On Friday, June 14, 2024, at the Mattatoio-Città Dell’Altra Economia (Largo Dino Frisullo – Rome), at 12:00 PM, as part of the Buffalo Roots Film Festival, Foot Footage will take place. This is an innovative educational format designed to explore and recombine audiovisual memory by walking (foot) through locations that evoke film repertoires to be reused (footage).
What is defined as performing media concerns the new cultural design through the properties of new interactive, hypertextual, and connective media. Although this is part of a path that finds its roots in various avant-garde cultures, it is no longer anchored to the experimentation of new languages, such as those expressed by the creative movements of the twentieth century (from Fluxus happenings to the psychogeography of Situationism) and, in particular, by the interaction between the stage and new media, such as videotheater and cyberperformance.
A method by Urban Experience, led by Carlo Infante, to harmonize the audiovisual world with cross-mediality, based on the principle of performing media, which focuses on the interaction between digital, interactive, and mobile media and the territory.
The importance of associating images with powerful places cannot be overstated; consider the canyons for John Ford in “Stagecoach” or Piazza Vittorio for Vittorio De Sica in “Bicycle Thieves.”
Let us remember that Neorealism was born in Rome, where directors and productions had to adapt to the impossibility of using film studios after the bombings of World War II. Rome and its filmmakers turned that lack into an opportunity, becoming an inspiration for cinema worldwide and definitively marking the history of cinema. Some locations are particularly significant today, such as the former Mattatoio in the heart of popular Rome or forgotten places like the former asylums, bringing to mind the film “The Nuclear Observatory of Mr. Nanof” by Paolo Rosa-Studio Azzurro, which skillfully used that extreme, now abandoned environment as a true subtext. It is no coincidence that this experience comes to mind, as the slaughterhouses, like the asylums, began Urban Regeneration as early as the late 1970s (even before transitioning to disused industrial assets in the following decades), questioning their new uses.
In the second edition of the 2024 Buffalo Roots Film Festival (see last year’s video on the WREP channel: WREPORT, Creator & Web Reporter Wrep on air https://www.youtube.com/@indywrep)
The walkabout that will demonstrate the Food Footage method will serve as a radionomadic laboratory in walkabout, functioning as a training asset for Web Reporters & Creators.
Carlo Infante is a changemaker, an expert in Performing Media, and the founder of Urban Experience. He is a freelance lecturer, with positions including “Digital Technologies and Cognitive Processes” at Università Mercatorum in Rome. He is the author of “Educare On Line” (NetBook, 1997), “Imparare giocando” (Bollati Boringhieri, 2000), “Performing Media 1.1. Politica e poetica delle reti,” and dozens of other essays. A book about him, “Performing Media, un futuro remoto. Il percorso di Carlo Infante tra Memoria dell’Avanguardia e Transizione Digitale” (Editoria & Spettacolo, 2022), edited by Gaia Riposati and Massimo Di Leo, has been published.
Urban Experience has created a new standard of urban spectacularity with feet on the ground and heads in the cloud, combining explorations and radionomadic conversations, translating them into maps (it introduced its own geoblog for the Turin 2006 Olympics) in which to embed geopodcasts.
WREP, the EU Web Reporter & Creators Registry, has created a register of professionals and enthusiasts who, through their own technologies, can certify and protect content, thereby safeguarding the work published online on the web and social platforms. This makes it possible to identify the copyright of the professional or the ordinary “prosumer.”
Iggy Poppins is a Freelance Journalist, Photographer, Videomaker, wiriter and a little bit artist. The nickname was born casually…