This is the title of an exhibition set up in Milan, at the Palazzo della Ragione, offering a vision on prospects opened by developing new technologies and by the oncoming of new media in the publishing business.

According to Gianfranco Bettetini, curator of the exhibition, the show has "basically conceptual features", and wants to promote "historical problems and situations, tackling in a more critical manner the relationship with information tools".

Three evolutionary lines mark the passage 'from papers to portals' : the transformation of production processes, the evolution of news backing, changes in the way information is consumed . Strictly linked to such paths, the exhibition highlights the fundamental passage moments in the evolution of information's production -product-consumption cycle: from the materiality of the newspaper to the virtuality of the net, from the specificity of the single communicative instruments to media convergence, from monodirectionality of destination to interactivity of subjects involved.

As does the web, the exhibition does not impose fixed and predetermined paths: each user is free to circulate inside a labyrinthine structure, creating their own personal knowledge path.

An exhibition-metaphore born to generate a critical awareness, more than a historical reconstruction of publishing in the Milanese capital. An 'itinerarium mentis' to understand how tools, roles, times and places of the creation and fruition of news change.

Technology applied to communication creates new functions and new perspectives: the knowledge told is no longer a concrete papery object, which is born and dies every day, and is the same to everyone; it becomes a virtual medium, available anywhere, which travels at the speed of light, and which is at the same time a space for continuous keeping up to date, and an archive.

With the new technologies language changes too: there are no longer the individual media with their own 'grammatical rules' (radio, TV, cinema), but a unique medium where the specificity of the single means of information converge.

And the ancient 'dumb receiver', the reader, becomes an active beneficiary, interacts with the net, automatically generating his own information process. The user participates in the construction process of knowledge, moving in the labyrinth of the web according to unique and personal cognitive processes.

One problem, however, remains unresolved: how will the new 'insipiens' find his reckoning in the labyrinth of dis-organic web information? The old beneficiary, used to referring to preselected and chosen news; is he ready for information "free will"?

Where: Palazzo della Ragione (Piazza Mercanti) Milano
Period: from 17th May to 28 October 2001
Opening times: every day (except for Monday), from 9:30 am to 06:00 pm
Information: Civiche Raccolte Storiche 02/76006245 - 02/88464170 - E-mail: risorgi@energy.it

Photos: Uliano Lucas "Arrivo emigrante", Milano Piazza Duca D'Aosta, 1968 Archivio Storico del Corriere della Sera, "Il lavoro di redazione"