INAUGURATION OF THE NEW OFFICINE SCHWARTZ WEBSITE DEDICATED TO THE TRANSMEDIALE HACKATHON

Worthy culmination of the anniversary year for Officine Schwartz (1983/84-2023/24), the avant-industrial group will perform on March 1st, 2024, at the Auditorium of Bergamo as a live mixed media, retracing their career with both vintage material and new compositions. In conjunction with the event, the polymedial publisher Rizosfera, concluding the work started a year ago with the Politecnico di Torino and Transmedia and polymedial languages lecturer Domenico Morreale, inaugurates the NEW Officine Schwartz website curated by Andrea Corsini of RS1 and Rizosfera UK dedicated to the Transmedia Hackathon event. The website, accessible at the following address https://schwartz40.rizosfera.org/, showcases the three most significant polymedial works elaborated by university students from the Politecnico, enrolled in the Cinema Engineering and Media Communication degree, Transmedia course, originating from the Transmedia Hackathon event held in Turin last May 17th. It’s a special occasion to visit and admire the quality of creations by the student groups and the communicative power emanating from their transmedia narratives.

But what happened on May 17th, 2023, in the university lecture hall of Politecnico di Torino, and what was the experience of the Transmedia Hackathon? Let’s pick up the news directly from the Politecnico di Torino website:

“Transmedia narratives: these are the forms that the students of the Transmedia course at Politecnico used to recount the forty-year history of Officine Schwartz, a prominent figure in the Italian industrial music scene. On the occasion of the celebrations, the polymedial publisher Rizosfera opened its archive to the course participants, providing videos, tracks, texts, and images that trace the career and works of Officine Schwartz. During the educational workshop, these materials were analyzed, collected, and processed with the support of Klynt software. Participants were encouraged to reflect on the journey of the group founded by Osvaldo Arioldi Schwartz and to propose original perspectives capable of understanding the extraordinary sound and aesthetic research of the “industrial civilization” from 1983 to the present day.

Making the experience possible was the use of the hackathon format, an intensive event where interdisciplinary work groups develop a project, a proposal that is then presented to the organizers at the end of the meeting, with the final announcement of the winner of the day. In the case of the hackathon organized by the Transmedia course and Rizosfera publisher, the event took place over four hours, involving about eighty students divided into ten work groups. The theme of the workshop was the combination of industrial music and working-class culture, of which, in the Italian context, the most representative group is Officine Schwartz, both for the originality of the subjects and colors proposed, and for the first multimedia experiments that bring together music, video, dance, and theater in a single performance.

“A well-attended event,” commented Domenico Morreale, Politecnico lecturer and hackathon organizer, “with significant involvement from guest speakers, Osvaldo Arioldi of Officine Schwartz, and Paolo Davoli and Andrea Corsini of Rizosfera, who shared their expertise on the subject with the students. The transmedia projects realized by the participants, presented at the end of the event, garnered general interest, offering everything from video interviews to thematic insights on self-built instruments. Particularly interesting was the explanation of the history of the tubicordo, a self-built instrument made from an old stove pipe, which was demonstrated and played in the lecture hall. I thank the students who responded to our invitation, the teachers who made the event possible, Elisa Roscelli and Nicola Falomi, and the speakers who brought the musical journey of this important Italian artistic reality to the attention of the participants.”