from ITALY
SPEAKING DIGITALIAN ----------------------------- the italians were latecomers to the brave new world of digital design, but three young artists have been running to catch up ... techniques used for artwork reproduction have always had a profound influence on artistic development. apprentice artists no longer need to travel the world in search of artistic masterpieces to inspire them and teach them techniques, images have themselves been travelling since the end of the 15th century. but as the original image -imago- becomes information, it inevitably undergoes a standardisation process as well. with the innovation of the internet, new semantic codes are being propagated in a very short space of time, are used by a vast community and quickly become codified as official languages. the on-line community has a huge influence on all web art production - work published on the internet stimulates countless designers and serves to increase their awareness. thanks to web tutorials, a huge range of people can learn artistic techniques and find ways to adapt them. this acceleration in the spread of information obviously increases globalization and renders production more homogeneous. history has taught us that as the distribution of information increases, so the number of true innovators is reduced, fewer creators of ideas there are… as for web design, it is said that in italy they are real copy-cats and that they got there after everybody else. the development of internet design has been slow, but as they have been grown in experience, italians have begun to add something of their own to the field. short web design development overview in 1993 the national center for supercomputing applications (NSCA) developed the browser ‘mosaic’, now 'netscape', allowing images, texts, sounds and movies to be combined for the first time. but the real boom in webdesign began in 1995 when sun microsystems developed java technology, which allowed temporary interaction between the user and the server by means of short scripts. in 1996 microsoft added its own browser 'internet explorer’ - to the scene and, thanks to the continual development of HTML, new versions of these browsers and the countless plug-ins (such as 'quick time', 'shockwave' real audio/video, 'VRML' ), have considerably increased the communicative potential of the web. in the mid-1990s web design became a hot topic in italy. 'mosaic' http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu italian protagonists several young artists tried to keep up with the times, initially following the predominating artistic currents, before finding their own niches in the world of web design. the best-known italian web designers in the international community - mirco pasqualini, simone biffi and nicola (niko) stumpo have all arrived at the same point, but from different directions. after professional experiences in very diverse fields, they each discovered an overwhelming passion for design on the internet. Like their predecessors and mentors - joshua davis, matt owens, josh ulm - they are all self-taught. grown up with a ‘do it yourself’ -mentality, they are their own most valuable resource. what follows is a preview of their work, from pasqualini's work with ootword, biffi's antiweb and stumpo's experimentation. - read more - back to the newstand		design by mirco pasqualini design by simone biffi design by niko stumpo
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