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Posted by Jason on November 23, 1999 at 14:17:30:
I will post more about projects we worked on when I get it together but meanwhile this one is very fresh 'IlluMilano'
Among the last messages I got from Nik were some Futurist texts he uploaded for IlluMilano. IlluMilano was a name he came up with for our entry to an international achuitecture competition for a giant illuminated sign in Milano for 2001. Working with Jim Doerfler, we were going to marry the work Nik and I had already done on Video Roundabout/Manchester Temport at Manchester Airport with Jim's ideas about public video projection structures. Jim and Niok and I were in three way brainstorming about het project when the discussion moved in Furturism and imagery. Shortly after Nik posted the text s below to a web site we started to se up for it. When I spoke to him on the phone a few days later he was still jazzed about the Marinetti stuff. Tok-song and I were going to meet Nik at Nice on Wed 17th Nov, drive straight to Mestre for 'Opera Totale' http://www.operatotale.org and then onto Milano to do on-site research for couple of days...
We went to the airport _justincase_ but no Nik.. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electronic moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung from clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts; flashing in the sun with the glitter of knives; adventurous streamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti From "The Founding Manifesto of Futurism"
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We wish to re-enter into life. Science of today, disowning its past, responds to the natural needs of our time. In the same way art, disowning in turn its past, must respond to the intellectual needs of our time. IBID Let us not be afraid of ugliness in literature, and let us kill solemnity everywhere. Come on, don’t put on those priestly airs when you listen to me! Every day we must spit on the Altar of Art. "Everything that is hissed at is not necessarily beautiful or new, but everything that is immediately applauded is certainly not superior to the average intelligence and is therefore mediocre, banal, revomited or over-digested. IBID I repudiate the title (of Maestro) as a sign of equality in mediocrity and ignorance. Francesco Balilla Pratella, "Manifesto of Futurist Musicians Manifesto" 1910 Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibilities of men". Luigi Russolo, "The Art of Noises", 1913 We no longer feel ourselves to be the men of the cathedrals, the palaces and the podiums. We are the men of the great hotels, the railway stations, the immense streets, colossal ports, covered markets, luminous arcades, straight roads and beneficial demolitions. Antonio Sant’Elia, "Manifesto of Futurist Archecture", 11 July 1914 "The Universe will be our vocabulary." The Futurist Cinema 1916 What we need is not only direct collaboration in the splendor of this conflagration, but also the plastic expression of this futurist hour. I mean a more ample expression that is not limited to a small circle of experts, an expression so strong and synthetic that it will hit the eye and imagination of all or almost all intelligent readers…Try to live the war pictorially, studying it in all its marvellous mechanical forms (military trains, fortifications, wounded men, ambulances, hospitals, parades etc.). F.T. Marinetti, letter to Severini, 20 November 1914 This unheard-of, outrageous, colossal thing happened, divulgation of which threatens to wipe out all the prestige and credit of the Communist International; in Moscow, during his speech to the Italian delegation – a speech given in the most correct Italian, mind you, so doubts about misrepresentation must be discarded a priori – Comrade Lunacharsky stated in Italy there is only one intellectual revolutionary and that he is Filoppo Tommaso Marinetti. The philistines of the workers’ movements are completely scandalized, and it’s clear that to the old list of insults: `Bergsonsian, voluntarist, pragmatist, spiritualist’, will be added a new and bloodier one: Futurist! Marinettist!’ Antonio Gramsci, co-founder and theorist of the Italian communist Party, in an article in Ordine Nuovo, 5 January 1921
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