Videoambienti e nuove narrazioni: N!03 e Karmachina, due gruppi italiani

Within fifty years, the multidisciplinary development of electronic languages and their aesthetics has been in tune with the progressive extension of works in space: from the more confined areas of video-sculpture and video-installations, to video environments up to gigantism of urban projections or video-mapping. Following the digital turn, on the one hand, the electronic image has been physically "deterritorialized"; on the other hand, the progressive suppression of the specificities of audiovisual languages, endorsed by the digital world and defined by Krauss as "post-medium condition" (1999), has defined a renewal in the relationship between cinema and video, creating what Manovich defined as "post-media aesthetics"(2001), useful to imagine new forms of expanded art. In the wake of the historic Italian experience of Studio Azzurro, new and young "multimedia workshops" are recently developing multimedia narrative projects for video environments, installations and videomapping. N!03 and Karmachina are some of these visual design studios whose work is at the intersection between arts and media, science and technology, trying to create profound interconnections between the real world and the digital universe, made more understandable and tangible by stories that arise from the need to narrate spaces, material objects, specific events as well as allowed by post-media aesthetics. Through the analysis of a few selected examples, this article aims to focus on these various forms and purposes of storytelling, that reflect the development of the audiovisual languages after the digital turn, as well as the evolution of society and its communication systems.