2016 will be a highly fascinating Summeracademy in Venice. We have elaborated an intense program based on the capacities of excellent professors. The program is, as always a suggestion, a guideline we suggest to hold on, but everybody is free to go in his or her own way as well.

The suggested program is as follows:

Week I

The subject of the first week will focus on San Marco Basilica in Venice and its pioneering/  very important role in polychoral music.

Polychoral music developed during a time when Christoph Columbus discovered America, Ferdinand Magellan managed to sail around the world and Vasco da Gama discovered India.

In the same time Nicolaus Copernicus and Tycho Brahe discovered the new role of the world in the universe. The universe no longer rotated around the earth but the earth became a planet rotating around the sun. The map of the world became expanded, new continents emerged and the role of the world became seen in a different way. All of a sudden space became a new dimension of the human being. In Renaissance paintings the perspective was introduced, and in music the polychoral singing was developed in Venice San Marco: music in space.

All this together depicts the change in human mind, in the way of perceiving the world and expressing it in art, which is surprisingly homogenous and contrasts so much to our nowadays fragmentation in perceiving our today’s world.

We will start from the idea of space represented in the polychoral singing of San Marcos Basilica and develop our program of the first week along these lines.

To give an example in the Painting I master class we will apply the paradigm of discovering new continents onto the development of our own personality. During our life we have to discover new continents during the different periods of our development and we will deal with those polychoral singing and staging.

 Perspective will play a specific role in representing our motives and also the human body as painted from life models. The theatre as a space within space will also be a model of transferring one’s perspective into another.

Last but not least we will make an excursion to San Marco Basilika and integrate sketches of space into our paintings.

In cooperation with the music master class directed by Justine Rappacioli we will also think of abstract painting as a stage environment corresponding to the polychoral signing.

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Week II

In the second week we will focus on the linkage between the different arts and the new technologies, the new media and social media.

An important subject of social communication is monitoring or the German expression “Protokoll.” Protocol is slightly different insofar as it not only includes monitoring, meaning ex post description of what two or more people have been talking or experiencing together. Above this protocols also can include methods of layout and even input into future communication and meetings. Both aspects are interesting for all the different arts representing communication between human beings.

When Daniel Spörri tried to represent the feelings we had during our stay together sitting around at a dinner table it is a kind of protocol, trying to trace the emotional feelings of that moment of being together.

When William S. Burroughs developed his “cut-up” methods of sampling pieces of text, he developed something new by coincidence made from existing protocols.

New media technology has enlarged our tools to such an extent that we are able nowadays to develop algorithms for the generation of something new. At the same time we are fighting with the difficulty between the “cold medium” of the video screen and the “hot medium” of the real object as a witness.

To give an example in the Painting I master class we will of course every week have figurative painting according to life models, but at the same time we will deal with questions of interface. So for instance right at the beginning we will start with a painting dialogue in groups of two and we will check out which kind of tools we have to monitor this, as well as expand the dialogue by automatically generated digital input. The input will not only provide optical input but also acoustical and sound generation.

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Week III

In week III we will draw our attention on performative aspects of art, where the different arts are linked to the physical involvement of the artist himself/ herself. This can be combining to draw on the wall and cooking food for the visitors like Rirkrit Tiravanija does it, or integrate a cat walk as an expanded choreography.

To give an example in the Painting I master class we will start with surrealist sketching concepts of spontaneity and creativity, developing paradox associations ending up with a narrative story. The story will be represented in our paintings which begun with the art of theatrical interpretation: either we integrate the architecture and space of the palazzo into the painting, or we see the painting as a stage design for movement and choreography.

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Suggested organisational options

In order to improve and facilitate this cooperation between the classes and the arts we suggest a series of optional facilities:

1.    As a warm up every week on Monday morning we will offer an “Early Morning Session” which will start at 10am. We will offer a class of Alexander-Technique and Social Dreaming Matrix.

2.    Every Wednesday evening at 8.30pm we suggest having dinner together in the courtyard of the Palazzo Zenobio to discuss group works of the cross media projects starting on Thursday afternoon. You are invited to bring your own pizza, drinks will be offered by the academy.

3.    This year we will publish a catalogue of the ten best cross media projects developed during the Summer Academy 2016 which will be distributed to gallery owners all over the world.