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Franco MANAI
Franco MANAI
Faculty of Arts, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Faculty of Arts, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Manfredo Manfredini
Associate Professor, School of Architecture and Planning, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Plastique Fantastique, Berlin, Germany
Andrea BALDINI
Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory, School of Arts of Nanjing University, Nanjing, China
Andrea is Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory at the School of Arts of Nanjing University, Director of the NJU Center for Sino-Italian Cultural Studies, and Young Ambassador of the Jiangsu Province. He is also Board Member of the Association of Italian Scholars in China (AAIIC), and Board and Founding Member of the Association of Tuscans in China. He has also been recently elected Delegate-at-Large of the International Association of Aesthetics (IAA).
Andrea holds two doctoral degrees, a PhD in Philosophy (Temple University, 2014) and a PhD in Text Sciences (University of Siena, 2011), as well as a BA in Philosophy (University of Siena, 2006). His mixed academic background naturally led me to develop interdisciplinary research interests, which lie at the intersection of aesthetics, cultural studies, urban communication, and visual culture. His is generally interested in how creativity can influence our everyday lives and practices, and in particular, the nature, uses, and functions of public spaces.
We have to stop thinking about
the digital space as separated from the material space.
Insight from "Innovative Approaches and Creative Practices in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic"
Andrea is interested in how creativity shapes and reshapes our daily life, in particular public space, and how digital space and creativity would merge in the future. During the lockdown, Andrea observed multiplied efforts to be creative in ways that usually we are not. A violin session by a professional on a balcony in Milan was recorded by his Chinese neighbor and shared on Weibo, which then became viral and unleashed creativity. People added their own performances by embedding the video, creating an ever-growing artwork, and essentially mixing the digital and the physical. Andrea proposed that the future of cultural production has to be in between the virtual and the material space, exploring the possibilities of having digital production that has a material effect and the other way round. Biancoshock’s and Rolenzo’s SOCOD19 is a project of such, creating a website and having the audience take a selfie and write something, what they have written enter into the code that produces their refrained and modified images that are visible to all. The work is also conceptualized to take a material form at a later stage.