Would you like to give us an overview of Cinema Solubile within the context of realtime (visual) interaction?

Many things can be defined realtime visual interactions:) I guess this includes a wink or a smile to a girl in a bus.
What interests me the most is the broad picture that comes out when an interaction is built into a complex situation. Cinema Solubile is a game. The context, the situation and time, in which it is played, defines a dynamic relationship between ideas, art-forms, history of art and a performance. I see it more or less as a situation where people (makers, public, musicians etc) have fun in a rich context (*).

Cinema Solubile is easy to explain to an artist:
"Would you like to join 10 other people in a movie game next week? You will be asked to come with a one-liner for a movie, put it in the hat with the ones brought from the others. I shuffle, You take back what comes out and have 23 hours to make a film that has to be maximum 6'22"11 frames. The film has no budget, will be shown the night after to the public, and after screening you will be asked to destroy it on stage. There will be a prize for the best film. Ah, by the way, it is related to the futurist manifest of Cinema and the manifest of Variety show... have you read that?"

Cinema Solubile means "cinema that can be solved (as a riddle)" but also 'instant cinema' like instant coffee...

How does the audience participate to these events?

The first thing to notice is that it's IMPOSSIBLE to produce a film in 23 hours. The audience feels this. Makers are forced by the game to "find a creative solution, think fast and trust their genius and experiment with the media". It is an interesting show.

For such task some of the makers prepare beforehand. I tell them they can team up, and I tell them that all that is not explicitly forbidden in the rules is permitted. Gordian knots are supposed to be cut. There are also the manifestos that I send beforehand, and the Futurist Manifesto of the Variety Theater [1] is pretty good to open your horizons...

I let makers bring their own people. I care to put in game artists of different styles, with various ages and different backgrounds: film makers, video makers, software artists, VJs, animators, etcetera.

Both evenings I use musical improvisation and futurist material to help setting the mood. Futurists have been a great avant-garde movement, the first one. Italian futurists are not well known, and the mix of sound/poetry/colours is very dynamic...

Then, of the most importance, there is the Unorosso orchestra, put up around the charisma of Fausto Casara, a good friend and incredible musician-drummer-percussionist. Unorosso is a core project that I have kept up since 1998. Every time I put it up with different guest musicians, on the range from the cello to the french horn to the guitar/bass to the laptop or the theremin. That helps a lot to create atmospheres. The mood is such that in the second night we are often asked to improvise live soundtracks...

The dynamics with the audience is different in the two evenings of the show; the first evening is aimed at involving the participating makers. Then there is more of an atmosphere of suspense and (quiet) expectation. In Amsterdam 2005 we performed the first evening at Waag, a 16th century masonic temple which incorporates an octagonal teatrum anatomicum, there I had a maker that did not show up. So I asked in the audience if there was someone wanting to improvise a film for us. I found one! And he not only presented his film the evening after... but it was also pretty good!

The second evening, I notice a climate of complicity. In the audience there are the makers with their friends and crews, people recognize each other from the day before... so they know each other and are there to have fun... it can easily become an happening... for example In Amsterdam 2005 second evening we were at Melkweg, a multifunctional center and famous concert place. Perhaps, they had not expected so large a crowd and a long performance, so we were interrupted halfway through the show because of too many bicycles in the way. The whole theater (me included) went down two stores, moved the bicycles and came back up, some fetching another drink in the way... it was a lot of fun!

What is the concept of 'cinema' in your project since it doesn't fit within the traditional method of making films?

Cinema is very important for 'new visual arts'. Because it is a mature art. Cinema has a great history and a good amount of solutions by cinema masters have a long history. A close-up, a narrative technique, slow motion, editing... All this defines sentences in a language were many genial masters have already worked within its canons to form a 'literature'.

Also the languages of cinema is made upon its technicalities, and along the evolution of those. Sonorization, color, animation, digital effects and sound... The entire language paradigm evolved in the end on strips of semitransparent material attached one to the other...

Now we do cinematic products recreating its established language digitally within our editing programs. As such we are forcing in our storytelling a language that has evolved within the limits of a medium that is only mimed by the one we use. The medium we use is a whole different one, it no longer has these sequential limits! The digital medium has to evolve its own language, evolve its paradigm. There are many talents that make software and have no idea of how this can be enriched by the experiences and theories of avant garde artists. Artists that were dreaming of a possible 'evolution' of cinema as if they already had the tools. All tools which are now common to us.

It also works the other way around of course. It is curious to see that the most experimental films are usually done by filmmakers not by VJs. Or that Peter Greenaway, for example, can be a very successful VJ here in Holland.

I say that a 'solubile' is a film because it has to be viewed together with other people in a dark place, looking in one direction only... That is the limit... and the strength! We know that it is impossible to make cinema in a conventional way in 23 hours and no budget... (I stress here the difference between 'cinema' and videoclip)
'The Zone' delimited by Cinema Solubile is one in which film makers and VJs can compete in a fair way: there is a maximum time (the 6 minutes 22 seconds and 11 frames) and a story line and there is no time to produce in a traditional way (script, cast, act, shoot, edit, post produce). So both ways of thinking are put offbeat in a specular way...

For the rest, to improvise or 'theatrize' with cinema is not a new thing to do. It was foreseen by the futurists in their manifesto, it was done by Piscator in the 20s... and there are various interesting experiments with live cinema concepts going on at the moment. It's difficult to do, but it is so in a creative way.

How do you see it as a creative challenge for the audience, the participators and the artists and where does one role start and the other one finishes anyway?

I said it is a competition, but I lied. Yes there is a prize, but no one knows beforehand what it is. There is a jury, but is selected "according to the canons of the futurist manifesto of Variety Show"... I say usually "that Cinema Solubile is a game, to be played like the children do: seriously..."
I say something obvious here: makers, even the more shy 'conceptual artists' like to have applause from the crowd. They want to do better than their friends... I see they do their homework when there is a 'solubile'... But it is no sport. The competition carries a light ironic smile. And you should see how the public reacts when a film has to be destroyed. In Spoleto for the crowd's favourite film there was a fierce opposition to the destruction process, the maker, Jan Klug, was very bold to destroy it anyway...

How much of the Futurist ideas are limiting the concept of Cinema Solubile, or on the other hand, releasing from conventional concepts of cinema, audience and artist?

Cinema Solubile came to me as a futurist performance. As such it can be related with many different incarnations of a futurist performance in the 20th century, including Cabaret Voltaire, Fluxus and Zappa's Mothers of Invention. I am stretching the term 'futurist' over the borders of the historically accepted meaning. But let me explain why I feel I need to do so.
The impact of futurism is not at all an argument sedated by time. It has been officially removed from the history of Italian culture for 40 years. Forgotten. It still stresses people. Futurists are considered tied with fascist ideals and government. Official Italian culture was eager to "forget them" after the Second World War. Sometimes this have been done over prizing some other minor figures, [can this be made clearer?] sometimes simply forgetting to mention them, as has been done in all major college study books since.

Living a 'subliminal' life in the underground culture in the 20th century, futurists had the fortune of deceiving the 'normalization' intrinsically embedded in being a piece of the history of art. I still had the chance to read Marinetti by chance! Not being in literature history books kept them alive for many underground movements. It would be interesting to relate this also to the history of underground culture in Italy in the 90s, were, in a certain way, I grew up.

Indeed within Cinema Solubile I try to propose futurism as discovery, a kind of little pearl of energy that you can catch and transform as you like. I always say to makers that I don't mind if they work against the principles of the manifesto... is still a very futurist thing to do.

Don't misunderstand me. I am not proposing to artists to look for futurist content today. Neither to mime their machine-aesthetics. I am looking to the attitude, to the drive. I feel it is a kind of abstract and primeval force in futurism that is the appropriate starting point to step into something yet to be charted.

What is the significance of the Futurist movement and Cinema Solubile and how does it fit within the new technologies culture (social and artistic)?

The first thing that comes into my mind to answer your question is that new technology cannot be itself the content. Futurism was also into new technology: electrification, speed, a new physics (relativity, quantum mechanics), radio communication. And also for the futurists the world was changing completely in a very unpredictable way: the vote for the masses, socialism, feminism, imperialism, emerging powers, modern warfare. Their work ponders and anticipates all these issues.
Nowadays we have different factors of instability and social (dis)comfort, but a very similar situation on a 'collective' plan.
The 'prima materia' for a 20 year old artist in 1909 was as explosive as the tools artists have nowadays to hack his way into the 'consumerist new-order's' toolkit.

The mechanics of the post-modern society have generated its anti-corps and a simple re-proposition of a futurist 'show' will be as dull as an advertising campaign. Moreover there are no more 'bourgoise a' epater'; scandal is now just a boring trick.
What is left is enormous; social circles of pairs, groups of interest, local bands, free software and in the future free architecture, learning, entertainment, cinema. Shall we start thinking on what will be the 'forms' new art will have to shape itself to fit into these niches?

For my part I do a lot of what I call 'situation design'. I think to of a generic artistic activity as a triangle in which the sensibility of the artist and the one of the receiver/spectators are triangulated by the 'piece'. Any Situation, in abstract, generates energy when has a dialectic between the elements that are there. Nowadays we have the possibility to see this whole dialectical setup as a whole, abstract the communication fluxes from it and implement them into software. This software is what i call a 'transformator', something that enhances a flux. The 'machine' then is no more to be intended as a part of a situation, but as an 'amplifier' of the situation itself. A successful implementation of an idea that has to transform a situation is what I call a 'unconventional media object'. It is something that opens the situation to another degree of freedom in a way that possibly generates aesthetic wonder. I believe that behind new media art there must be this kind
of research. I see too many possibilities in this direction not to move into it...

It’s interesting the way you set up the audience’s mood and get them ready for the event. I see it as a teaser; the music and distribution of manifestos. It is a generous way of interaction at an emotional level. At the end there is the destruction of the film, which I suppose is quite intense, for the audience and for the artist. Would you like to expand on these ideas of interaction?

It is nothing new, Greek theater is already a 'multimedia' environment. The base should always be pathos. I try to work in and out of the technique, in and out of the space, and across the established forms. I look for something typical of my age, and I like to cause other people to interact with me on this organic level if I manage.
Seen from the perspective of the new technology designer such a multidimensional space is like an empty, dirty and rough place and can be frightening. Ten years ago jargon for reality was 'meat space'. Everything outside simulation is rough, and things have to work smooth to be accepted by an 'audience'. I don't really agree with the elitism of some new media art that is undecritptable outside of its own form, like code-art for example. I think that the meat space is the ultimate interactive space, were things must be brought to be judged.

The way we think and feel has interesting ever changing laws and resides in its own similar complex space. Maybe something like what a Jungian calls “collective unconscious”, artists the artwork and cops the crime scene. I feel is time to invent forms of exploring such realities; It is nothing complex, It is like cooking a good dinner: good ingredients, nice company, a space and tools to cook, good conversation, timing and overall a good predisposition to amazement and wonder.

(*) I bumped in Brian Enos's 1995 published diary, A Year with Swallen Appendices, (London 1996), pp. 90, 401-403, and found such a definition of "interactive": INTERACTIVE = UNFINISHED. He states: "The idea is clear: here is an object of culture which you have to finish yourself to be able to use it. Another way of saying that is to suggest that culture-makers are moving away from providing pure, complete experiences to providing the platforms from which people then fashion their own experiences".

[1] Some bibliography and useful links

Over Italian Futurism and F.T. Marinetti the most influent Italian books have been written by Claudia Salaris:
Salaris, Claudia (1997) Marinetti: Arte e vita futurista, Roma: Editori Riuniti
Salaris, Claudia (1996), Dizionario del futurismo: Idee, provocazioni e parole d'ordine di una grande avanguardia, Roma: Editori Riuniti

I don't know of any English translation. Browsing the net I have found the following books:

* Selected Poems and Related Prose
F. T. Marinetti, Elizabeth R. Napier (Translator), Barbara R. Studholme (Translator)

* The Untameables by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Jeremy Parzen (Translator),Sun and Moon Press (December 1994), ISBN: 1557130647

Marinetti is always worth reading. His Italian is still very modern, don't know how he performs in translation. Still some texts are worth reading, especially the technical manifestos and the prose.

You may find english translations of main futurist manifestos here: www.unknown.nu/futurism
In particular as a reference read: Abstract Cinema Chromatic Music: www.unknown.nu/futurism/abstract.html
The Futurist Cinema: www.unknown.nu/futurism/cinema.html
You can also browse on the excellent
http://www.futurism.org.uk/futurism.htm
for other translations, pictures etc, and FIND the translation of the manifesto over the Variety theater!
About russian futurism check this:
Burliuk, David; Kruchenykh, Alexander; Mayakovsky, Vladmir and Khlebnikov, Victor , A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/slap.html

Recordings and video

Many recordings of the remaining futurist works have been released in the last 20 years. For a rapid check you can relay on the incredible
www.ubuweb.com
all you ever wanted to know about avant garde and never dared to ask. Check into the mp3 archive. Nothing is left from the Italian futurist cinema but a few frames. The bible about it is the work of Mario Verdone, some of which has been translated. Google his name and good luck.

For recent influences and random notes/links over live cinema check my web site: www.cinemasolubile.net