An atypical figure of the contemporary art system, Lucrezia De Domizio, Baroness Durini has been operating for over thirty years in the field of international culture, as cultural operator, journalist, writer and patron. The end of the Sixties saw the launch of her first challenge, with the opening of Studio L.D. in Pescara, a gallery-house structured by Getuliano Alvani, Ettore Spalletti and Marco Ceroli. She organised exhibitions by Burri, Fontana, Capogrossi, Rotella, Pistoletto and proposed American Pop Art and International Constructivism. Married to Baron Giuseppe Durini of Bolognano, in the Seventies the villa of San Silvestro Colli (PE) became a meeting centre for the protagonists of the art scene at that historic moment. All the protagonists of Conceptual art and Arte Povera would meet at her house in the name of excellence and friendship. Mario and Marisa Merz, Kounellis, Calzolari, Bagnolari, Vettor Pisani, Paolini, Mattiaci, Isgrò, Boetti, Ontani, De Dominicis, Fabro, Agnetti, Job, Russo, Giuli, Salvadori, Clemente, Chia and many others. This permanent cenacle saw the participation of critics including Bonito Oliva, Celant, Tommassoni, Trini, Menna, Corà, Salerno, Gatt and Izzo, at the same time transforming the stable of an old Bourbon fort in Pescara into a space for events and anti-traditional artistic operations. In 1971 she met the German artist Joseph Beuys on the ferry to Capri. This meeting led to the first discussion Incontro con Beuys (Meeting With Beuys) in 1974. While the greatest events of aesthetic research in twenty years were taking place in Pescara and the Villa in San Silvestro Colli, the work of Joseph Beuys was becoming the guiding thread which would transform Lucrezia De Domizio's entire existence, profoundly sharing as she did the whole Beuysian philosophy and becoming its scholar and firm supporter. Venice, Kassel, Bolognano, Tokyo, Naples, Paris, London, Düsseldorf, the Seychelles, New York and Rome were the stages of the Operazione Difesa della Natura (Operation Defence of Nature) entrusted to her by Joseph Beuys. In the historic refuge of the Abruzzi countryside, this Operation to safeguard the environment and standing in anthropological defence of man and human creativity found its most creative moments in the last fifteen years of the artist's life. One of the most significant figures of the international artistic scene after the Second World War, Beuys made Bolognano his Italian residence. Active interlocutors included the intellectuals Harald Szeemann, Pierre Restany and Thomas Messer. Since Joseph Beuys' death (23 January 1986), Lucrezia De Domizio Durini has dedicated her energies to the diffusion of Beuysian philosophy through discussions, debates, conferences, publications, conventions, theses, essays and exhibitions, in particular the anthology of the Operacio Difesa della Natura at the Museo Santa Monica in Barcelona promoted by the Generalitat de Catalunya 1993, the exhibition Diary of Seychelles, Difesa della Natura promoted by the Province of Perugia at the Rocca Paolina 1996, the first Convegno Mondiale (world conference) in Budapest in 2000, the exhibition Joseph Beuys. L'immagine dell'Umanità (Joseph Beuys. The Image of Humanity) at the MART museum in Trento in 2001 and Piazza Beuys with the Bosco Sacro di Beuys (Beuys' Sacred Forest) in Gibellina. Author of twenty books on Beuysian thinking, perhaps the most significant is Il Cappello di Feltro (The Felt Hat), translated into seven languages and languages and adopted as a reading text in many schools of art both in Italy and abroad. Collector and publisher of works of art, president of the Italian Free International University, awarded the title of Chevalier, the Order of Arts and Literature in Paris by J. Lang in 1993, member of the Tribunale dell'Ambiente (environmental tribunal), she has made donations of many of Joseph Beuys' works of art, most significantly to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and the university of architecture in Venice, while abroad she has donated to the Zurich Kunsthaus ("Olivestone"). the Mitterand Foundation of Paris and to the museums of Sarajevo and San Marino. Since 1988 she has been living and working in Milan in a loft converted from the old Caproni industrial buildings, now an international meeting place and editorial office of the periodical "RISK Arte Oggi", Cultural Intercommunication magazine founded by Lucrezia De Domizio Durini in 1990. She has been featured in newspapers including "Le Monde", "Figaro", "El Pais", "New York Times", "Corriere della Sera", "Vogue", "Il Sole 24 Ore", "Abitare", "Giornale dell'Arte" and many other international weekly and monthly magazines. She is currently working towards the establishment of the JOSEPH BEUYS International Documentation Centre with the aim of safeguarding the environment and promoting interrelations between the various cultural situations of daily life. On 13 May 1999, in solidary collaboration with Harald Szeemann, one of the world's most renowned art curators, she inaugurated Piazza Joseph Beuys in Bolognano. A place created according to Beuysian concepts, a phenomenological unicum in the world history of art. She has restructured the historical residence of Palazzo Durini in Bolognano, bringing to life the exclusive and unrepeatable project la casa di lucrezia (the house of Lucrezia), bearing testimony to life and events, unique in Italy. To mark the eightieth anniversary of Beuys' birth, she promoted the Difesa Della Natura Stamp in collaboration with the State Philately of San Marino, in tribute to the German master. She collaborates with architects of international fame such Jean Nouvel, Mario Botta and Renzo Piano, with poets such as Sanguinetti, with philosophers like Sgalambro and with art critics such as Harald Szeemann and Pierre Restany. She is currently curator of the Italian section of the new Sarejevo Museum. She has collaborated for approximately six years with Edizioni Charta of Milan, managing Charta/Risk, a special series of cultural intercommunication publications. She is currently managing the series Il Clavicembalo (the harpsichord) for publishing house Editrice Silvana in Milan, and has written and published 56 art books. She has directed pieces at the Gobetti Theatre in Turin (1977), at the Quirino in Rome for Michelangelo Pistoletto (1980) and has devised two unusual pièces The Thought Take Shape and The Felt Hat Joseph Beuys A Life Told. She is curator of important exhibitions in prestigious museums in many countries of the world. A rare figure in international culture, Lucrezia De Domizio Durini lives a broadened vision of art in her philosophy of work, an art which is one with life and is an existential practice at the same time, a practice of all those teachings which only art knows and can give. In 2001 she was awarded the title of Chevalier, the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic by President of the Republic Hon. C. A. Ciampi and the Medaglia al Merito della Cultura (cultural merit medal) by the city of Sarajevo. In 2002 she was awarded the Maiella Prize. Lucrezia De Domizio Durini should be considered an independent cultural operator who has made art and culture along with humanitarian and environmental issues the primary purpose of her own existence, proudly defining herself a collector of human relationships.

Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta, is a composer of contemporary music. He is also architect and urban planner. He won the Destaque Prize in 1977 by the Brazilian ABM Institution; the APCA Prize in 1986 by the Art Critics Association of Sao Paulo; and the Lac Maggiore Prize in 1994 by the Regional Government of Lombardia, the International Association of Art Critics, the Unesco and the Council of Europe, in Locarno, Switzerland. In 1993 the Unesco, in Paris, selected his works as one of the most representative intermedia researchers of the world. He is member of the SACD - Societè des Autheurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques in Paris. He is an active member of the New York Academy of Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC. He is also member and advisor for the AIVAC - Association Internationale pour la Video dans les Arts et la Culture, in Locarno and Lausanne; and founding member of the International Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Symmetry - ISIS Symmetry, with main offices in Budapest. On music, he studied with Hans Joachim Koellreutter (pupil of Paul Hindemith, Marcel Moyse), Conrado Silva (Karlheinz Stockhausen), Demetrio Lima (French School for transversal flute) and Holger Czukai (Karlheinz Stockhausen) among others. As Architect he took part in various workshops and master classes with Kenzo Tange, Oscar Niemeyer, Yona Friedman, Peter Cook (Archigram) and Charles Moore among others. He collaborated with John Cage, for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, from 1986 until his disappearance in 1992. He remains commissioned composer for Merce Cunningham, in New York, since then. His musical compositions have been played by important musicians like David Tudor, Takehisa Kosugi, Maurizio Barbetti, John Tilbury, Martha Mooke, John DS Adams, Michael Pugliese and the Manhattan Quartet among others. His compositions had been performed in several theatres all over the world, like the City Center Theatre and The Kitchen in New York, the Shinjuku Bunka Center in Tokyo or the Sao Paulo Museum of Modern Art. He is Editorial Director of the art and culture magazine RISK Arte Oggi, in Milan, Italy, since 1992. He is member of the jury of the BES Fellowship - Experimental Intermedia Foundation of New York, Luso American Foundation and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation - since 1995. In the early 80s Emanuel Pimenta coined the concept "virtual architecture", later largely used. In the end of the 70s, he begun the development of a new graphical musical notation inside virtual environments, using computer graphics. Mr. Pimenta has been invited, as professor and lecturer, by several institutions, like the Universities of New York, Lisbon, Lausanne, Tsukuba, Sao Paulo, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Monte Verita Foundation in Switzerland and the Technion Institute in Haifa, Israel among others. His works are included in the Universalis Encyclopaedia (Britannica), in the Sloninsky Baker's Music Dictionary (Berkeley) as well as in the All Music Guide - The Expert's Guide to the Best Cds. He has his works, cd-roms (3), audio cds (10), books (7) and papers published in England, the United States, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, Italy and Spain. Articles on his works have been published in different newspapers and magazines, like the New York Times, Le Monde, Le Parisien, O Estado de Sao Paulo and O Globo among others. He develops his compositions of contemporary music using Virtual Reality and Cyberspace technologies. He also has been curator for several institutions like the Biennial Foundation of Sao Paulo, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the ExperimentaDesign Foundation and the Belem Cultural Center in Lisbon among others. Please see http://www.asa-art.com/edmp.html

Massimo Donà was born in October 29, 1957; he graduated in philosophy with Emanuele Severino at the University of Venice, in 1981. He presently teaches at the all'Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia as well as at the l'Università Vita-Salute del San Raffaele, in Milan. He is co-founder of the magazine PARADOSSO and he curated, together with Massimo Cacciari, Giulio Giorello and Romano Gasparotti, the publication of Andrea Emo's works. He collaborates with several magazines and already published, among others, the follow books: Il "bello"… o di un accadimento (Il destino dell'opera d'arte), Helvetia, Venezia 1983, Le forme del fare (con Massimo Cacciari e Romano Gasparotti), Liguori, Napoli 1987, Sull'assoluto (Per una reinterpretazione dell'idealismo hegeliano), Einaudi, Torino 1992, Aporia del fondamento, La Città del Sole, Napoli 2000, Arte, tragedia, tecnica (con Massimo Cacciari), Raffaello Cortina Editore, Milano 2000, L'uno, i molti (Rosmini-Hegel, Un dialogo filosofico), Città Nuova, Roma 2001, Aporie platoniche. Saggio sul 'Parmenide', Città Nuova, Roma 2003. As musician, a career started in the 80s at the SOLAR BIG BAND Orchestra, directed by Giorgio Gaslini and developed with the formation of his sextet - MASSIMO DONÀ SEXTET - which had diverse collaborations with musicians from different countries. Its participation at the Festival Jazz di Roccella Ionica, in 1982, had the participation of Enrico Rava, Franco D'Andrea, Massimo Urbani, Gianni Cazzola, Maurizio Gianmarco, Gianluigi Trovesi among others. His musical activities were suspended for some years. Then, in the end of the 90s he collaborated with the formation of ethnical groups, or World Music groups, amongst them the group from Senegal TAM TAM SENE, and TANTRA, which musical proposal embraces West and East as well as the most varied types of urban music and instrumentation. Recently, he formed the MASSIMO DONÀ QUINTET with which he already launched two cds, New Rhapsody in Blue - a Tribute to New York City, in 2002; and For miles and miles, in 2003; always by Caligola Records).

William Anastasi is one of the founders of the Conceptual Art "not merely as an exponent of this kind of art but historically as one of the very inventors of the idiom itself in the 1960's "(Richard Milazzo). Citing the weight carried by the precedence of Duchamp's 'Three Standard Stoppages' and other chance derived work, he began a series of Blind Drawings in 1963, which lead to unsighted Subway Drawings in 1968, begun as an extension of his Pocket Drawings from the same period. In the late 70's he reinvestigated the Subway Drawings riding to and from daily chess games with John Cage. Sitting with a pencil in each hand and a drawing board on his lap, his elbows at an angle of 90 degrees, his shoulders away from the back rest, Anastasi was operating as a seismograph, allowing the rhythm of the moving train - its starts, stops and turns, accelerations and decelerations, to be transformed into lines on paper. This signifies not only the internalization of chance in a work but furthermore the phenomenological process:..."it is an art object that expresses the physicality of its making." (Pamela Lee) Anastasi demonstrates his concerns and reflections with the act of not seeing. In an 1990 interview about Anastasi's modus operandi vis a vis Surrealism's Automatism John Cage made a clear distinction:"It's not psychological; it's physical." Anastasi surrenders to a random process, allowing deeper or more intricate structures to surface. The results are mysterious and highly subtle drawings, exposing another order, a timeless noncausal scenario of universal physiological conditions. Since the 60s he has presenting his works world-wide in some of the most prestigious galleries and permanent museum collections. In addition to exhibitions around the United States, he has shown extensively in Europe and Great Britain, as well as in Japan and Korea. He was appointed artistic advisor for the Merce Cunningham Company in 1984. He has had two retrospective exhibitions: the first at The Levy Galleries of The Moore College of Art in Philadelphia in 1995; the second at The Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center, Copenhagen in 2001. In 1977 John Cage was the "narrator" in William Anastasi's theater piece "You Are" presented at The Clocktower in New York City. John Cage and William Anastasi played chess virtually every day for fifteen years. Since the 60s he has presenting his works all over the world in some of the most prestigious galleries and museums. Among the galleries that had made exhibitions in the last forty years there are the Dwan Gallery, in New York City; the Whiterspoon Gallery, in Greensboro; the Washington Square Gallery, in New York City; the PS1 Mus., the Hetzler and Keller Gallery in Stuttgart, Germany; the Whytney Museum; the Kunstmuseum of Dusseldorf; the Bess Culter Gallery; the Stalke Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark; the Scott Hanson Gallery; the Sandra Gering Gallery, in New York; the Krister Fahl Gallery in Stockholm; the Sorbonne University in Paris; the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia; the Pier Gallery in Scotland; the Moore Collection and Design in Philadelphia; the Anders Tomberg Gallery in Sweden; the Hubert Winter Gallery in Vienna, Austria; the Museum of Judaica in Philadelphia; the Specta Gallery in Copenhagen; the S65 Gallery in Belgium; the Gary Tatintsian Gallery in New York; the Art Agents Gallery in Hamburg, Germany; the Niels Borch Jensen Gallery in Berlin; the Nikolaj Contemporary Art Gallery in Copenhagen; the Hubert Winter Gallery in Viena, Austria; the Thomas Rehbein Gallery in Cologne, Germany. He is also represented in permanent collections of several museums in the most diverse countries, like the Neuberger Museum of New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York, Brooklyn; the Museum of Art of Philadelphia; the Museum of Art of Phoenix; the Getty Collection in Santa Monica, California; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art of New York - MOMA; the Harvard University Art Museum; the Contemporary Art Museum of Honolulu; the Modern Art Museum of Stockholm; the Whitney Museum; the Jewish Museum in New York; the Statensmuseum for Kunst in Copenhagen; the Contemporary Art Museum of Malmo in Sweden; the Guggenheim Museum of New York; the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston; the Ludwig Koln Museum of Cologne, Germany; and the Baltimore Museum of Art among others. He has also being lecturer invited by numerous institutions all over the world.

Dove Bradshaw is widely known as a pioneer, beginning in 1969, of indeterminacy in sculpture, painting, performance and film. Her sculptures, designed to change in weather, are seen in numerous outdoor museum parks and gardens in the United States and Europe. John Cage selected her along with Mary Jean Kenton and Marsha Skinner to accompany him in his 1991 Carnegie International presentation for which he scored the daily hanging of the works. She was represented in Cage's similarly scored Rolywholyover Circus, 1993-5, which consisted of his selection of Twentieth Century works traveling across the United States, and to Mito Tower, Mito, Japan. Appointed in 1984 as Artistic Advisor for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, she designed sets, costumes and lighting for many of the company's stage and television productions. She accompanied the score of Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta on Cunningham's "Fabrications" in 1987 (revived this year for the 50th Lincoln Center Anniversary Celebration of Merce Cunningham and his Company) with the design and lighting. A retrospective will be exhibited at Baruch College, City University of New York, in 2003 to coincide with a monograph publication beginning in 1969-03, with a text by Thomas McEvilley, Mark Batty Publisher, LLC, New York. John Cage in conversation with Thomas McEvilley provided the text for a publication by Sandra Gering Gallery, New York, 1969-1993, which has been republished by McEvilley in Sculpture in the Age of Doubt, Allworth Press, 1999 and will be included in this monograph. Her work is represented in the permanent collections of the major museums both here as well as in Europe. In addition to exhibitions around the United States, she has shown in Korea, Japan and Europe.

Leonello Tarabella began his musical training as jazz alto-sax player. He earned his degree in Computer Science at the University of Pisa and started his work on computer music under the direction of M° Pietro Grossi. As a researcher he coordinates the activities of the "computerART project of ISTI/CNR", National Council of Research, Pisa, and yearly teaches a computer music course at the Computer Science Faculty of Pisa University.
His research mainly concerns the design and implementation of languagues for algorithmic composition and original gestural man/machine interfaces for interactive computer music/graphics performaces. As a musician he composes and performs his own computer music with the systems realized. He has performed in many international Modern and Technology Art Festivals in Madrid, The Netherlands, Shanghai, Thessaloniki, NewYork, Barcelona, La Habana, Paris, Dublin, Venice, Rome….

After participating in several musical projects, João Castro Pinto discovers a profound interest on electronic and electroacoustic music. He performed his first sound experiences by the second half of the 90's. The main creative and artistic work of J.Castro Pinto is based on intermedia performances, sound, art and live electronics performances. João Castro Pinto's audiovisual approach reaches an experimental aesthetics' that longs to recreate environments and scenarios that are directly related with experiences connected with the richness and diversity of the landscape: "sound/visual scapes". J. C. Pinto's work is focused on non-linear narratives and perspectives through the use of digital mediums manipulations. In 1999, he won the national contest organized by the Portuguese Club of Arts and Ideas and by the State Secretary of Youth "Jovens Criadores 99" (YOUNG CREATORS 99), in the music section with an electroacoustic piece named "Impressões Sintéticas" (Synthetic Impressions). In the meanwhile, he developed and deepened interest on Philosophy as well as on multiple expressions of the experimental art: video, installations, intermedia, etc… Due to this strong interest, he won the 8th edition of the Portuguese experimental intermedia art fellowship "Bolsa Ernesto de Sousa" with "A SENSE OF FLOW", an intermedia project focused on the natural landscape of the Tejo river (Tagus river, in Portugal). This fellowship is organized and supported by the Portuguese Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Luso-American Foundation for Development and by the Experimental Intermedia Foundation of New York. He attended an intermedia trainee at the University of Iowa during February 2001 and performed "A SENSE OF FLOW" at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation of NYC, on March 16th 2001. He also was a selected Artist in March 2002 by the European community initiative "The Pépinières Européennes" in the map program (map - mobility in art process), for a 3 months artistic residency, from February to May of 2003, to develop and present the experimental intermedia art project "Cont@mination" , at the "Fournos Centre pour Les arts et Les Nouvelles Technologies", in Athens - Greece. He attends a graduation degree in Philosophy at the University of Lisboa - Faculty of Letters. Currently is the head of "Espectro" a Portuguese association to develop the Portuguese experimental arts, this association is going to organize an experimental arts festival called "Hertzoscópio" in November 2003.

Eduardo Reck Miranda is a leading research scientist and a composer of international reputation. In 1991, he received an MSc in Music Technology from the University of York, UK, and went on to the University of Edinburgh, UK, where in 1994 he obtained his PhD in Music with important contributions in the fields of musical knowledge representation, machine learning of music and software sound synthesis. In 1992 he studied computer music at ZKM (Center for Art and Media), in Karlsruhe, Germany and in 1994 he was awarded a research fellowship at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), where he developed Chaosynth, an innovative granular synthesis software that uses evolutionary computing techniques for generating complex sound spectra. In 1995 he joined the Department of Music at the University of Glasgow, where he lectured computer music for three years. There he formed a research group to conduct interdisciplinary research in the field of computer-aided musical composition systems. In 1998, Eduardo Reck Miranda moved to France, to take up a research position at Sony Computer Science Laboratory. At Sony he conducted research aimed at gaining a better understanding of the fundamental cognitive mechanisms employed in sound-based communication systems, with particular focus on the evolution of the human ability to speak and the role of our musical capacity in the development of spoken languages. Miranda authored patents in the field of speech processing and made important contributions in the fields of speech synthesis, evolutionary music and cognitive neural modeling. During this period he was appointed Visiting Professor of Interactive Media Arts at MECAD (School of Media Arts and Design) in Barcelona and Adjunct Associate Professor of Computer Science at the American University of Paris. Miranda's compositions have been broadcast and performed in prestigious concerts and festivals worldwide, including Festival Música Viva (Lisbon, 1999, 2000), Computer Music Festival in Seoul (Seoul, 1998, 1999, 2001) and International Computer Music Conference (Gothenburg 2002, Hong Kong 1996), to cite but a few. His music has won prizes and distinctions in Brazil, France and Italy. He was appointed Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2000. He is currently the head of Computer Music Research and coordinator of the Neuroscience of Music Group at the University of Plymouth, England. More information about Miranda's work can be found here: http://neuromusic.soc.music.ac.uk