Neat Series' Proto-Manifesto: Messages, Our Medium!

In this moment of awkward confrontation with “the jungle out there”* Neat Series is ready to shape its ideological** program according to the following guidelines:

1 – Embrace the common and the (apparent) repetition of daily routines as the backdrop for the surreal side of everything. We will use, develop and promote a sharp and ironic attention able to detect the details that make each instant, person, object, or word singular, unrepeatable and potentially ridiculous.

2 – Promote a critical awareness that responds to the overflow of information that comes to us. Fighting both silent passivity and intellectual over-criticism, we propose an active and optimistic attitude towards media society, using its tools and resources to promote inter-action and the production of customized contents.

3 – Use artistic strategies as tools of political and social intervention. Art actions and objects (as any other) are always containers of either explicit or implicit messages. We want to gain full consciousness of this potential of meaning, using our artistic projects as catalysts for communication and inter-action to activate a shared and responsive experience of reality.

4 – Work in a dialogical way knowing that artists, as citizens, are inevitably responsive members of a community, and as such should raise pertinent issues and questions and understand/consider the potential impact of actions from a social and political point of view. We believe artistic work shouldn’t always be self-referential: it should echo and be framed by the specific context it is developed in.

5 – Believe that technology, namely when it’s used to produce artistic work, is not an end in itself but a privileged media and should be used to its maximum capacity to support and communicate content and establish dynamics of interaction. We don’t praise but we also don’t demonize technology: we intend to use it, expand its possibilities and propose other ways it can be integrated to promote creativity, interrelations and active citizenship.

* The residency program at ACA was a very comfortable nest for artists, and life outside is nowhere near being that easy. For example, in the outside world, there aren't any Master Artists to provide us with wine for our evening meals. But the big question is: who will put up our signs now that we don’t have Dan?

**Yes, we know: Ideologies are dead. Even Capitalism (an adjective recent history has proved to be harmless) is dead--that’s why we have no fear in calling our program ideological.