In "Urbana" by Mario Canali, you stroll through a city by night. What happens when urban space is reduced to optical and acoustic sensations?

To go out, get into a car, stroll through the town, by day and above all by night. To meet shapes, go along them, cross them, go around them.

"Urbana" is intended to be a short trip through the town. And once again the goal is not to be in a certain place at a certain time, but to follow the development of a sense, of one among so very many.

The spatial wandering around shapes and the musical modulation with time create a continuous repetition of allusions along which the feeling moves on and defines itself.
The images are three-dimensionally structured and animated frame by frame. The music has also been realized by computer, without human interference in the mixing.

Technical Background

The animation was realized on an IBM PC AT, the electronic paint system TARGA 16 AT&T, SONY 5850 BCD with Artwork, Videowork and Targatips software; the music was created on Apple Macintosh, Yamaha CX5M2, DX7, TX7.


Correnti Magnetiche
Mario Canali

If one considers that "change" should be one of the main characteristics of an image - at of the new computer generated image as opposed to the traditional painted image - one accepts an interpretation of reality under the aspects of the contemporary development of science, above all of physics, which interpret processes and the interaction of matter per se as dynamic.

But this understanding means that one approaches the idea of a universe in continuous movement, the basis of most of the oriental philosophies. And so it is maybe not purely casual that the computer which makes this vision possible been born in California, in that geographical area where our history in constant movement from East to West meets the ocean that both connects and separates the East, the West. And it is only by chance that the first works of computer art show such an eastern influence; and not by accident the most eastern of the western countries, California (just think of "Blade Runner's" Los Angeles of the future), has been joined in the research of these new technologies by the most western of the eastern countries, by Japan.

And Europe - or rather the Heart of Europe - has always been the favorite place of encounter between these two cultures.

And so Europe's task is not to be found in exerting a technological predominance that historically cannot be claimed to be ours any more, but rather in deepening and realigning the orientation of the human mind in the light of these new findings.

Earlier works - "Una corsa", 1985 - is a reflexion of the lines-of-force and tendencies of an oil painting by Mario Canali. In "Narciso e Paolo", 1986, two paintings by Caravaggio, are contrasted and connected. This visual analysis of two works of the past underscores the incorporation of historical traditions (so important for Europe) into the new technologies. "Riflessi", where music and its stimuli determine the generation of the image, shows the development of the image as such, as a sequence of control commands and vectors executed by the computer in order to finally produce the definitive image. The computer permits a kind of Action Painting that is not only captured through the result, the image, but can be presented in all its dynamism.