[ITA] Il 6 Aprile 2021 è venuto a mancare Gene Youngblood. Ho avuto l’onore di curare, con Simonetta Fadda, l’edizione italiana del suo fondamentale saggio Expanded Cinema del 1970, pubblicandolo dentro <mediaversi>, la collana editoriale coprodotta da Noema e da CLUEB. Mi ha dato gratuitamente i diritti del libro e siamo rimasti in contatto per alcuni anni. Nel 2020 mi ha inviato l’introduzioneche aveva scritto all’edizione del cinquantesimo anniversario di Expanded Cinema perché la pubblicassi su Noema, prima che il libro fosse sul mercato. Ne ho parlato in questo post. È stato un onore per Noema e per me, così come è un onore adesso celebrare il suo lavoro fondamentale riproponendo quel saggio su Noema.
[ENG] On April 6, 2021, Gene Youngblood has died. I had the honour to edit with Simonetta Fadda the Italian edition of his seminal essay Expanded Cinema, published in 1970, in <mediaversi>, a book series coproduced by Noema. I remember when I asked him for the rights of his books, that he gave me for free, and we have been staying in touch for some years. In 2020 he sent me the “Introduction to the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition of Expanded Cinema” before the book was on the market, in order to publish it in Noema. I wrote about this here. It was a honour for us, as well as it is a honour now to celebrate Gene Youngblood’s fundamental work proposing that essay again in Noema.
From the introduction:
The Internet, artificial intelligence, and reality technologies are opening the door to the possibility of sociocultural transformation at scale, so I conclude this Introduction with an abridged version of Kit and Sherrie’s Electronic Café Manifesto, which called for it implicitly so many years ago: “The key dimension of our time,” they wrote in 1984, “is the scale that separates technological possibility from human imagination and understanding. The challenge – for the artist, for us all – is to reconcile the dialectical relationship between the quantitative capacity of technology and the qualitative desires of humankind. If we are to shape and control our destiny we must begin to see, to judge, to imagine in a new ‘scaled perspective.’ We must begin to create at the same scale as we can destroy. If we do not, art will be rendered merely decorative, and the human spirit and imagination will become impotent. The counterforce to the scale of destruction is the scale at which all people can communicate.”
