Books by Simone Dotto
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Meltemi, Milano - Udine, 2019
Fissare l’effimerità della voce in una forma permanente è una possibilità portata in dote dalle t... more Fissare l’effimerità della voce in una forma permanente è una possibilità portata in dote dalle tecnologie del suono che l’Italia coglie in netto ritardo rispetto agli altri paesi europei, inaugurando la costruzione del “patrimonio fonico nazionale” soltanto nei tardi anni Venti del Novecento. Attraverso uno spoglio documenti originali e periodici dell’epoca, Voci d’archivio ripercorre l’istituzionalizzazione della fonografia a mezzo archivistico soffermandosi da un lato sulle vicende e sui dibattiti che portarono alla fondazione della Discoteca di Stato e dall’altro sui modi diversi in cui le potenzialità del nuovo medium vennero concepite e messe in opera dalle parti in causa. Uno sguardo ravvicinato a discorsi e pratiche che guidarono le prime applicazioni della fonografia, utile a riconoscere la natura tecnologicamente e culturalmente mediata di quella che chiamiamo memoria sonora.
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Papers by Simone Dotto
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The Soundtrack
Mario Wienerrother's Musicless Musicvideos series have recently surfaced on the Internet ... more Mario Wienerrother's Musicless Musicvideos series have recently surfaced on the Internet and since 2006, they have gained millions of views as a humorous YouTube sensation. As a professional sound designer, he re-edits already released and often widely known music videos by depriving them of music and adding a different, entirely sonic audio track that he records himself. All of these reworkings seem to raise the same hypothetical question: what if these audiovisual excerpts were deprived of their most signifying aural expression, namely music? Would they still have the same meaning? Would they tell the same 'story'? This article aims to explore Wienerroither's practices and the effects they provoke on our understanding of the aesthetic conventions of the music video. As a first step, I will provide a detailed account of the process for realizing the Musicless Musicvideos by drawing on an interview I carried out with the author. Secondly, I will investigate a number of Wienerroither's productions in relation to (1) the aesthetic conventions of music video and (2) the practical realm of Foley artistry. The objective of the article is to demonstrate how, by relying on a sound-centred practice, Musicless Musicvideos undermine the overall balance between the visual and the aural elements in a typical music video.
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The New Soundtrack
Most of the recent theoretical contributions in film and media studies claim an adequate consider... more Most of the recent theoretical contributions in film and media studies claim an adequate consideration of sound reproduction in its material features. With the aim of underlining how two distinct conceptions of materiality (concerning the physical composition of reproduced sound itself on the one hand and a material approach to the media for sound recording and sound reproduction on the other) might be mutually intervolved, the first part of the article will point out some significant intersections between the theoretical accounts on mediated sound offered by Rick Altman, Tom Levin and Wolfgang Ernst. Those notions will be subsequently applied to the historical context of the conversion to sound in Italian cinema: in doing so, we will first outline the way in which film theorists rejected both the sonic and technological ‘materialisation’ of the film-medium and how, by contrast, practitioners dealt with the technological novelties as concrete problems to solve; secondly, by focusing on the film-making practices and the film-editing and projecting techniques we will re-formulate to the notion of noise with the double meaning of ‘obtrusive materiality’ and ‘technological materiality’, depending on the different context. In order to verify how new theoretical accounts can serve as epistemological frameworks for our investigation on historical film practices, the essay will discuss the way in which the materiality of mediated sound (as an aural phenomenon to be recorded and a technological inscription to be reproduced) changed the habits and challenged the skills of the workers involved in a film-making process.
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Cinémà&Cie, 2019
Introduction to the special issue "Avantgarde and Popular Form" , co-edited with François Mouillo... more Introduction to the special issue "Avantgarde and Popular Form" , co-edited with François Mouillot and Maria Teresa Soldani.
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"Immagini industriose. Film e fotografia industriale nella cultura visuale italiana: interfaccia, evento, archivio", a cura di Francesco Pitassio, Federico Pierotti, Immagine. Note di storie del cinema, Dec 2019
Il saggio riflette sulla natura “sponsored” dei film realizzati dalla Incom su commissione della ... more Il saggio riflette sulla natura “sponsored” dei film realizzati dalla Incom su commissione della Fiat per documentare il raid transafricano del pilota Paolo Butti, da Algeri a Città del Capo a bordo di un fuoristrada ‘Campagnola’. Le riprese furono montate in tre servizi e un numero speciale del cinegiornale “La Settimana Incom” e ri-montate dalla Fiat per un corto promozionale. Confrontando le tre edizioni si ricostruirà la sponsorship come “contratto negoziale” tra committente e compagnia cinegiornalistica e come agency istutizionale sottesa al racconto del
viaggio.
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L'avventura, Jul 2018
The «ethnic» or «language records» published by multinational companies for non-English speaking ... more The «ethnic» or «language records» published by multinational companies for non-English speaking communities in the U.S. are a long-standing research interest in ethnomusicology. This essay reconsiders the same study object from a media-related perspective by focusing on the records made for Italian-American communities between the mid-1910s and 1930s. Building on Joseph Sciorra’s notion of «translocative experiences of italianità», I will first outline the transnational geographies of early record industry and the strategies underlying ethnic production in the U.S. Secondly, I will discuss the case of non-musical records to demonstrate how their discursive and representational rhetorics engaged the listener by «carrying» him/ her in to re-invented homeland.
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in «Imago. Studi di cinema e media», n. 14, 2016, pp. 161-173.
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Bianco & Nero, speciale monografico "Mario Verdone", a cura di Andrea Mariani, Simone Venturini, Oct 2017
L’articolo sintetizza i tratti della produzione radiofonica di Mario Verdone dal 1941 al 1994. Ne... more L’articolo sintetizza i tratti della produzione radiofonica di Mario Verdone dal 1941 al 1994. Nella prima parte si ricostruisce il percorso che portò Verdone a contribuire alle programmazioni dell’Eiar come autore di drammi, scene e atti unici e successivamente a collaborare a con Radio Firenze. Nella seconda parte si analizzano i tratti stilistici della trasmissione ideate da Luigi Salimbeni Pangloss (1989). In ultimo si fornisce una “radiografia” delle trasmissioni di Verdone a partire dai palinsesti pubblicati sulle testate «Radiocorriere» e «Radiocorriere TV».
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The New Soundtrack, "The theory of Practice" edited by Philippa Lovatt, Nessa Johnston, , 2017
Most of the recent theoretical contributions in film and media studies claim an adequate consider... more Most of the recent theoretical contributions in film and media studies claim an adequate consideration of sound reproduction in its material features. With the aim of underlining how two distinct conceptions of materiality (concerning the physical composition of reproduced sound itself on the one hand and a material approach to the media for sound recording and sound reproduction on the other) might be mutually intervolved, the first part of the article will point out some significant intersections between the theoretical accounts on mediated sound offered by Rick Altman, Tom Levin and Wolfgang Ernst. Those notions will be subsequently applied to the historical context of the conversion to sound in Italian cinema: in doing so, we will first outline the way in which film theorists rejected both the sonic and technological ‘materialisation’ of the film-medium and how, by contrast, practitioners dealt with the technological novelties as concrete problems to solve; secondly, by focusing on the film-making practices and the film-editing and projecting techniques we will re-formulate to the notion of noise with the double meaning of ‘obtrusive materiality’ and ‘technological materiality’, depending on the different context. In order to verify how new theoretical accounts can serve as epistemological frameworks for our investigation on historical film practices, the essay will discuss the way in which the materiality of mediated sound (as an aural phenomenon to be recorded and a technological inscription to be reproduced) changed the habits and challenged the skills of the workers involved in a film-making process.
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The Soundtrack, "Sound and Music in Emerging Media" special Issue edited by Jennifer O' Meara , 2016
Mario Wienerrother's Musicless Musicvideos series have recently surfaced on the Internet and sinc... more Mario Wienerrother's Musicless Musicvideos series have recently surfaced on the Internet and since 2006, they have gained millions of views as a humorous YouTube sensation. As a professional sound designer, he re-edits already released and often widely known music videos by depriving them of music and adding a different, entirely sonic audio track that he records himself. All of these reworkings seem to raise the same hypothetical question: what if these audiovisual excerpts were deprived of their most signifying aural expression, namely music? Would they still have the same meaning? Would they tell the same 'story'? This article aims to explore Wienerroither's practices and the effects they provoke on our understanding of the aesthetic conventions of the music video. As a first step, I will provide a detailed account of the process for realizing the Musicless Musicvideos by drawing on an interview I carried out with the author. Secondly, I will investigate a number of Wienerroither's productions in relation to (1) the aesthetic conventions of music video and (2) the practical realm of Foley artistry. The objective of the article is to demonstrate how, by relying on
a sound-centred practice, Musicless Musicvideos undermine the overall balance between the visual and the aural elements in a typical music video.
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Cinema&Cie, Mar 1, 2016
The article discusses the concept of 'radio-film', a term which repetitively entered the vocabula... more The article discusses the concept of 'radio-film', a term which repetitively entered the vocabulary of practitioners and theoreticians during the transition to sound, and raises several well acknowledged historical notions by adopting a slightly different question: has an idea of cinema as an entirely aural art — i.e. sound cinema as 'cinema made of sound' — ever come up in media history? Starting by considering the European scenario and by focusing more specifically on the case of the early Italian radio-play between 1925 and 1935, this article explores this path as a concrete historical possibility: in this context, the surfacing of two hybrid terms such as fonoquadro [phonoscene/phonoframe] and suonomontaggio [sound-montage] will represent the case studies for a discussion on 'intermediality' both as an epistemological framework to apply and 'a state of historical transition' to investigate. By questioning the role of cinema as an always present term of comparison in the debate on the medium specificity of radio and the ways in which a cinematic imagination has affected the development of entertainment genres in radio production, the essay aims at demonstrating how a hypothesis of aural cinema as a radio art can be grounded in several concrete aesthetic and technological intermedial exchanges.
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"Total Entertainment. Rivedere la disco music" a cura di Claudio Bisoni, Paolo Noto, Guglielmo Pescatore, Cinergie - Il Cinema e le altre arti,, 2016
To further elaborate the widespread criticisms concerning the supposedly “materialistic” and “tec... more To further elaborate the widespread criticisms concerning the supposedly “materialistic” and “technocentric” essence of Disco, this essay aims at reconsidering Discomusic from a “crono-technological” perspective rather than a social-technological one. Theoretical tools borrowed from Wolfgang Ernst’s understanding of media-archaeology will be applied to two different cases (vinyl records manipulation techniques and digital sampling in Nu Disco), highlighting differences and similarities in the use of analog and digital media for sound recording. In each case I will discuss how the dee-jay and the producer differently “mediate” between recorded music and the listening audience, within a live or a studio context, in order to demonstrate in which ways the medium itself (as a techno-cultural artifact) “performs” by stressing its material and temporal features. The purpose of the essay is to investigate the effective role of media technologies in shaping our entertaining experience as Discomusic listeners.
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BOOK CHAPTERS by Simone Dotto
Scrivere la storia, costruire l'archivio, a cura di Diego Cavallotti, Denis Lotti, Andrea Mariani (Meltemi, Milano-Udine), 2021
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in M. Haffke, S. Horn, E. Canpalat, M. Preuss (eds.), Gegen-dokumentation,Trascript, Bielefeld, 2020
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Mariapia Comand, Andrea Mariani (a cura di), Ephemera. Scrapbooks, Fan Mail e diari delle spettatrici nell'Italia del regime, Marsilio, Venezia, 2019
Introduzione Lettere, cartoline, diari, album di ritagli, agende di appunti, liste, memorabilia: ... more Introduzione Lettere, cartoline, diari, album di ritagli, agende di appunti, liste, memorabilia: quale posto riserva la storia del cinema alle produ-zioni degli spettatori? Nel porre le premesse di un volume che mira a recuperare almeno in parte un'eredità eccentrica, eterogenea e preservata in disparate istituzioni, vale la pena di interrogarsi su quali strumenti teorici e metodologici potrebbero valorizzare al meglio i materiali di nostro interesse. La categoria di «paratesti» alla quale saremmo portati ad ascriverli, seguendo quasi per un automatismo il dettato genettiano, risulta a ben vedere limitante per almeno due ragioni. La prima sta proprio nell'uso del termine «testo» e all'ingombrante portato che alla nozione si è attribuito nell'ambito della tradizione semiologica: inquadrare questi oggetti soltanto quali manifestazioni enunciazionali e considerarli esclu-sivamente per il loro aspetto contenutistico-informativo ci condur-rebbe a far passare in secondo piano la loro consistenza fisica, la loro identità di oggetti della vita quotidiana. [1] Il saggio è stato ideato e scritto dai due autori in stretta collaborazione. Nel redigere le bozze Simone Dotto si è occupato del paragrafo di Introduzione e di quello conclusivo, Cultura materiale ed ephemera come oggetti sociali. Ad Andrea Mariani appartengono le stesure dei paragrafi Dalla periferia al medium, New Cinema History ed ephemera come «soft» medium e Archeologia dei media ed ephemera come «hard» medium.
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Simone Natale, Diana Pasulka (eds), "Believe in Bits. Digital Media and the Supernatural", Oxford University Press, 2019
Examining the use of sound recording in relation to the spiritualists’ practices and discourses, ... more Examining the use of sound recording in relation to the spiritualists’ practices and discourses, the chapter questions a widespread “metaphysical” understanding of phonography: the tendency to ascribe the indexical trace an evidentiary value. Through a brief historical overview, the first part highlights how, if used as a tool to explore the supernatural dimension, analog recording is evaluated more for its revelatory potential than for the transcriptive one. The second part addresses the problem of digital recording from a twofold perspective. On the one hand, it considers the analog-to-digital transition in
contemporary electronic voice phenomena chasing practices; on the other one, it interprets the sonic hauntology music genre as a secularized version of the spiritualists’ inquiry, aimed at reviving phonography itself. The overall objective of the chapter is to demonstrate how the reliability of the same technologies may be differently perceived depending on the users’ shared beliefs.
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L’archeologia dei media, come è stato affermato da Vivian Sobchack, si presenta come una “discipl... more L’archeologia dei media, come è stato affermato da Vivian Sobchack, si presenta come una “disciplina indisciplinata”, frutto di molteplici traiettorie epistemologiche accumunate dalla medesima tensione di base, ossia dalla necessità di rivolgere alla storia dei media uno sguardo più attento alla materialità delle evidenze storiche – insomma, uno sguardo capace di riconfigurare i rapporti tra la teoria e la pratica. Tale oscillazione è di assoluta rilevanza per le diverse “ipotesi cartografiche” elaborate, con ottimi risultati, oltre che da Wanda Strauven, anche da Erkki Huhtamo e Jussi Parrika. L’indagine di una simile “tensione di base”, tuttavia, può rimandare anche a un altro fine, ossia alla descrizione di alcune configurazioni semantiche assunte dal termine “archeologia” da quando è diventato parte del dibattito scientifico sui
media. Il primo paragrafo tenterà dunque di fare sinteticamente il punto sui modi in cui esso è stato utilizzato finora, mentre il secondo evidenzierà la possibilità di altri approcci “archeologici” allo studio dei media.
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Wer ist Leonardo? Da Caligari al cinema senza nomi. Studi in onore di Leonardo Quaresima (Mimesis International, a cura di M. Comand, S. Martin, F. Pitassio, C. Saba, S. Venturini, V. Re, F. Zecca (Milano - Udine), 2017
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Books by Simone Dotto
Papers by Simone Dotto
viaggio.
a sound-centred practice, Musicless Musicvideos undermine the overall balance between the visual and the aural elements in a typical music video.
BOOK CHAPTERS by Simone Dotto
contemporary electronic voice phenomena chasing practices; on the other one, it interprets the sonic hauntology music genre as a secularized version of the spiritualists’ inquiry, aimed at reviving phonography itself. The overall objective of the chapter is to demonstrate how the reliability of the same technologies may be differently perceived depending on the users’ shared beliefs.
media. Il primo paragrafo tenterà dunque di fare sinteticamente il punto sui modi in cui esso è stato utilizzato finora, mentre il secondo evidenzierà la possibilità di altri approcci “archeologici” allo studio dei media.
viaggio.
a sound-centred practice, Musicless Musicvideos undermine the overall balance between the visual and the aural elements in a typical music video.
contemporary electronic voice phenomena chasing practices; on the other one, it interprets the sonic hauntology music genre as a secularized version of the spiritualists’ inquiry, aimed at reviving phonography itself. The overall objective of the chapter is to demonstrate how the reliability of the same technologies may be differently perceived depending on the users’ shared beliefs.
media. Il primo paragrafo tenterà dunque di fare sinteticamente il punto sui modi in cui esso è stato utilizzato finora, mentre il secondo evidenzierà la possibilità di altri approcci “archeologici” allo studio dei media.
directions. This paper aims at highlighting the specificities of the audio recordings as archival items, both in terms of selection criteria and technological means of preservation: in order to fulfill this task, I will make reference primarily to the serie of experimental radioplays and sound-montages on film, produced and broadcasted in
Italy approximately between 1920 and 1930, concurrently to the introduction of sound in film industry and now mostly lost. Such case studies in radio and phonographic recordings preservation could be useful not only to understand in which ways non musical sonic documents should enter the archival research on cinema (cfr. Feaser–Smith 2009) but also to address the current debate about the construction of a sonic heritage and “how sound collection offered a model for early cinema preservation” (Birdsall 2015).
recordings realized by Rodolfo De Angelis between 1924 and 1925 for his collection “La Parola dei Grandi” that would constitute the earliest archival corpus to be preserved from the Italian Institute for the Sonic and Audiovisual Heritage. De Angelis asked some among the most important personalities of his time (mostly writers or military authorities who fought during the First World War) to read literary works and public statements they had notoriously written or pronounced years before in front of a phonograph.
Since De Angelis’ aim was to record the sound of their voices and preserve them for future generations, it can be stated that those recordings pursued an archival task even before a proper archival institution was settled: originally conceived as aural monuments to celebrate the life of the speakers, they required a re-enactament of historical events in order to fit the needs of the new technological medium as an “archiving machine” (Enwezor, 2006).
The objective of my presentation is twofold: on the one hand, I wish to highlight the specificities of the non-musical sonic artifact in respects to the archival theory. On the other, I aim at demonstrating how the representing and re-presencing of the past (Sobchack, 2011) that repetitively occur throughout time are strictly intertwined with the material form of the phonographic record; in other terms, I will analyze in which ways “the intervolved relationship of artifact to event suggests the
possibilities of replaying history and of making history” (Camlot 2015).
Not by chance, with the rise of an emerging “machine agency” and a new “subject of history” (Anders, 1980) between the 17th and 21th Century, “technologies took over”: automated cultural activities and daily routines “were increasingly imagined as living entities” (Parikka, 2010). For being capable of recording movement over time, the cinema and the media double the world that surrounds human beings.
26th-28th March 2020, Gorizia (Italy)
EXTENDED DEADLINE: JANUARY 18th 2020
Confirmed keynote: Carolyn Birdsall (Amsterdam University)
Trevor Pinch (Cornell University)