In the last days some clamorous news about a rediscovered picture by Van Gogh has been published in the magazine “Analytical Chemistry”, and has already been spread out loud to the whole world. Under the surface of a painting by the great Dutch artist there is another one, realized previously and then covered, portraying the face of a woman.

Florence has been for centuries the propelling centre of art, a city anciently inhabited by important patrons of art, enlightened men and great artists, now an organized and fascinating site for anyone who wishes to admire its ancient and present splendour.
Just the other day in Piazza del Duomo in Florence a fifteenth-century main door opened up to receive tourists with a new inviting proposal. Indeed, the regional capital of Tuscany has inaugurated the Art and Culture Opa-Centre, a centre characterized by high technological performances, that will lead visitors and travellers through a multimedia journey, encouraging them to find out and appreciate even more the monuments of the beautiful Florence, in particular the cathedral, the baptistery and the bell-tower.

Who, visiting an exhibition, has not felt the need to follow up their experience with the support of an audio guide? An instrument that everyone knows but which is now evolving in order to become increasingly user-friendly and truly useful for visitors.
One of the new frontiers of this evolution is the mobile phone audio guide. The idea generates from a simple observation: nowadays mobile phones are the most common means of communication and they are the most used instrument by categories of heterogeneous users.

In an increasingly hectic world that is always in motion, finding the possibility to always be where you would like to is not easy. And so, it could be that a collector who’d like to buy an artwork that he’s been aspiring to for a while from a London auction, must be at a New York reunion on the very same day.

There are of course solutions. It is enough to send a personal representative to the auction, giving up the excitement of the wager or participating via the internet or by telephone. But even these long distance means of participation have their negative aspects.

Article translated by Amritee Mahabir

FRANCESCA ALONSO TELLS US ALL ABOUT COMMUNICATION IN MULTIMEDIA ART

Even Italy is opening its doors to the use of technology within the artistic and cultural sector. New scientific instruments are in fact evermore prominent in our daily lives, but they especially offer new solutions that could become indispensable factors towards improving a sector like art, which is sometimes considered too traditional.

Article translated by Amritee Mahabir

The 52^nd Venice Biennale “Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense”, has by now been closed for a while, to be precise, since November 21^st 2007. The exhibition curated by Robert Storr, was held as usual in the traditional Biennale location: Arsenale Corderie and Artiglierie and in the Padiglione Italia at the Giardini, and in other sites in and around Venice’s town centre registering 319,332 visitors - the most attended Biennale in the past twenty years.