you know, this is strange. to put things in a row, i mean.
i think i never did it fully, apart during altered states of some sort.
it forces you to place things along a line. maybe a bit crooked, but a line. to identify in some way what is "you".
what is when and how.
and to choose a beginning.
the beginning could be a name. xDxD, later with an added part, xDxD.vs.xDxD
the name was choosen randomly, by hitting my hand on a keyboard.
before, i was nuke (because of a freaky villain on pills of several colours who almost beat up capitan america in the comics, and who didn't succeed only because his heart blew up because of the pills themselves).
then i was madHatta, and peterjenningsBUTi'mitalian. and then maze and some other names which i used maybe only once.
then i got bored, chose the random name and stuck with it.
it all began, in a way, when i came back to italy after living for 3 years in philadelphia with my family. first year of high school. i was the only one in school with a skateboard, surrounded by paninari in their monclair jackets, timberland shoes and short-to-the-ankle levi's jeans and el-charro belts.
i was hooked on skateboarding and on the commodore c-64, then on the Amiga and then on the PC.
i made quite a lot of money when i was in school. i did ASCII/ANSI art for pirate BBSs and i got software in exchange, which i sold at school.
[ h e r e ]
[ h e r e ]
and
[ h e r e ]
is litle old me (nuke, at the time) in a 3l33t pirate group, producing ANSI artwork for the pirate BBSs of my pirate friends (and there's some more on the website, under the pirate group OPTiK) :)
i was so much into networking, i met people, we hacked phone credit cards algorithms to call abroad, we were into phreaking, we had access to a modem at the university of indiana through which we could place outbound calls by connecting to it through telnet and connect to BBSs in USA: we telneted to it by hacking through ITAPAC, itay's packet network at the time, and off we went into copper cyberspace :)
i was living in rome already at the time and i hung out with people from politicized squats. that's when i discovered music trackers and anarchy. i started using protracker and then fasttracker to produce electronic music, and spreading the tools to lots of people who lived in rome's suburban hells, and they quite enjoyed it. we even participated to a music label called "Idroscalo Records" (from the Idroscalo in Ostia, rome's beach, where they killed Pasolini), and we had an enormous concert in 1991 in which i played 2 commodore amigas in a band called Madonne Cromate (Chrome Madonnas).
with a bunch of guys and girls from a squat called spaziokamino we moved to milan, playing music at rave parties (also at the free france raves in marseille, and throughout europe). i was with this girl that has a serious problem with drugs and so i ended up in a series of troubles, after which i was kind of destroyed, and so i turned to some more "regular" stuff to save my ass.
so i went back to rome started computer engineering and things changed quite a bit. while rome's university was quite terrible, i met some really nice people that were into lots of interesting stuff in culture and technology. we "defended" our little squat inside the university and i kept on doing small jobs in computer software. at the time (it was around and after 1996) i produced quite a lot of software (i worked with silicon graphics, with ibm, with several telcos, and with the starting wireless markets, in italy, czech republic, ireland, belgium, netherlands) and i mostly played electronic music during all of my free time (basically, every place i went to for work, i tried to find rave parties to play in ).
this is when (around 2000) i started to experiment in adding "things" to the way in which i made music, connecting printers, electronic devices and appliances.
as i finished the university in 2000, i started working mainly in robotics and wireless and mobile technologies, making games, entertainment systems and research, in italy, denmark, brasil, malaysia, japan.
then love came back again, and i headed back to rome.
in rome i created AOS: art is open source.
it was, basically, a 3 months continuous festival held at the Linux Club, a now-closed venue based on open-source and digital rights for everything: from the drinks at the bar to the music played by the djs.
i invited all of italy's electronic, digital and netowrk related art scene to this venue, located in a neighborhood that was filled with house music clubs and cocaine. while i worked with loads of fantastic people, it was a financial nightmare, as all this stuff, at the time in italy/rome, was regarded only as "strange" and "weird". yet we managed to produce these 3 continuous months of concerts, DJ/VJing, installations, workshops, meetings, mostly funding it with our own money.
and it was fantastic.
but then i was tired and love ended, so i was on the move again :)
i started touring-for-jobs again, and i started to work on other projects i was interested in.
what i did was, basically, earn some money during the day and deveop my projects at night, living on 3 hours sleep for about a year.
at the time (from 2004 onward) i was really interested in networking, robotics and social mutation. during the day i worked on projects that were about entertainment on technological platforms and/or institutional (mostly geographical systems and security), on systems that had deep impact on how people perceived technology and on how it shaped their lives.
so i started approaching technology in a deeply political way. political yet ironic, as i always had the perception that we were all on a fast downhill race in the direction of an enormous fall.. so, basically, i said "why not smile a bit, then?"
i first worked on performance, then on web projects, then it came up to me, by studying and practicing, that what i wanted to research on were the bridges that the digital technologies were creating from our physical reality to immaterial ones, changing everything. changing production, identity, sexuality, culture, law, theories, relationships, the way in which you go shopping, the way in which you fall in love, the way in which you live in a dictatorship, the way in which you probabily find yourself in a form of dictatorship even if you can't make it out just exactly where/what/how it is.
when i did things i loved to collaborate.
what i did was to play the role of the enzyme.
take some concept, implement it in some form of technology and throw it in the face of someone i felt comfortable with, or that i respectd, or that i loved, and see what they would come up with. then start interacting/iterating through to the final "thing" we produced.
I could list dozens of times this happened. I'll just list some :)
i happened to work with an italian/venezuelan painter Bruno Antonio Menei Hurtado that was deeply involved in a series of works involving spirituality, mysticism and esotherism, and on the research on iconologies (cultural, religious, popular, pop...). what i did was to take everything i learned on artificial life, digital ecosystems, robotics, games and networks, and develop it to create entities of some kind, then creating narratives on top of them. we created a digital sabba, another performance in which a dancer's body was connected to the network interface so that users could control her body stimulations, a techno-pop band composed by software automas, and loads of things like that, performing all around italy.
then i worked a lot with italian artist Franca Formenti. she was doing the biodoll project at the time: a cloned prostitute transforming network interactions into sexual energies. she teamed up with lots of people and, among them, with Derrick de Kerckhove.
So, practically, the biodoll had sex with de Kerckhove by interacting with him on the network. i thought that it would only be fair if they had a child. so Angel_F was born, a child artificial intelligence learning how to speak by harvesting text from all over the web, as a form of spider or spyware. this was an incredible thing to do, as it was a true gateway to all of my recent work. Franca was an incredible person to work with. she was so much in synch with the possibilities offered by hacking philosophies and practices that she was totally open with me, and she let me completely hack her performance as a virus. it has been an incredible experience.
then, lately, something magic happened. i met penelope.di.pixel one evening at a friend's house. that evening we disagreed on just about everything. she left for brasil a few days later, off to a project on digital ecosystems. when she came back i kidnapped her, and she still lives with me :)
penelope.di.pixel used to work with governments on digital rights policies, digital divides, open source and knowledge sharing. she used to work for the italian senate. when we met she was in a deep state of delusion. none of the things governments did were going anywhere, used barely (if you were lucky) as tools for electoral campaigns, to gain consensus and money. when we met i was totally critic to her approach, promoting the absence of interactions with institutions and governments which, for me, represented the corpses of something that was already dead and that just didn't want to accept it, trying to force on us mechanisms that had no link with reality, based on forms of soft dictatorships layered atop media control, economic power, energetical policies, the control of education , old business models, an unjust form of society, and loads of other things.
with penelope.di.pixel, after i kidnapped her, we restructured many of our own past projects, creating a wonderful and significative convergence. she introduced me to some implementations of the concepts of digital ecosystems that were politically more formal, and to the love for narratives. i introduced her to the dynamics of hacking, to viral practices, to the concepts of reverse-engineering things (conceptually and technically) and to a generally more critical approach to society. she lost some of her "friends", i lost some of my spare time to argue with her :) but, since then, we have been creating a hybrid artistic/political/etnographic/technological/architectural approach to things (inside and outside of projects) that i feel is really significative.
we started out with Angel_f, turned into a research on identity and on the ways in which technology could be used to promote newer, significant models for society, economy, philosophy and on the personal approaches to our lives and to ecology. Angel_f was turned into a true digital identity, producing a freepress, chocolates with an open source recipe, a USB pendrive containing the "presence" software that let you squat your ISP's connection moving you into a meshed network, actually disappearing from the "regular" internet and accessing an independent parallel internet. Angel_F internationally attended conferences as a speaker. It even held a workshop on digital rights at the Internet Governance Forum in Rio de Janeiro in front of an amazed audience, and to defend its rights as a digital being, after having been the star of an episode of censorship.
Then the research on identity continued with Dead on Second Life in which artificial intelligences bring back to life Karl Marx, Coco Chanel and Franz Kafka, as autonomous avatars strolling through SL and interacting with people using text generated by linguistically processing the texts of these famous persons.
then we moved on to some more theorical and performative actions, such as the NeRVi (Neo Realismo Virtuale) in which we promote forms of design and narratives that access the material-immaterial domains of our lives, exposing the multivdual selves which we have become, living through modified and multiple sexualities, identities, perceptions, emotions. A reality in which production has changed, transforming products into services and communication, accessing emotional, immaterial domains.
In between all these main steps there are hundreds of things: invasions of conferences, commercials, architectural installations, electronic music, robots falling in love, pornographic sites for automas, artificial life, art festival hacks.. loads of things....
you can find practically all of the rest in much deeper detail on
[ http://www.artisopensource.net ]
byebye!
xDxD.vs.xDxD