Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

Audinate’s DANTE (Digital Audio Network Through Ethernet)

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“While Australia-based Audinate’s Dante is one of several competing protocols for communicating multiple audio channels over standard Ethernet and IP networks, it has led the industry in media attention, awards and licensing agreements with an impressive list of partners. With applications in live sound, recording and conferencing, Shure jumped on board in 2012 and joined the ranks of Allen & Heath, Yamaha, and many, many others. Dante represented an opportunity to bring a high performance plug-and-play experience to users of Shure’s ULX-D digital wireless system, SCM820 Automatic Mixer and Microflex Wireless.

“In this post, we’ll address a few of the basics, so that the next time Dante comes up in conversation, you won’t be thinking of the Middle Ages poet who wrote the Divine Comedy [. . .].”   –Gino Sigismondi (Senior Manager, Shure Systems Support), “What You Need To Know About Dante,” shure.com

Contributed by Pete Maiers

Australian Painter Garry Shead Finds Divine Inspiration in Dante

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“Gregorian chants play softly and a curl of incense drifts high into the air at Garry Shead’s studio in Bundeena on the coast of the Royal National Park.

“For almost five months, Shead, one of Australia’s best-known figurative painters, has been grappling with a new series based on Dante Alighieri’s poem, The Divine Comedy. Invoking the spirit of the 700-year-old poet has been “terribly difficult”. He grimaces as he recalls stepping up to the blank canvas every morning, regardless of whether he felt like it or not.” […]    –Ali Gripper, The Sydney Morning Herald, September 12, 2014

Check out Garry Shead’s online art gallery here.

 

Alfredo Jaar, “The Divine Comedy” (2019)

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“A new tunnel, named Siloam, is an AUD$27M (£15m) underground extension to David Walsh’s privately owned MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) in Hobart, Tasmania. The complex of chambers, gallery spaces and connecting tunnels of Siloam feature works by Ai Weiwei, Oliver Beer and Christopher Townend but the centrepiece is a new commission by Alfredo Jaar.

Jaar’s immersive installation The Divine Comedy (2019), is a three-room installation based on Dante’s The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso. Visitors enter—ten at a time—into three pavilions interpreting each of the realms of the 14th-century epic poem. They will encounter fire and flood in Inferno; hover between life and death with a film by the US artist Joan Jonas in Purgatorio; and, finally, simply exist in the sensory void of Paradiso.”    –Tim Stone, The Art Newspaper, July 18, 2019

Australian Metal Band, Abandon All Hope

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abandon-all-hope-band-2005Abandon All Hope is a metal band out of Adelaide, Australia that was formed in 2005. The band had 5 members – Micah Leinonen as vocals, Jarrod Kennett on bass guitar, Chris Whitbread on drums, and Jake Battista and Shaan Kelly on guitars. The Metal Archives list the band’s lyrical themes as “Hate, Anger, Life, [and] Relationships.” The band split up in 2013.

Their discography consisted of 3 albums – Where Life and Death Meet (2007), A Havoc Command (2010), and Prowler (2011).

Fiona Hall’s Divine Comedy Polaroids (1988)

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Inferno-V-Lustful-Fiona-Hall-Polaroid-Photograph
Artist : Fiona Hall (Australia, b.1953)
Title : Inferno, canto V: The circle of the lustful (1988)
Medium Description: Polaroid photograph

“This photograph from the late 1980s is from a series of twelve Polaroid photographs relating directly to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Each work is a carefully constructed scene illustrating a particular canto. Technically the artist has made the most of the cumbersome 20 x 40 inch Polaroid camera, using it to render exquisite detail and to capture subtle colour. She cuts and moulds aluminium soft-drink cans to form menacing vegetation, human figures, creatures from beyond the grave, on the journey through Hell and Purgatory to Paradise. Hall photographs them amongst found objects set against backgrounds which she has painted.” —Art Gallery of New South Wales website

View the whole collection of photographs at the Art Galley of New South Wales site.

How to Cite

Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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