The city and the eyes
Round-table conference

Don’t make the eye always work in the same direction: you will strain it; provide it with “scene changes” that can allow the stroll not to fall into tirediness and boredom. Behind the eye there’s that mutable and rich, fertile, fantasious, rational and high thing that is spirit. What will fall before our eyes, it will be our joy. (Le Corbusier, 1925)

The subject chosen by Notti di Luce for the 2004 edition makes it possible to face a molteplicity of topics of great actuality especially if treated from different points of view adding multidisciplinary abilities and contributes. So it’s actually inevitable, for a contest fully played on the dialogue of the different characters and on expressive forms, to start a many-part reflection on Italo Calvino’s intuition, the City and the eyes, transforming the “excuse” offered by the round-table conference into a real creative workshop. The theme of visibility/invisibility of the city and, then, the many “chain relations” caused by the sheer sensorial element, lead us in the actual architectonic dimension, as a contemporary expression of the intellect and of the human heart, in balance between art and science. Through human or technological eyes, like the lens of the camera, of the movie-camera or of the web-cam, it is possible to give a creative interpretation of the city, visible or imagined, carrying it into an a-temporal dimension, where individual wishes, memories, fantasy prevail. Or it is possible to monitor, control or even determine processes and behaviours either in order to improve the quality of our life and to affect or, worse, violate it. The first case is the one of the orobit: the technologic (and absolutely innovative) eyes of Bergamo’s park, that through surveying and data (bit) eleboration about the ground (oro-) condition allow to activate interventions to improve the quality of the environment even in a highly industrialized area like Bergamo. The second one is inevitably related to television: an instrument of great communicative, creative and educative possibilities, nowadays the more and more oriented to “spectacularization” of stereotyped life patterns (reality shows). The eyes allow us also to travel and discover cultures thar are geographically very far away from Europe, from where, often unconsciously, our society is highly influenced in “ethnic” trends of music, fashion and art.

Chairmen:
Carlo Dignola, journalist and coordinator
Walter Barbero, architect
Domenico Egizi, President of Bergamo’s Parco dei Colli
Davide Ferrario, director
Giorgio Gaslini, musician and composer
Roberto Masotti, photographer of Milan’s La Scala
Renzo Salvi, Rai Educational head project
Federico Spinetti, ethnomusicologist

During the round-table conference Claudio Angeleri’s “Musiche dalle Città invisibili” Cd will be presented and offered to the public, a documentation of the multidisciplinary project of music, theater and images presented exclusively for Notti di Luce 2004.