inguine.net by Vanni Brusadin
Communication versus Chaos
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Immediate Contact versus Unpredictability and Surprise
A Surface of Identical Languages versus A Never Completed Construction of Paths that Elide Each Other
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Immersion versus Seduction
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enjoy ©ontradiction$
Inguine.net saw the light at the end of 2000 - an idea born out of love for comics, a jumbled-up composite idea. Good enough reasons for turning it into a mixture of the concrete and the immaterial - a fistful of kilobytes on the Web, a few thousand ones and zeros which when reassembled on your computer screen regain the appearance of a picture, a text, or a message left by who knows who. Inguine wanted to transcended the fanzine, yet translate the smell (and price) of photocopied paper into a continually evolving, open Internet project. We have changed much of the original idea, carried out a few experiments and sometimes we have found ourselves up to our knees in water, wading across a ford leading we knew not where. But we have never worried too much, since one of Inguine.net's first slogans was _Enjoy contradictions_.
If I asked "Why comics within the cold digital logic of the Internet?" we can give a few provisional answers - the definitive ones will have to wait a few years until the theoreticians come along and sort everything out. But clearly new instruments need testing and exploiting to the utmost, especially when they are as innovative and extraordinary as the Web. One of the main strands within Inguine.net is Web Design and research into transferring the expressive power of contemporary comics to the screen. Experiments in the digital processing of short works by italian and foreign authors have been carried out, together with monographic competitive or collaborative experiments initially on works by Giuseppe Palumbo and now by Joe Sacco. The outcome has always been innovative comics that are often refused admission to mass distribution circuits and which, perhaps for this very reason, still manage to create stories and pictures with an original sensibility, whether political, visionary, surreal, or whatever.
There is also another stand. Web design is one of the most fascinating ways of shaping the visible form of this new means of communication - the Web, but the Web itself is a living nervous system: a chaotic soup of collaboration, concepts in development, links to the physical world, new forms of human activity. Beneath the Internet's lively colourful surface lies the possibility of using the web as a tactical instrument to spread information, produce pleasure, look for accomplices. Beyond the computer screen too, perhaps on city walls, to produce comics which (for the time being) shun newsstands and art galleries and nevertheless manage to reach the homes of comics enthusiasts. For example in a simple series of Paper Resistance decals that can be downloaded and printed as they are. And this could just be the beginning.
La nostra rivista
