Emoticons from Italian Cinema

On the occasion of the “Settimana dell’Arte a Brescia”, the LINK Center for the Arts of the Information Age is proud to present the project Emoticons from Italian Cinema, by Matteo Erenbourg with Claudio Beorchia. The event is a spin-off of the show Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age (Spazio Contemporanea, September 24 – October 15, 2011).
 

Along the last century, cinema has become an unprecedented archive of stories, faces and emotions. Italian cinema in particular, in its best results (from Neorealism to Italian Comedy), developed a visual language which is still admired and studied by directors and artists from all over the world.
 
If cinema is emotionally rich, “emoticons” (emotional icons) are usually extremely poor: highly stylized reproduction of human facial expressions in the form of punctuation or small icons. Created to bring back emotions into the “cold” medium of e-mail and SMS, emoticons are among the few conventions of digital culture that are shared by almost anybody in the world, and by any generation of users.
 

Emoticons from Italian Cinema is an attempt to create emoticons with the emotional richness and complexity of cinema. The medium used is animated GIF: a simple, light, universal image format, often used to create small animations and described as a form of “micro-cinema”. Matteo Erenbourg and Claudio Beorchia select, along the history of Italian cinema, all the manifestations of a specific emotion, and collect them in an ongoing online archive, that anybody can use to select an image of affection, anger, anguish, anxiety, apathy, approval, complicity, vanity, love, lust and so on, and use it immediately in emails, chats, on Facebook or Twitter.
 
Emoticons from Italian Cinema is thus a project of appropriation and sharing of a cultural heritage belonging to everybody, and an attempt to adapt it to the expressive needs of a new age, and a new communication platform.
 
On Saturday, October 1, at Spazio Contemporanea, Matteo Erenbourg will make a workshop on animated GIFs.
 

September 24 > 18.30 – 24.00
Cinema Nuovo Eden
via Nino Bixio 9 – Brescia
Artisti all’Eden

 

October 1 > 16.00-18.00
WORKSHOP / Matteo Erembourg