Tomorrow Now and digital culture

Published: 2009 - April/May, Dossier: Culture and Innovation

Among the operators of culture and art, the foundation of Bevilaqua La Masa in Venice is also concentrating on the problems that emerge from the relationship between contemporary art and the most stringent technological note in the production of the work. This devotion is not shown only in the interest at the moment of exhibition, the installations and performances, but also and above all for the desire to understand a type of “philosophy of the language of contemporary art”. Beginning with the mission to deal with and promote the forms of young artistic expression - this foundation is characterized for over one hundred years by that vocation - at the Bevilaqua La Masa the language of contemporary art is met with the intention to confront with the other problems that making-art can bring. “ Certainly, to be interested in the present and in the technological support is fundamental” - underlined Stefano Coletto, creator along with Maria Grazia Mattei of the project Tomorrow Now - “ in fact you mustn’t risk seeming to live in the past and for this we hold that contemporary art has to reflect on the present, on how much it produces even with resorting to new technology. All in all, summarizing one of the approaches by Ernst Gombrich (one of the most original thinkers of the Twentieth century in terms of art and the practical realization of work): to have a one’s disposition technological innovations doesn’t lead to art that’s connected to contemporaneousness”.
To observe artistic practices, then, and to monitor in some way the languages to be able to grasp the sense of the artifacts and bring them back to a contemporary where the digital culture is always more in evidence.  In this aspect, the project “Tomorrow Now” - that explicitly takes the title from an original display by Bruce Sterling - was created in around 2003-2004 with the desire to reflect on how digital culture is working on contemporary art and its languages, impacting on its forms and contents. With this project, carrying on now for almost four years through seminary meetings and conferences held by diverse scholars - amongst them the founding contribution from Derrick De Kerchove - the objective of the foundation seems to be “think better to understand better” and to enter in the end into a dialogue relationship with creative reality interested in the relationship between art and technological innovation.