Art and Digital Art
Let’s immediately clear: art is art (if it is able to be art), that’s it.
We choose to use digital technologies because we consider them stimulating in relation to at least two points of interest. The technical one because of the range of experimentations offered by its constant development. And that of the contents, of the conceptual perspectives and of the humanistic implications of the technological process: in other words, the effort to think critically about the intimate, social, daily and epochal relapses of what is happening to us. Of course, in our case the employed technique is declared. But we are interested in the digitality in itself: ours is a conscious, declared and experimented research about the conceptual symbiosis between the employed technique and the psychological, social and linguistic effect that the Digital Lifestyle is producing (and has already produced) on our daily life.
The digitality pervades our environment, enhances and mutates the range and the nature of our senses, creates new mental landscapes and languages. Where does the “virtuality” resides in this? The digital transforms and expands our perceived reality.


The "New Technologies" are not New, that is the Technical-Conceptual Revolution
The first personal computer, the Apple I, was born in 1976; the first personal computer designed focussing on the common man, simple to use because provided with a graphic interface and a mouse, the Apple Macintosh, was born in 1984, the technology of the internet became public in 1993…
In other words, behind the so called “New Technologies” there is an almost thirty-years-old conceptual, cultural and anthropological history. Taking note of this is the first step we have to make in order to think about it critically, giving up the (dogmatic) emphasis for whatever Is new which always invests the “old” media (still today they make “common sense” and vox dei) when they are compared to the “new” media…
The introduction of personal computing in the eighties involved at the beginning only the business field, influencing the productive and organizational structures of the companies. Then it extended also to the home field, influencing social relationships and lifestyles. The undisputed protagonist and beginner of that revolution was the Apple Macintosh. A personal computer conceived to open perspectives that were revolutionary from an anthropological point of view (the slogan repeated “the computer for the rest of us”, which implied: for everybody, everywhere and for every use), whose technological implications were (and are) coherent with this idea. In short, it had the power to concentrate in itself all the technological, conceptual and moral aspirations of an epoch, putting also a mark upon those that were going to come. The history of the Macintosh represents for our considerations a precious red line, clear and coherent, which is determinant to find out the technological evolution of the digital culture and the anthropological reflexes bound to it.


The Digital Neohumanism
We are trying our best to underline a deviation, a new point of view, which can eliminate a perceived break (but it is only ideological and not real) between the technological and the humanistic knowledge, the rational and the spiritual data. Because of the different competences and psychologies they request in their professional use - but also in the daily use of everybody -, the technologies of the ipermediality induce us to consider these two macro-fields as unitary. We are, in short, on the treshold of a digital new humanism, which is already clearly determined by a new aestethics, a strongly synthetic and planning one.
And since aestethics is the result of language, and language is the result of culture, understanding the logical basis of this aestethics allows us to become fully aware of the logical basis of the culture (and of the mental form) which was its origin.
In this sense, the ipermedia development team represents a metaphor and, first, a concrete praxis of this process of cultural renewal: the unity of the intentions materializes in the final goal, through a project that pursues an established output.
This concept, in the slang of graphic designers, developers and marketers, defines the final “output” (in material and conceptual words) of a product, established on the basis of the effectiveness and the coherence in relation to the achieving of some goals and results. So, to be effective, the product must have developed in itself, in the logical-planning links it is held by, an intimate coherence with those goals, in order to adhere totally, materially and concaptually to them. Otherwise the result would be the ineffectiveness and the failure of communication. So, extending and bringing this concept to its extreme consequences in the contemporary artistic research, the output is for us the result of a conscious act of cultural and aesthetical reassembling about a series of given historically and humanly needs.