maurizio.droli@uniud.it

This was the issue explored by our (SISAD) study discussed at the 1th IPSAPA/ISPALEM International Scientific Conference "Paradise Lost of landscape-cultural mosaic. Attraction, Harmony, Atarassia" Venice (Italy) July, 6-7, 2017, Badoer Palace. Thanks to all the participants supplying such valuable inputs, the idea and the stimuli.

2017 IPSAPA-ISPALEM CONFERENCE CALL FOR PAPER

Since 2005 the IPSAPA conference focuses on the successful keyword "landscape-cultural mosaic." Sometimes it prevailed realism, sometimes economics, sometimes evolutionary dynamics, sometimes the pursuit of excellence. This year will confirm the return to the domain of imagination and fascination of discovery, taking the line of the conferences of 2009 and 2010, named respectively "The backstage of the landscape-cultural mosaic . Invisible, Inaccessible, Inexistent" and "Wonderland in the landscape-cultural mosaic. Idea, Image, Illusion" . The fantastic invention was present in part in the 2013 conference entitled "Utopias and dystopias in the landscape-cultural mosaic. Visions, Values, Vulnerability". The unstructured reality was the subject of the last conference (2016) entitled "Erratic of the landscape-cultural mosaic. Emotion, Energy, Experience "

This year we were inspired by a profound and argumentative book due to Stefano Zecchi, entitled "Paradise of the West: our decadence and the seduction of the night". We ask the participants to join together the dreamy fantasy to the conscious rediscovery of the values ​​of our ancient culture, taking examples where the free creation is able to overcome the heavy constraints of formalism, legal even before design.

The title of the book by Zecchi peremptorily reminds John Milton’s poem from which we took our title. One of the highlights is precisely Satan’s command "Awake, arise, or be forever fall’n", which can sum up the essence of his book.

This conference invites to exemplify and to discuss cases where the innovative solution came from breaking the traditional mold or even neo-traditional uncritical imitation of novelty. We all know the brilliant example of the Beaubourg (Centre G. Pompidou) by Renzo Piano of the Seventies, but it is not compulsive that we should only look at today, because even the past has presented moments of enthusiastic creativity, just think of Brunelleschi. The novelty of these last hundred / hundred and fifty years is the accumulation of technology, which, according to some authors, tends to sterilize the creative ability, even if carpets his works with a spectacular scenery, not linked otherwise to any context so that therefore must be considered as delocated. For the modernists this can be good, for others, substantially historicist and even romantic, it is leading to the "night in which all cats are gray". However, one can not but bow before Michelucci with his station of Santa Maria Novella and his Church of St. John the Baptist on the Autostrada del Sole, which enhance Florence as if they were its new doors.

Deep down lurks the eternal debate between knowledge and skill, knowledge that you can teach in an analytical and systematic way and skill, that can be learnt only stealing it from someone who is already past through, trying to imitate his example. But do not forget that in a lucid page of his autobiography (pag.356) the founder of artificial intelligence, Nobel laureate Herbert Simon, says that the construction of expert systems obliges us to understand and also to codify what was previously considered a creative asset linked to the experience, so that even the synthesis can become the object of teaching as already it has always been for the analysis.

It is always the eternal debate between scientism and humanism, and even this meeting should bring voices from both sides, overcoming the cultural Manichaeism from which perhaps is suffering even Zecchi’s book. It is no coincidence that in our interpretation we wanted to challenge it with the verse of Milton's Paradise Lost that invites you to use all the tools of reason and science to regain Paradise.

But then the spark of creativity must always be present, otherwise there is the risk of making an honest but trivial copy of what already exists or that anyhow is a trivial result of the rules. This is what can be summed up in the concept of “state of art”. Participants at the conference will present real or potential examples and here it becomes essential their contribution to tell us where creation arose, or to explain why one cannot find amy original contribution. This meeting / clash between knowledge and skill characterizes all progress both scientific and artistic and cultural.

It would be nice that in every summary a moment of reflection were reserved on this point. essential for the interpretation of the value of the works described (or planned). Even the example of a not yet realized project or a theory not yet defined may fall in the interest of the conference, especially if it underlines points still under discussion.