www.tinobagdad.com "The Nights of Tino from Bagdad" is a new transmedia work by ConiglioViola. It is an experimental video art project, developed in Augmented Reality, which defines a new public art format. An open work, spreading across the city and which can be enjoyed not in one single place, but rather, invites the viewer on a tour across 30 outdoor locations in Turin, on a quest to assemble and combine the fragments of this poetic tale. The work is freely based on a novel, Die Nächte der Tino von Bagdad (The nights of Tino from Bagdad) by the German expressionist poetess Else Lasker-Schüler. A modernist Thousand and One Nights, narrating the story of Tino, a Bagdad princess and poetess, who gives up her life to render poetry immortal. This text makes use of a hermetic style and non-linear structure to poetically face quite relevant issues: the condition and role of women, gender identity, fascination and fear of the exotic, the role art and poetry play in society. ConiglioViola has taken apart the storyline to create 31 plates engraved on copper, each portraying an episode from the princess’s story. On May 15, during the XXVIII International Book Fair, the first 12 of the 31 posters making up the scattered installation in Augmented Reality have appeared at 12 different bus stops. Each poster recreates one of the engravings by the artists in large format. By using the map found on this website, the wandering spectator is invited to explore the city in search of these posters, depicting different landscapes seen through an Oriental window. By using TINO, the free App made specifically for this project by TIM, to frame these posters, each episode of the video work will come alive on mobile phone displays, directly overlapping the city’s architecture. In order to assemble Tino’s story, the wandering spectator must cross those places in Turin where the posters are found, unite them in any order, and thus create as many stories as there are itineraries. At the end of this tour anyone can rewrite the plot on the project’s web site, thus becoming a player and co-author and giving shape to a literary process theorized by Combinatory Literature and here transposed to real space, thanks to a significant use of new technologies. Augmented Reality installation This widespread exhibition will gradually continue to enrich itself with new works until late November, in concomitance with the main events related to the languages this project touches upon: literature, architecture, new media, visual art, and film. The posters will gradually appear alongside Turin’s public transportation stops, until they are 30 in all. Instead, the 31st will be unveiled at a secret location, in the fall. In order to define this “format” – able to compose a syncopated story over time and space and conceived, on the one hand to reconsider the city as a hypertext and on the other to use technologies to make real “that which literature from this past century already seemed to forerun and foretell” – the artists from ConiglioViola have coined the term “widespread film”. The artists’ intent is to engage the viewer in a recherche with the city as a backdrop. It aims to reconstruct its meaning or narration: a model the artists dream about replicating and adapting new literary texts and new urban contexts.

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