PRESENT and future interwoven with strong ropes of the past. Like Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tešanović. Bruce is one of the cyber-punk fathers’ – the other is William Gibson, the fans of Shirley and Shiner are pleased not to feel themselves slighted -, Jasmina is a feminism icon of the past 30 years and a fine writer. In a four-hand talk like they do often in their texts, published in the introduction of Bolognesi’s book, Sterling & Tešanović speak about Humaescape, the last work of Marco Bolognesi. Important names that speak only for good reasons. Today, we can read them in their online features Wired and La Stampa, where they hold a feature on Turin, the town that adopted them and where they live since some years, when thousands of engagements don’t take them away. Loved names – particularly Sterling – by lovers of culture and modern, “technological” science-fiction. That cyber-punk that owes a lot to the Texan Sterling. From the first editions to the theorization of the “wave”, if we can call it so. The most important titles are written by William Gibson, with the fantastic Burning Chrome, Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdive, but the cornerstone of cyber-punk remains Mirrorshades, year 1986. It’s the collection of short novels, cured by Sterling, with the greatest names that defines and theorizes the category. If someone desires to know better this cybernetic punk, we recommend the reading of those pages. Where the future is the today’s, in some cases differently shaped, we find dystophies, colonization, big commercial empires, the “web” and a lot of darkness. The Serbian Tešanović walked a very different path started up from Italy – her second homeland – with feminism’s mark. She became famous but she took big risks too in the Yugoslavia of the 70’s fostering feminist instances and initiatives. From then her journalist, polemist and writer career didn’t stop and shows a torrential production rhythm bonded with a strong civil engagement. “Woman in black” against Balkan’s War – she Serbian – author of “Normality, moral work of a politic idiot” a touching diary of the Kosovo’s War that, published on the web, made her “expert” of the new modernity. But she remains bonded to an ancient hearth: she translated in Slavonic the works of Calvino, Moravia, Morante. Tešanović & Sterling. Two “dark” hearths if we think about their often dreary works but with a strong faith in progress and in technology, their meeting point.

Marco Bolognesi, Inland Empire, 2012, 125x196

“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.” Jorge Luis Borges

The reflection at the centre of the Humanescape project that I’ll present for the 2012 edition of the European photography festival is moved by several questions: How is the individual to be seen within his or her world? How do everyday living, social life, our surroundings , the constructions and constrictions that surround us influence how we feel? How does the individual interact with that which surrounds? Does one feel actor or victim, included or excluded? Being born in a place and living there determines the “landscape” to which one belongs and the reference group to which one compares, this should lend a sense of inclusion, making the individual feel part of a community. This mecchanism, however, isn’t innate in humanity and the collectivity should raise doubts and questions on how to guide the individual towards meeting, exchanging and participating. Society of the new millenium, post-modern, globalised, insecure, has lost its faith and ideologies and, along with these, the structures and limits that characterised these systems over the last few centuries, producing in their place a sense of individualism and solitude. Social structures have come undone, mass media builds a hyper-reality made up of falsehoods and mans’ rapport with others, and with nature, are evermore mediated and artificial. Linking to the concept of Liquid Modernity by Zigmunt Bauman , we may say that the processes of privatisation and deregulation of the State bring to an end the modern project of the individual-citizen. The expectations of the individual and of the citizen contradict one another and may be exemplified in the difference between the ‘de iure’ (rights-duties) individual and the ‘de facto’ (ability to assert) individual. To use Bauman’s words crisis of the individual is characterised by ” a vast and ever-widening divide between the conditions of the ‘de iure’ individual and their chances of becoming ‘de facto’ individuals, meaning to become masters of their own destinies and making choices based on what they truely desire”. The risk is immobility and incapability of asserting the self. The divide was created and is enlarging because of the emptying of the public space: “the individual ‘de iure’ cannot transform into a ‘de facto’ individual before having become a citizen”. My work is moved by this ‘accident waiting to happen’, almost to avoid a possible future, that must be avoided but that is already visible, albeit in embryonic form, around us; photographing and representing a world in which the individual is dehumanised, denuded of all ornamentation and deprived of freedom. Alone and imprisoned, the individual is inserted into a landscape, built of games and scenes that, like the falsities of everyday reality, oppress. Looking back at the characteristics of my past works, operas made up of large format images, with the female figure central, completely painted in white that, like the modern Gulliver, tied down and suffering, recognise nothing within their surroundings and filled with feelings of solitude and motionlessness. As in all of my works, the female body is the actor, this time used as a metaphor of the single individual no longer ( – or not yet) citizen, and the only real element of the image, surrounded by toys. The subtle red line that guides is the contrast between the real and the fictional, white and colour, human and toy. The real is the individual, the womans body, large and central. The risk underlined is loss of humanity: All the details and imperfections typical of humanity are cancelled in these purest white figures, without hair and expressing, at times, seeming resigned to their fate, at others, ready to fight. Here is the apologia of individuals who fight, wrestle and, in the end, give up on trying to defend their own rights, the wish to be an important part of the world. The fiction is the series of landscapes in which these bodies are immersed; like dioramas representing moments in life and real situations. They’re built from coloured meccano, which become landscape structures and, at the same time, coercive elements that imprison the individual. Houses, schools, churches, hotels, gyms, places from everyday life. All around them, many little personalities are playfully busy in their silent lives, unworried by the sufferings and the horror of the individual, they populate the INSCAPE, its internal point of view. The concept of ‘INTERNAL LANDSCAPES’ has been present for some time in my work and this project amounts to its first chapter. The external landscape, objective and tangible, which appears to our senses is always mediated through an interior landscape, hidden and mutable. The interior landscape is the reflection of mans’ gaze upon the world. A subjective vision linked to that which exists, to memories, to emotions, to the people that live in, and shape, the places in which they live. The term ‘INSCAPE’ is used for the first time by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to define that mix of characteristics that confer uniqueness and exclusivity to individual experience. The symbolic message is very clear: No landscape exists without a representation of it and it is through this passage that society manifests its aspirations and participates in the process of socio-cultural evolution. This study of the interior landscape that analyses the links between places, personality and experience has been transformed into this work of INSCAPE and HUMANESCAPE, the human landscape or man running away? A scenario on the limits where the placecomes from a society that is unable to welcome, make feel part of nor grant the individual status as a citizen.

Marco Bolognesi

Le farfalle volteggiano nel fitto dei fenomeni, nella cui ombra la pantera sogna. (Ernst Jünger)

“Ceci n’est pas un papillon“. Facile la parafrasi magrittiana ma, in questo caso, non del tutto scontata; perché questa “è una farfalla”, intesa come essere vivente, vibrante particella del creato, giusto nella misura in cui… non è una farfalla.
Una normale farfalla, neanche particolarmente bella, ma che ha una particolarità: non è stata la natura a determinare i disegni delle sue ali. O, per meglio dire, lo ha fatto solo in parte, perchè il codice genetico del lepidottero è stato deliberatamente alterato dall’artista Marta De Menezes. Quindi una “tipica” opera di Arte Transgenica (o arte genetica, biotech o bio art), espressione quindi di quella ricerca creativa che introduce il materiale biologico come nuovo strumento dell’arte.

In un precedente post avevamo parlato di “Post Human“; termine, coniato nell’ormai lontano 1991 dal critico Jeffrey Deitch, che in questo ventennio ha goduto di grande popolarità. Seppure spesso abbinato, in modo alquanto disinvolto, ai contenuti più disparati, ha avuto il merito di fotografare una tendenza che si è progressivamente affermata nell’arte contemporanea, e che trova proprio nella Transgenic Art la sua frontiera più estrema, che ha eletto a propria icona… un coniglietto verde.
Infatti nel 2000 l’avvento sulla scena di “GFP Bunny”, una coniglia albina che, se esposta alla luce U.V., diventa verde fluorescente, “creata” dal brasiliano Eduardo Kac, attrae l’interesse dei media internazionali, e scatena una ridda di polemiche. Fino ad arrivare ad una vera e propria censura, che rende impossibile presentare in pubblico il coniglio.

“E’ chiaro che la manipolazione genetica diventerà una parte integrante della nostra esistenza nel futuro. Gli esseri transgenici popoleranno il paesaggio terrestre, organismi transgenici vivranno nelle nostre fattorie ed animali domestici transgenici entreranno a far parte delle nostre famiglie. Non possiamo ancora dire se sia un bene o un male, ma sta di fatto che la carne e i vegetali che mangeremo non saranno più gli stessi. Nel futuro avremo noi stessi del materiale transgenico, impianti meccanici ed elettronici all’interno del nostro corpo. In altre parole, diventeremo transgenici.” (Eduardo Kac, “Transgenic Art”, 1998)
Kac, che già dagli anni 80 aveva posto al centro della propria ricerca artistica il rapporto fra arte, potere, tecnologia, ritiene che l’arte possa fornire strumenti importanti di decodifica, riflessione, conoscenza anche quando si parla di biotecnologia. Tematiche che l’artista ha ulteriormente indagato, trara il 2003 e il 2008, sviluppando il progetto “Natural History of the Enigma”, che vede al centro Edunia, una petunia contenente il DNA di Kac.

Dalla nascita del coniglietto ad oggi sono nati molti centri specializzati nel binomio arte/biotecnologia. Fra questi un ruolo di rilievo spetta al collettivo SymbioticA, fondato da Oron Catts e Ionat Zurr. La loro attività di ricerca è svolta nella School of Anatomy and Human Biology della University of Western Australia, in un modernissimo laboratorio interamente dedicato all’esplorazione artistica delle tecnologie biologiche (The Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory () ) presso la University of Western Australia.

Il loro lavoro, che indaga l’potesi di rendere il corpo vivente massa organica malleabile, viene definito “art of the semi-living”. Le loro opere consistono in frammenti di tessuto cellulare coltivati in vitro, ed esposti trasferendo complessi apparati di laboratorio nelle gallerie di arte contemporanea. La materia vivente diviene contemporaneamente mezzo e fine dell’opera artistica.

Un esempio in questo senso è il progetto per realizzare le “Ali di Maiale”.
La storia delle culture è ricca di corpi alati (sia animali che umani) utilizzati come icone fantastiche e mistiche; basti pensare a Pegaso, alla Sfinge, a Icaro, ai draghi, agli angeli… Le Ali di Maiale di Symbiotica, realizzate con l’impiego di cellule staminali prelevate dall’osso del maiale, reinterpretano il mito in chiave moderna. L’impalcatura osseo/cartilaginea è stata realizzata mediante polimeri su cui sono stati disseminati condrociti i quali lentamente sostituiscono la matrice artificiale con tessuto organico cartilagineo, che va a sostituire il polimero che gradualmente si degrada. Alla fine di tutto questo delicato procedimento, le ali ottenute vengono conservate sotto formalina per due mesi, poi fatte seccare e ricoperte d’oro per proteggerle.

Un’altra realizzazione di SymbioticA è “Disembodied Cuisine”, sviluppata nel corso di Marzo del 2003 a Nantes, in occasione della mostra internazionale di arte biologica. Dalla biopsia fatta su di una rana sono state isolate le cellule da “coltivare”; mentre la rana saltellava per la galleria-laboratorio, contemporaneamente si sviluppava in vitro la “bistecca” da lei originata, in seguito offerta “in assaggio” ai visitatori dell’esposizione. La prefigurazione di un possibile futuro in cui il consumo di carne potrebbe prescindere dall’uccisione di animali.

Symbiotica sostiene che gli artisti per primi hanno la possibilità, se non il dovere, di partecipare attivamente alla definizione dei possibili scenari futuri determinati dalla implementazione delle nuove concoscenze tecnoscientifiche; più in generale, la finalità di questo tipo di sperimentazioni è provocare la discussione, simulando in una forma estremizzata le ricadute della tecnoscienza sulla società. Ma le implicazioni epistemologiche, etiche e giuridiche di questa sperimentazione artistica restano controverse, perchè per la prima volta gli strumenti dell’artista sono “materiali viventi”.

“Le farfalle volteggiano nel fitto dei fenomeni, nella cui ombra la pantera sogna” ha scritto Ernst Jünger; ma, la dove volteggiano farfalle transgeniche, il confine fra sogno e incubo diventa labile…

It’s easy to return to the sixteen’s and to the beginning of the seventeen’s, but other times the British artist tried to launch webs that connect far planets. And if in the “innocent” sixties he looked like a pioneer – in fact an attentive and very good observer of the avant-garde wave – in the nineteen’s he reappears as a story-teller. He did it in 1995 with Outside, one of the most discussed records, among electronic and Viennese Actionists, mutilations and artificial bodies, scenarios of that what – at that time – was future and pre-millennium tension disquiets (the story rules out in 1999). To bond all, one of the most effective fiction’s adhesive, the crime story, that sees Bowie in the part of the detective Nathan Adler, specialized in “artistic crimes”, murders in which the bodies are mutilated to become art works. Outside should have been the first of the chapters of a five-act story following Adler and other actors of this dystopic world told with records of different styles. The target was to create the concept of a unique narrative world, into Bowie’s representing coordinates of this dark pre-millennium image. The common points with Bomar Universe are a lot, the science-fiction themes, the willingness to enter in a new world bonded with the earth reality, the strong interest to the idea of the body as art-work and of the relation between body and machine: it’s a painful relation. In Outside the detective Adler/Bowie encounters personages that modify and mutilate their body – Bowie’s memory of the sixteen’s, of Nitsch, of the Viennese Actionists, of his guru Lindsay Kemp. Memories of alternative worlds, of the classic “sci-fi” that inspired the first Bowie’s masterpieces, background of another historic record Diamond Dogs, where transmuted humans revive the most famous dystopia of the ‘900 narration. Another time it’s easy to walk hand in hand with the Bomar Universe.
And sounds? We are speaking of music, of course, and Bowie is the masse-diffuser of avant-garde and experimentation. In this case, electronic music, dance and harsh rhythm, British pop-rock of which the Duke is the guru, all in synthetic black, as the atmosphere and his partner (the immortal Brian Eno). It’s not simply a disc: the added-value is the packaging. Outside it’s accompanied by a good book, the cited works, work-drafts, the artistic murders, extracts of Adler’s diary (rich of good reflections), the texts, translated in a lot of languages, as Bowie asked. Maybe the last great flicker of Bowie. Not a music masterpiece but a great conceptual work. With a regret: the following is not yet arrived and a lot of fans are waiting new artistic mutilation to listen. Maybe watching some extracts of Bomar Universe.
A.A.

After the first presentation of Mock-up  and of the video at the Italian Institute of Design in Milan, Marco Bolognesi speaks about his last work that is leaving for an international tour in galleries and exhibition spaces.

Propaganda Republic retrieves an old guru of the Italian science-fiction, Margheriti. What did you drive toward him?

I’ve ever loved and I love science-fiction and my meetness with this big pioneer of this gender – Antonio Margheriti – has been naturally. The research of the extent in which the Italian culture contributed to the cinema’s story and particularly science-fiction is very important for me.
I refer to film directors that built a vein, more or less interesting, that promoted our cinema with La morte viene dello spazio (The death comes from espace) of 1958 directed by Paolo Heusch (his first science-fiction film) with scenography by Mario Bava who realised with Riccardo Freda Caltiki il mostro immortale (Caltiki the immortal monster) a Italian remake of the original of Blob Mortale and in 1965 Terrore dallo spazio (Terror from the space) an extraordinary film that gave inspiration to Ridley Scott for its Alien .

And the great and pioneristic cinema of Antonio Margheriti at the beginning with Space men, then with Il pianeta degli uomini spenti (The planet of the damped men) and with a cycle of very interesting science-fiction films.

Mock-Up puts together more “modern” parts (the last generation animations) and “older” one (Margheriti’s film, the spaceship model). Why this mix of opposite elements?

From 1992, when I began my artistic career, my favourite expressive mean and file rouge of my research is collage.

Catching old and new elements to mix them produces a de-contextualization aimed to transformation that is a creation, something new. This is a common element in the postmodern culture that bases its originality in the fusion of genders and styles.

Why did you use the spaceship as display?

The spaceship is a mock-up, like the prototypes used in publicity to reproduce an original item.
It’s re-construction, artificiality, control on vision.

In the same way, my Skeleton Arcadia attracts the audience making it actor of the installation, induces it to search the truth inside that that in the best propaganda’s action is a “war spaceship that fights to enforce peace and democracy”.

In the spaceship Arcadia – beginning from its name – there are a lot of call-backs to great Japanese science-fiction and animation directors, as Leiji Matsumoto, author of Capitan Harlock and Starblazers. It’s a tribute?

Sure, I’m a great fan of Matsumoto, his style and his characters are very appealing for me.

What do you think about these authors? In Italy they are often considered “for children only”.

We have an old cultural problem that induces to think that cartoons are only for children because they are near to tales.

This culture pushes us to think that the Walt Disney story is the “right” cartoon to propose to our children, and we do not consider how much dangerous allegories are included in the tales of Hans Christian Andersen.

The video develops in Bomar Universe. However, in this thirteen’s video we se lot of call-backs to the “Earth” actuality, to the manner to diffuse the news, to the manner of action of the media. Today like 70 years ago. What do you want to tell with this comparison?

We developed the text based on studies of popular and populist speeches of at least ten dictators form the thirteen’s to nowadays and we discovered an incredible analogousness. They magnify the regime’s power that often expresses itself in a form of popular republic.

You are one of the protagonists of Invideo 2011. It’s important for you? It’s more a conclusion of a path or a birth of a new phase? Are you already thinking about new projects? Will they always live in Bomar Universe? Will they have a knot with Reggio?

I’m been honoured of taking part to the festival Invideo but I think that projects are a bridge of an interior and philosophic path that develops in the time.

I think that in future I’ll develop more videos because I want to animate my universe, to give a form to what remained blocked in my photos.

Reggio is my town now and therefore it is involved every day since two years in my life and in my projects.

A.A.

Mock-up is the name of the installation presented by Marco Bolognesi at Invideo 2011, the international video and cinema show.
The installation is composed by the model of the spaceship Skeleton Arcadia, a big scale reproduction realised with 300 toys and the homage video Propaganda Republic that recalls the social science-fiction’s universe, using a cine-magazine of the thirteen’s. After Dark Star and the tribute to John Carpenter, Marco Bolognesi, revisits the Space Opera of Margheriti “The Battle of the Worlds”.

The eye of Bolognesi interlaces with the naïf images of Margheriti to create an installation in which you enter totally.
In the original film a planet guided by the “central mind” enters in collision course with the Earth to destroy it. The central mind continues ruthless his mission to conquer the Earth. The hero of Margheriti’s film is the eccentric scientist Benson, whose intervention allows to the humans to find the enormous central mind and rescue the Earth.

Bomar Universe’s amazons (the universe in which lives the art of Marco Bolognesi) interact with the protagonists of Margheriti’s film to create a perfect integration between the two worlds. Bolognesi gives a face and a body to the feared “stranger” that in the original film is never shoot. He rereads the story from the point of view of the invader and re-interpreting the final. The spaceship, with his kaleidoscopic shape, is an integrating part of the story and a scenographic element that allows you to participate to the scene.

Re-emerging from the imaginary of Bolognesi you have the impression that the forced propaganda of the video is only a “mock-lecture” of the actual politic communication. A resolute critic that Bolognesi has no fear to express.

Here, we can read the interview with Davide Masi in the Sky’s studios, where he explains his work and his collaboration with Bolognesi.

Who is Davide Masi?
I’m a special effects technician, I began to work in 1985 collaborating with cinematographic, TV and publicity projects and making all that is part of the old special effects’ tradition, i.e. all that is in front of the cine camera: mechanical dolls, spaceships, models, miniatures and so on. Actually I’m working to the realization of the “Sgommati”, the puppets of the satirical program broadcasted by Sky. I realize these puppets.

How met you Bolognesi and how did your collaboration begin?

I met Marco on the set of productions in which we worked together, chatting we began to know each other and so the idea of the collaboration in the new project of Marco began to grow.

In which consists your collaboration?

I build physically the spaceships models fitting them to the concept of Bomar Universe.

To what is the realization of the models inspired to?

For the work of Marco I’m inspired to the cyberpunk imaginary but my models have the aftertaste of the Italian science-fiction cinema of the seventies.
What’s your relationship with the science-fiction?

I’m always been interested to science-fiction and being a model maker this is a world to which I’m ever been bound. So it has not been difficult for me and Marco to be on the same wavelength.

The new project with Bolognesi is a tribute to the Italian director Margheriti, you worked together with him it’s true?

Yes, exactly. I knew Margheriti in 1986 during the realization of a RAI production: I was the props maker and so I worked directly with him, he was the director of the series, a futurity version of The Isle of the Treasure.

What’s Bomar Universe?

Marco Bolognesi: Bomar Universe is an expanding artistic project, each of my project is a domino of this global work. In other words, Bomar Universe is the living space of my art, the universe in which I fertilize my artistic creation.

In the Bomar Universe the heroes are cyborg women or post-human women, where draw you the inspiration from?

M.B.: As I told previously, my cyborgs begin with the science-fiction genesis. That of the twenties, the cybernetic organism, a creature that interlaces the human body and the machine body. The body invasion by technology is not limited to the coexistence of artificial means and natural tissues. In the cyborg the exteriorisation process is so extended to became overturned and the majority of our watching-filters becomes senseless. If we adopt a different perspective of the dichotomy natural/artificial we have to discuss the centrality of the human body as biological data produced by the physic interaction with the reality. My women are “natural cyborgs” and are proud of being it. In this way, the human genre can be changed, improved, adapted to the exigencies of the social life, with esthetical surgery or genetic-engineering.

In this universe the human body is hybrid, how do you define it?

M.B.: the body is only a case. Since the nineteen, Orlan speaks about contamination between body and new technologies. If we depart from the idea that “body is obsolete” the mutant-artist takes us in the operatory room to see the technological metamorphosis. The artist modified his face to put together the most known feminine faces of the story of the art, to represent the loss and the regain of his identity, in name of the art. I like to think that the genetic mutation is a stabile and heritable modification in the genomic nucleotide sequence. Nothing has a contest no more and we give a new semantic perspective to all.

An orange jumpsuit, a cloak with bits of old PCs stuck onto it, a helmet with electric wires of every possible colour and length coming out of it, plaited as though they were the hair of some electromechanical punk coming from some parallel universe, arriving in our reality directly from the virtual world. Almost as though it was one of Wim Wender’s angels falling to earth and still proudly wearing its heavy-duty armour.

This is, at a first glance, Fatherboard, the prototype of SuperAvatar.

This project was started in 2007 by Luigi Pagliarini and was first seen in the form of a mask layered with symbolic meanings.

A revisitation, or better still, the evocation of the concept of “Wearable Electronic Art” whose precursor was the Electric Dress created in 1956 by Atsuko Tanaka, a member of the avant-garde Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai group. This dress was made up of luminous bulbs that the artist wore in many performances to symbolise the rapid transformation and urbanisation within Japanese society after the end of the Second World War.

SuperAvatar is an avatar that has escaped from the computer. It’s components are integral parts of its physical presence, they become its body. During artistic performances, the SuperAvatar creates a rapport with humans – the spectators participating in the performance.

Fatherboard has a series of sensors applied all over its body that activate small speakers or lights which react to stimuli based on the movements of the wearer and interaction with the external ambient. The reactions are always different and unrepeatable.

This ‘robot’ is not conceived within a network of exchange and communication between the world of the real and of the virtual. Rather it is an entity that has voluntarily disconnected from the network thus avoiding those inevitable forms of control that go with these connections. In this way, the focus is clearly upon the problematic relationship between human and artificial intelligence. This rapport of subordination, which has intrigued minds such as Turing and Asimov, Pagliarini proposes as a theory of polymorphous intelligence, in which interaction is not one-way (man-machine) but becomes bidirectional or even polydirectional including all biological and artificial intelligences
E.I.

Twenty years ago appeared a monster called Screamadelica, one of the key albums for the present music.
In 1991, the Primal Scream – one of the firsts and among the bests – mixed rock, dance and electro and
now they present him live in a world tour, that crossbred son. Son of a lot of sounds and inspirations he is
the degenerate (of course) father of a lot of contaminated and techno music of nowadays.

Do you remember? Forty years ago appeared another little monster: the Vanishing Point – in Italian Punto
zero – directed by Richard C. Sarafina, road movie of the hippy generation and above all a model for the
rising cinematographic exploitation. That exploitation that owe a lot to Russ Meyer, to his roaring cars and
to his wonderful and cruel women. Quentin Tarantino closed the circle a few years ago in his Grindhouse
with tributes and explicit citations to Vanishing Point and to Meyer.

Two elements, the passion for that “exaggerated” cinema of the Seventies and the interest for the
electronic and techno music emerge from the work of Marco Bolognesi. As artistic inspiration and as real
and sometimes imaginary sound track. Some futuristic backgrounds, some scenarios between dystopic
and apocalyptic , women hanging between glamour and uneasiness: why not a charged, restless, dark
electronic sound track. Dark but human, daughter of machines but of meat too, like the imaginary and the
work of Marco Bolognesi.

Machines’ and meat’s son is a record of 1997 by the “fathers” Primal Cream with a tribute to Vanishing
Point, to the non-perfect heroes. The title is Vanishing Point, inspired by the film of 1971 without
concealing it: the name of the first single is Kowalski, as the protagonist of Vanishing Point. The stated
target is to deliver an alternative sound track to update – at the end of the millennium – this sense of
paranoia, constraint and claustrophobia. The means are meat and machine, where the heavy, obsessive,
industrial electronic element joins together with the human one: the voice “in the deep of the soul”.
The Primal Screams don’t forget the background, like Bolognesi. The Primal Screams’ background is the
black music used to flavour the technologic menu. Then a video clip of “Kowalski” a clear tribute to Faster,
Pussycat! Kill kill! by Russ Meyer where a druggy Kate Moss emulates Tura Satana.

A.A.