An emotional social network.
The visualization shown on FakePress’s homepage represents the beginning phase of a design process. It uses Plutchik’s classification and uses realtime search engines to collect emotional information from social networks. It then represents it as an expressive visualization. We are going to turn it into a wearable device.
“Vuoi mangiare? Dimmi una storia.” Squatting Supermarkets: cortocircuito
REFF, RomaEuropaFakeFactory, has been interviewed in Rome during Joy Ito’s lectio magistralis held at the italian parlament, in an event rganized by Capitale Digitale, a program on digital cultures, economics, creativity and innovation created by Telecom Italia.
Art is Open Source interviews Dino Borri from Eataly Turin about the possible uses of Augmented Reality and other technologies to inform consumers and enact critical practices.
Angel_F is a young artificial intelligence son of Derrick de Kerckhove and the Biodoll. It ws born from a digitally sexual accident when the Biodoll seduced prof. Derrick de Kerckhove :)Angel_F and its book have been presented at Generative Arts Congress 2009, to a delighted audience. This is the presentation that was used in that occasion.
design / digital culture / events / features / interviews / people / performance / texts
December 12, 2009 0Just published: “Angel_F. Diario di una intelligenza artificiale“, telling the story of the first year of life of Angel_F.
The book features theorical contributions by Derrick de Kerckhove, Massimo Canevacci, Antonio Caronia, Carlo Formenti and Luigi Pagliarini,with extensive interviews in which each one of them expresses his personal point of view on the themes emerging with the existence of Angel_F, a little digital being.
Squatting Supermarkets again in Mondovì with ToShare.
We will be in Mondovì from Wednesday, 9th December to Sunday, 13th December, together with ToShare, tha Associazione Culturale Marcovaldo and the Town of Mondovì presenting Squatting Supermarkets at the – SMIR – Multimedia Spaces for Innovation and Research – as part of the European Territorial Co-operation programme Alcotra 2007-2013.
Conference Biofeedback is a USB gadget that allows conference lecturers to receive physical stimulations and feedback coming from the audience.
Squatting Supermarkets was presented at AHAcktitude 2009. Here are the slides (they’re mostly pictures of the installation/software/performance) and some videos
AOS participated to AHAcktitude 2009 in Milan, and it was a great experience. We presented Bluetooth Wars, a workshop in which the people were able to build their very own Bluetooth media server. This has many uses, ranging from proximity advertising to political uses in demonstrations or events. Here below the links to the presentation slides and to the video of the workshop.
Art is Open Source and FakePress just released Zones, a simple harmonic granular synthesizer for the iPhone. Create relaxing soundscapes and ephemeral melodies by creating grains with your fingers. Grains interact with each other establishing a musical force field. Best heard in headphones.
This year’s Consciousness Reframed conference has just finished, and we just returned home for a little while.
A sunny Munich hosted the tenth edition of the Planetary Collegium’s annual conference themed “Experiencing Design, Behaving Media”.
We presented two FakePress projects: Conference Biofeedback and Ubiquitous Anthropology.
AHAcktitude sarà una tre giorni di attività e di attivismo, di allegria e di condivisione, di studio e di divertimento. Tecnologia, musica, internet, letteratura, telecomunicazioni, marketing, social network: tutto sarà declinato all’insegna dell’open source e della messa in comune.
Art is Open Source is going at Consciousness Reframed X conference organized by the Planetary Collegium in November 2009 at the Macromedia University of Applied Sciences in Munich. We’ll be there from November 19th to 21st.
We will present the Ubiquitous Anthropology project with FakePress. We will also present and use our little new project: Conference BioFeedback.
design / digital culture / events / features / installation / people / performance
November 13, 2009 6Just recovering from the enormous effort put in setting up, performing and taking down the Squatting Supermarkets.
Several thousands visitors, hundreds of customized food cans, hundreds of QRCodes printed to link products’ stories, dozens of hours of live Shoptivist TV, 3 workshops, a ShopDropping action in the city centre of Turin, an augmented reality tour at Eataly (a big shopping centre focused on organic foods), hundreds of questions and the relative answers.
These are the numbers. Read on for the details…
digital culture / events / features / installation / interviews / people / performance
November 2, 2009 0Squatting Supermarkets is all installed and it is about to start.
There will be a continuous interaction with the people at the Share Festival, both friends and visitors, and all the technical and curatorial crew.
It will be part documentary, part interviews, part performance, and it will take the shape of a web TV called Shoptivism
Squatting Supermarkets occupies and reinterprets the spaces and times of commerce, to enact critical practices and poetical reflections, superimposing a free and accessible digital space on ordinary reality. Here below you will find the description of the conceptual elements of the project, and teh details for its participation to the Piemonte Share Festival. To turn prctices and technologies into an open framework to create augmented reality spaces, connecting bodies and information, implementing accessible, relational and natural interaction schemes.
Squatting supermarkets occupa e reinterpreta gli spazi e i tempi del commercio, per attuare pratiche critiche e riflessioni poetiche, sovrapponendo alla realtà ordinaria uno spazio digitale libero ed accessibile.
Qui di seguito una esposizione della parte teorica del progetto, e un appuntamento per il Piemonte Share Festival.
Mettere a sistema pratiche e tecnologie, per creare un framework aperto per creare spazi di realtà aumentata, collegando corpi e informazioni e per realizzare forme di interattività tecnologica accessibili e naturali.
AOS wil be at the AHACKTITUDE meeting in Milan, on November 27-28-29 in Milan.
We will present a really simple, but effective, project, called Bluetooth Wars
Angel_F, Autonomous Non Generative, E-volitive Life_Form, Angel_F is the son of the Biodoll and of Derrick de Kerckhove. It is an Artificial Intelligence, learning how to speak through the texts of internet users.
we just joined in with Frontiere Digitali supporting a coordinated action in favor of Net Neutrality. Lots of things are going on and many of them are just plain ugly. Check out the press release below (sorry, it’s in Italian, but a quick Google translate will fix it nice enough) and feel free to join in the action HERE
REFF, RomaEuropaFAKEFactory was featured in an article on Wired Italia, October 2009 issue
RomaEuropa WebFactory 2009/2010 edition is actually indistinguishable from last year’s RomaEuropa FakeFactory!
:)
We will be at the DULP 2009 meeting at the Tor Vergata University on September 14th and 15th, 2009, to present FakePress and, specifically Ubiquitous Anthropology (presented by Luca Simeone) and Saperi p2p (presented by Salvatore Iaconesi)
The new ToShare website is up! You can check it out here on http://www.toshare.it
The Piemonte Share Festival is starting up as well, and we’ll join in the party, dealing with Squatting Supermarkets.
The new issue of Disegno Industriale is out, focused on Interaction Design.
You can check it out here. There’s also an article I wrote about John Maeda and the great influence he had on creativity through computing.
Thanks to Rolf van Gelder of CAGE we have a new improved version of the Processing library to handle QRCodes we released a while ago
A big event has been organized today in Rome’s Piazza Navona where hudreds of bloggers, journalists, politicians, intellectuals and other people of any shape and sizes gathered to protest. Among these was Derrick de Kerckhove, who met his little digital child, Angel_F.
delicious poetry grabs internet’s faourite links in realtime and uses their contents to visually build a chaotic poem. An everchanging complex composition built on people’s wishes, desires, tastes and emotions.
Art is Open Source will be at the Feedback Festival from 25th to 28th of June 2009, in San Casciano, near Florence.
We will present our Voyeur Software Automas.
More info on the festival below.
The world is not built out of a single point of view, or out of a single voice. It is the result of a continuous interaction among different people, places, objects, architectures, information.
Ubiquitous publishing and Ubiquitous Anthropology. The next-step in publishing practices and platforms, united with a research on the possibilities offered by location based technologies and by novel approaches to knowledge dissemination. We presented our research at Frontiers of Interaction V in Rome (June 2009), together with the first two applications and an open call.
Frontiers of Interaction is probably one of the most interesting events about interaction design in Italy. We’ve been there to present FakePress, our next-step publishing house, with two “ubiquitous” projects: iSee, interstitial narratives for shopping centers, and Ubiquitous Anthropology, location based technologies for ethnographic research.
We’re just back from the intense 4 days of the Live Performers Meeting 2009 where REFF (RomaEuropaFAKEFactory) held its new showcase.
REFF is back again!
REFF @ LPM 2009
on May 28th 2009 (Digital Freedoms Day)
and on 28th-31st May 2009 (exhibitions, showcase, workshops)
REFF.erence
Mar. 20th, Italian Senate – Senato
REFF, RomaEuropaFAKEFactory, was presented at the Italian senate through an intense series of panels dealing with art/culture/creativity in the contemporary era, with the issues of cultural politics from the points of view of institutions and cultural operators, with the possibility for the enactment of innovative business and legal models [...]
The international competition RomaEuropaFAKEFactory re-lauches in Rome on March 20th and 21st with two dense days dedicated to the theme “Freedom to Remix”: at the Italian Senate, at the Libreria Flexi and at the Neo Club, with a triple event crossing the borders between different spaces and contexts of the metropolis, from institutional ones to the night clubbing scene of via Libetta.
“I am Orson Welles.
I never really wanted to join Roma Europa Web Factory.
I understand the beauty and significance of a fake.
As for my style, for my vision of the cinema, editing is not simply one aspect; it’s the aspect.
Fake is as old as the Eden tree.
Today I believe that man cannot escape his destiny to create whatever it is we make:
jazz, a wooden spoon, or graffiti on the wall.
All of these are expressions of man’s creativity, proof that man has not yet been destroyed by technology.
But are we making things for the people of our epoch or repeating what has been done before?
And finally, is the question itself important?
We must ask ourselves that.
The most important thing is always to doubt the importance of the question.
I am Orson Welles.
I never really wanted to join Roma Europa Web Factory.”
Say What? REFF RomaEuropaFAKEFactory at the Italian Senate?
Andy Warhol – rejected from the RomaEuropaWebFactory Prize
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfm-ATAsPug
—–
http://www.romaeuropa.org
“I am Andy Warhol.
I could not participate to RomaEuropaWebFactory.
A fake, a fake, what is a fake, anyway?
Nothing is real, the only real things are the ones
that you can reproduce, and make millions of them.
Take a thing everybody knows, change it a bit, and claim it as yours.
This is [...]
Investigating ruptures in the art political grid
http://www.romaeuropa.org
“I am William Burroughs.
I could not participate to RomaEuropaWebFactory.
Damn those bloody suckers couldn’t tell art if it hit them in the forehead.
Deep shadows, close down over culture when culture is not able to catch up with the world it lives in.
I could not participate to RomaEuropaWebFactory.
I could not participate because I am an old man, [...]
Just back from Turin where we joined our friends of the Share Festival in a wonderful s.valentine party.
We presented “Loving the Crisis” an nstallation in which the characters of “Les Amants” by Magritte interpret the global flows of the discussion of the international crisis with their desire to kiss each other.
a full report can be [...]
And yet another update on the Interviewing the Crisis project.
This time it’s the turn for Andreas Jacobs of Nictoglobe. He is turning out to be quite an interesting person to collaborate with. We just had the chance to get to know each other by collaborating on a series of things, and he is a marvelous [...]
Here we go with another update from the Interviewing the Crisis project.
This time it’s Carlo Infante (Performing Media) talking about the scenarios of the possible futures from his point of view, deeply involved in innovation and a socially sensible view on technology. Arts and evolution, in a truly evolved perspective.
Read the interview
Interviewing the Crisis: Carlo [...]
Just back from Turin, I just had the chance to keep up with the Interviewing the Crisis project
We already started publishing the second round of interviews, starting with Carlo Infante, Andreas Jacobs and Warbear.
As usual, the interviews are first published on ArtsBlog and then translated and collected on the project’s website.
The first one we are [...]
Yesterday we attended the conference “Cultura digitale e le politiche dell’innovazione” (Digital Culture and innovation policies) organized by our friend lawyer Guido Scorza in his role of president of the Institute fo Innovation Policies (Istituto per le Politiche dell’Innovazione).
We were invited to discuss DegradArte, the art movement we created when the S1861 law was approved [...]
We finally managed to get the next two interviews of the series “Interviewing the Crisis” ready in both English and Italian.
The next two on the lineup are Marc Garrett and Simona Lodi
Their points of view are quite interesting.
I got to know (digitally, up to now) Marc by reading and writing on the NetBehaviour mailing list. [...]
The new issue (#13) of Hertz Journal is out and you can find the evolution of the “We are not alone” article which we published on Digicult a while back.
We added some new evolution on Angel_F’s performances and a deeper analisys on the research path that we are currently following.
You can read Hertz journal online:
Hertz [...]
A series of articles hosted on artsblog.it in which we analyze some of the issues of the rising financial crisis through a sequence of reports and interviews.
The focus is on art: the crisis’ impact on art and, specifically, on new media art disciplines, organizations, artists.
O is a bluetooth gadget with an emotional design approach. squeeze this soft gadget and make your friends O vibrate and flash with lights anywhere in the world
Hello there!
an update on our little artificial kid, Angel_F. Our young AI is continuing its life among people, shifting its digital attention from the research on innovative business models to the experiments on contemporary forms of identity in this post-industrial world.
The performance is ongoing, and you all will have a couple of surprises coming up [...]
just a quick update, ad the wonderful organizers of the Milano in Digitale event just sent me the official pictures. Which, of course, are way better than mine, as I’m a lousy photographer.
You get to see more of the OneAvatar performance. If you want to read more about the OneAvatar project read here.
by the way, [...]
We took OneAvatar at Milano in Digitale.
The third edition of the Milano in Digitale competition was held at the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan, an industrial complex restored by Milan’s public administration to host artistic and cultural projects. Organized by the Fondazione D’Ars Oscar Signorini onlus, it is a competition created to investigate the evolution [...]
while in Mexico we did quite a few things.
possibly the most difficult one was the creation of an architectural installation called rel:attiva presenza.
the installation constituted a practical example of the theories we exposed at this congress and it was created in the beautiful cloister of the Italian Cultural Institute in Mexico City, in the colonia [...]
just back from Mexico where me and penelope.di.pixel performed quite a few activities: a congress on the revitalization of the historical centers, a panel on virtual, participative and interactive architectures and on innovation, and an installation performance called rel:attiva presenza.
The Seventh International Meeting on the Revitalization of the Historical Centers (27-28-29th of October 2008) was [...]
My dear friend Arturo di Corinto has decided to make me completely blush by making an article about some of the things I do. :)
You can read about it here
among the works described in the article are the Whitehouse and del.icio.us poetry
a visual reportage from the “Freedom not Fear” event in Rome.
here is a report on ArtsBlog
here is the story on NeRVi
NoemaLabs published some info
here are the pictures:
Angel_F and SuperAvatar are scared.
The lives of the young artificial intelligence and of the avatar who escaped from virtual worlds have been endangered more than once by the control, that is constantly perpetrated on people’s information, habits and identities.
Forms of surveillance that are progressively and obsessively expanding through continuous control of our lives (and not [...]
We are just back from the AHACamping, the first meeting of the AHA mailing list.
The event was took place at the SALE Docks and it featured talks and performances on art, hacking, activism and critical theories on technology and on the ways in which they are transforming our lives in the contemporary era.
Here are some [...]
Here below you can find the text that we presented at (re)Actor3 and HCI2008 explaining the theories and concept of the installation and of DegradArte.
ABSTRACT
Degradazione per Sovrapposizione di Corpi (DpSdC) investigates on interaction mechanisms created using low cost DIY technologies, aiming at the creation of emotional environments that can be used to break the users’ [...]
digital culture / events / installation / interviews / people / performance / texts / video
September 22, 2008 2Just back from Liverpool where we attended the (re)Actor3 and HCI2008 events presenting Degradazione per Sovrapposizione di Corpi.
check out how it went with full video coverage here:
> report from Liverpool
connect to the events at
> (re)Actor3
> HCI2008
OneAvatar connects your body to your Avatar in virtual worlds.
You and your Avatar will be finally one, sharing the same experiences even at physical level.
You get hurt, you Avatar gets hurt.
Your Avatar dies, you die.
Connect to your avatar and watch out for yourself at
> at NeRVi website
> videos on Youtube
also spotted at:
> Twitter
> Art Feed
> [...]
The Planetary Collegium presented this conference titled “Being Syncretic”. Researchers and artists from all over the world converged in Vienna to present the state of the art of research on technologies as they access reality in integrated ways.
We presented our research on identity and on the evolution of the body in a technologically ecosystemic perspective.
check [...]
my little hacks and pranks page has been featured in JODI’s wonderful webcra.sh parade across the streets of Holland.
JODI’s webcra.sh in which websites become street banners for a joyful(?) parade and we get to eat del.icio.us bookmarks.
A wonderful meal done by cooking del.icio.us bookmarks and e-books followed.
make your website banner and stroll along the streets [...]
I have been appointed “Cultore della Materia” at the Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”.
I will be holding lessons on Digital Arts and Cultures at the faculty of Communication Sciences.
> website
Degradazione per Sovrapposizione di Corpi [DpSC] is an installation in which simple DIY technologies are used to create an interactive floor on which visitors use a broom to sweep their way through 300 years of Art History, creating beautiful cut-up paintings.
Created for the DegradArte event held at LPM2008 in Rome.
more info here:
>> DsPdC website
>> DegradArte
>> [...]
2 part article on DigiCult Magazine, written together with my beloved mademoiselle
penelope.di.pixel
We speak about identity, body, artificial intelligence, avatars, cyborgs, and digital ecosystems.
It’s the first article in which we spoke about NeoRealismo Virtuale [NeRVi]
feel a bit less alone by reading our article at DigiCult magazine:
> Part 1
> Part 2
Holy Fire was an exhibition held at the IMAL, in Brussels, exposing a series of artworks coming from the net art pioneers of the net.art and of the digital arts from the times running from the 90s to now.
A main focus was put on the collectability of such artworks, as the organizers were conducting their [...]
Art is Open Source and NeRVi present Angel_F project in Mexico City at the Computer Art Congress 2.
The international meeting researches on the evolution of digital practices as they affect arts and society.
I presented there the Angel_F project, together with penelope.di.pixel.
check out the informations about CAC2 at
> CAC2 website
> Laboratoire Paragraphe
> Tecnológico de Monterrey
> Europia
.
We gave out a presentation at the conference organized by the University of Rome “La Sapienza” and Co.Pi.Da.
We presented some alternative business models based on a freepress publication created for the Angel_F and biodoll projects, and the scenario for a research laboratory which we are trying to fund: reverse engineering consumer electronics, both conceptually and [...]
Centro di Osservazione sulla Produzione Immateriale e il Diritto d’Autore at the Communication Sciences faculty of the Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”
information here:
> website
> presentation by Arturo di Corinto
.
A new narrative, sitting across the borders running between materiality and immateriality, organic and inorganic, architecture and body.
These borders have been deleted by digital technologies in the contemporary era, perpetrating a continuous shift from object to communication, from product to service, from the mass to a plurality of multi-viduals.
NeoRealismo Virtuale dives into this scenario, hybridizing [...]
The collective Io/Cose produced an hoax during italian elections, spamming thousands of people with obnoxious mail messages by political parties.
Reactions were quite cruel and disillusoned.
“Yes We Spam! Remixed” remixes all that, together with the texts of an interesting discussion happening on the AHA mailing list.
In the background, pictures of all the words used at the [...]
Famous people come back to life in the Online Virtual World of Second life, in the form of autonomous avatars conducted by artificial intelligence.
A research on identity and on how people relate in the virtual environments that we find online and offline.
Karl Marx, Coco Chanel and Franz Kafka come back to life as autonomous avatars [...]
In 2008 the italian government released an incredible law stating the necessity to degrade images and videos to be able to use them freely on the web, for educational an research purposes.
A conception of “fair use” that seems quite strange, united to a surreal composition of technical and philosophical paradoxes. And an unbelievable “negative aesthetic” [...]
In 2007 the Biodoll had a child with Derrick de Kerckhove.
The kid was born as a cute Artificial Intelligence feeding on web content.
Born as a virus in its mother’s website, digesting the interface as if it was a placenta, it evolved into an intelligent spyware, following people around the web, to find interesting content [...]
an interview i held with Kanonmedia
see it here:
> the interview
> kanonmedia
A series of interventions in Second Life (and some in other virtual worlds).
The performances explore the aesthetics of code, systems overload and crash, lag.
Places get invaded, filled with art – or enclosed in art – sounds and virtually physical objects that change the characteristics of the space.
Issues such as copyright, the role of art in [...]
an interview on “Le Courrier” swiss magazine on virtual worlds and art
> the Interview
What are the challenges artworld is facing in the time of globalization and increasing technologization?
At the conference I presented the Biodoll project and Angel_F.
In collaboration with CIANT (International Centre for Art and New Technologies), Center for Global Studies (Academy of Sciences and Charles University), Prague Biennale 3.
check it out here
> website
> flickr
IULM, Libera Università di Lingue e Comunicazione: opportunities and proposals towards the Lisbon Agenda of 2010. I presented an Ipotesi per Assurdo together with penelope.di.pixel.
ceck it out here
> IULM
> the Program
> our presentation
> the Ipotesi per Assurdo
.
i have had the profile added to the AND [Artist Network Database].
here:
> the AND database
A latex cyborg suit is created to connect a dancer’s body to the interaction of the live and internet audience.
All of the dancer’s senses are replaced by user-generated ones, and all of the sensations and movement of her body are used as sound and video feedback to the live environment and to the web interfaces.
A [...]
I am pretty happy about this one.
:)
When you access del.icio.us Poetry a software uses del.icio.us most recent bookmarks page to gather all the links that have been saved in the last few minutes, and opens them up.
All together. On the page you are looking at.
Aesthetically, this i squite hypnotizing and amusing, as you’ll see compositions [...]
Talker is a linguistic artificial intelligence. Two processes animate it.
One, automatic, harvests each day some content from random webites.
The other one uses the texts provided by web users, who can upload it through the interface.
All the collected text is used to synthesize the linguistic mind of the Talker. Through sequences, relations, similarities, language is turned [...]
I answered the 11 questions on the JavaMuseum
> the interview
A critical view on search engines. “Google, why bother?” offers you full Google functionality, but when you search the results are made completely useless.
How do search engines work? Are we satisfied on how the web works? All this information lets us deal with too much content, not being able to find things, to understand them [...]
![[ByB] Be Your Browser](http://www.beyourbrowser.com/images/index.gif "new forms of life, a new idea of design, and business models")
![[NeRVi] Neo Realismo Virtuale](http://www.neorealismovirtuale.com/OALogoSmall.png "art, philosophy architecture in a performative attitude")
