Presenting the 90s art works by Maurizio Bolognini, Mario Costa, a professor of aesthetics at the
Naples University, writes:
"The new technologies reintroduce with force the terms of research carried out by the avant-garde and
make the renunciation of control, the irruption of randomness, the reduction of the subject's role to a
residual possibility of choice... the absolute and unavoidable conditions of every project.
Bolognini uses the randomness of out-of-tune television signals (Interference works), makes computers
run on stochastic programs (Randomizing machines), provokes an interactive randomness by using
communication networks (Interactive self-portraits)... In this lack of expressive intentionality, this
renunciation of intervention with a by now exhausted imagination and in this full acceptance of the
subject's weakness the signs are recognizable of the technological sublime, which we are led to by the
actual techno-cosmos and which I have elsewhere attempted to grasp and penetrate..."
The relationship between new technologies and the changing role of the subject seems to be crucial to this discussion.
An brief introduction to the theory of professor Costa's "tecnological sublime" can be found at:
http://www.spidernet.it/sisin/NS/bolog.html
http://www.spidernet.it/sisin/NS/bolog1.html
Anna Riva