FRIDA
Festival in Renaissance Italy: a Digital Atlas
A New Digital Atlas Model for the Performing Arts
Project conception: Francesca Bortoletti (University of Parma) and Paolo Ciuccarelli (Density Design Research Lab, POLIMI and Northeaster University, Boston).
Project direction: Francesca Bortoletti (University of Parma), Giuseppe Gerbino (Columbia University, NYC), and Paolo Ciuccarelli (Density Design Research Lab, POLIMI and Northeaster University, Boston).
Work Team: International and interdisciplinary research group (Parma, Columbia, Northeastern University, POLIMI), composed of IT designers, music historians, art historians, and theatre historians.
Pilot Project I: Venice.
FRIDA focuses on the theme of the feast/festival as a memorial machine, a place of synthesis and diffraction of knowledge, of heritage, and invention for the polis within the polis.
FRIDA starts from basic research and processes its results through a dynamic platform – a digital Atlas – that restores the fragments of festivals, and the documents once interconnected with the festive event and now fragmented in historical documents, as multimedia and intermedial contents.
The ATLAS operates on three interactive levels: Event, Backstage, and Memory. This three-part model allows for reliving, investigating, and visualizing for the first time the complexity of the feast, addressing the richness of the documentation from a series of interconnected viewpoints. Through digital technology, visual analysis, visualization systems, and the creation of networks and a multimedia narrative, this Atlas aims to offer an innovative analysis tool and cultural mediation device for the valorisation of the arts and the conservation of cultural heritage.
Advisory board: Lina Bolzoni; Patricia Fortini Brown; Maria Luisa Catoni; Allen J. Grieco; Raimondo Guarino; Kristin Huffman; Margaret McGowan; Konrad Eisenbichler; Edward Muir; Massimo Rospocher; Jeffrey Schnapp; Philippe Vendrix; Paola Ventrone; Piermario Vescovo.
Funding: The Italian Academy-Columbia University, Delmas Foundation, Mellon Foundation/CSPW; Fondazione Cini/Centro Vittore Branca; CEMH (UMN).
Partnership and collaborations: International Observatory for Cultural Heritage dell’Italian Academy; Minneapolis Institute of Art – Dept. of Prints and Drawings and with other Italian, European, and American archives.
Header Image : Jan Grevembroch, Theatrum mundi, torneo dei Cavalieri della Calza. Venice, Museo Correr Library, ms. Gradenigo Dolfin 49 – courtesy of Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia
Video and figures : from “Festivals in Renaissance Italy: A Digital Atlas” – The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University
