Audi. Wipprecht “enhances” the human body with clothes that are wearable technologies, unusual in form and function, and they remind us of the research of the early twentieth century pushing beyond the perception of the body as an actor of experiences and relationships. Watch the video of Meet the Media Guru with Anouk Wipprecht.
• VoV – Value of Values is a blockchain based art project that aims to discover the true economic value of human values through the electroencephalogram. VoV is an extension of the acclaimed Brain Factory project by Maurice Benayoun, Tobias Klein, Nicolas Mendoza Leal. Visitors to the exhibition give – directly from their brain waves – a three-dimensional shape to abstract concepts, such as freedom, peace, money, love, power.
• Typeline is a video installation dedicated to the dynamic typography whose main axes are movement and time. The project of Griffo-la grande festa delle lettere (Griffo, the great party of letters) is curated by Roberto Paci Dalò and Dina & Solomon (Mirit Wissotzky, Manuel Dall’Olio) and consists of a sequence of 8 videos selected through an international call promoted by Griffo and aimed at artists and designers (works by: Gianluca Alla, Victoria Hanna, Ivan Miranda, Matteo Moretti, Doretta Rinaldi, Schultz Schultz, Caroline Sinders and Yuri Tartari Pucci). The set of projects shows how the everyday matter of letters, almost banal and taken for granted, produces a wide variety of acts, operations and worlds, which oscillate between art and design.

In the opening image see the installation of VoV – Value of Values in the Sala dell’Eneide e di Ercole in Palazzo Buonaccorsi, Macerata.