Category Archives: Activism

Here you will find the updates about our activities which are connected to activism.

Incautious Porn: a voyage into privacy

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Incautious Porn

Incautious Porn

“We searched for Porn.
We found you.

We captured more than 100,000 public comments on porn and sexually oriented websites in which users left their mobile phone number to male/female/transgender performers, where everyone could see it, and we turned them into a series of paintings which you can purchase.”

Incautious Porn

We access social networking websites every day.

We think they’re free, but what we really are doing is accessing services which we pay by granting access to our personal data to companies, organizations, institutions, aggregators, marketing firms etcetera.

And there’s more.

While we navigate these websites we tend to radically transform our perception of what is public and what is private.

We often engage messaging, chats, comments and content production without realizing that we’re saying and posting things in public, where anyone can see them, and use them.

Incautious Porn is about this.

It is about the transformation of the ways in which we perceive private and public spaces.

It is about being sold hundreds of times each day: our data, information, emotions, relations.

How is it done?

We harvested the content found on hundreds of thousands of porn or sexually oriented websites using freely accessible tools such as Google, various Web Scraping APIs, and the APIs which are made accessible by popular social networks service operators (such as Facebook and Twitter), to get as many naughty comments coming from all you boys and girls.

We searched among the comments to find the ones in which users left clear indication of their phone/mobile number to the sensual performer, and we put them in a database, along with a screensot of the page, its link and the date/time in which it was recorded.

incautious porn how-to

incautious porn how-to

We developed a little software which takes one random comment/link out of the database and uses it to create a beautiful generative painting and originality certificate.

We set up this website to put the paintings on sale.

Note: all the content used in the process is freely available online, in public forums/blogs/webcam-shows/social networks/etc.

More info coming soon

Reinvent Reality at FADfest, a conference on Open Design and Shared Creativity, Barcelona

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Reff, RomaEuropa FakeFactory

Reff, RomaEuropa FakeFactory

We will be joining in the conversation at Open Design / Shared Creativity Conference in Barcelona, on July 2nd and 3rd to present a scenario for radical innovation, based on a radically open process.

In 2008 we created REFF, RomaEuropa FakeFactory, a meta brand ( an open source brand, a brand which anyone sharing an ethical approach can use, with the results benefiting the whole p2p network of individuals and groups who participate in the brand itself ) which we created to confront Italy’s difficult scenario for what concerns public policies for arts and creativity.

When we created it, we chose to give it a peculiar form: an institution.

A Fake Institution, more precisely.

As Orson Welles might have said: “fake” is real.

Meaning that reinventing reality can become a tool for constructivist action onto society.

This is precisely what we tried to do with REFF: to create a p2p ecosystem dedicated to the systematic reinvention of reality through critical practices of remix, re-contextualization, re-enactment, mash-up.

We used these terms – which are classically associated with media – in real-life, in the space of the city and of the networks of relationships which describe our societies.

The structure of the initiative has been natively peer-to-peer, meaning that the whole “system” was designed as a tool for expression of a network of peers, used to add meaningful layers of information and opportunities for action to our ordinary reality.

This, in our perspective, is a wonderful definition for Augmented Reality, and AR has, in fact, been a great tool for REFF, which used it as a metaphor for its practices.

And this is, for us, a highly effective scenario to create opportunities in our near-future, beyond the scenarios of crisis: bringing the scenarios opened up by technologies to networked models which are deeply rooted into our cities and our communities, in which basic definitions of our societies – such as public space, production, distribution, revenue, governance, policy-making, decision-making and many others – can be redefined to become natively networked processes, and create new schemes for sustainability, sociality and development.

This is the point of view which we will present at FADfest, at the Open Design / Shared Creativity Conference.

Open Design / Shared Creativity Conference is an international forum that seeks to explore and debate the emerging landscape of openness and exchange that is taking shape around practices such as open code, creative commons licensing, co-creation, de-localisation and collaboration.

Digital technology and social networks have reached a point of maturity from which a new industrial culture is emerging, revolutionising the processes of creation, mediation, distribution and consumption. Taking design in all its expressions and forms as a starting point, the conference will be an important international forum of ideas, working platforms and specialised practices that are transforming the articulation of design with society, economy and culture.

Designers, architects, artists, editors, web activists, programmers, curators, lawyers and cultural analysts will explore over two days the reality and the potential of open design culture, from new business models to the most experimental creative practices.

Are You At Risk? Nuclear campaigning with Greenpeace

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Are You at Risk?

Are You at Risk?

Do you remember Nuclear Anxiety?

After one year from the Fukushima disaster we’ve teamed up with Greenpeace International to create an awareness and action campaign on the risks coming from nuclear energy.

Click HERE to start “Are You at Risk?”

The interactive map shows the locations of nuclear plants all over the world. By clicking on each one of them, detailed information pops up showing how many people live near the reactors and, thus, would find themselves in the same situations as the people who lived in Fukushima when the disaster took place.

(an enormous “thank you!” must be delivered to Declan Butler: he let us use a dataset he published, which was used as the foundation for this wonderful article on  Nature.)

In the campaign we go a step further.

By using the map you can connect to Facebook and Twitter. If you do it, the software grabs the information about your friends/followers and actively searches for the ones who live near nuclear plants (e.g.: the distance of their home location is less than 300km from a reactor).

When it finds them, it alerts them on social networks by tagging them on an image, pointing out the risks of living near a nuclear plant, and inspiring them to go to check out the map.

When you do this, you can browse the map and see additional information appear: the images and names of your social network buddies appear next to each reactor, indicating the people you love who would suffer from an accident in that location.

And, so: Are you at risk?

 

credits:

Art is Open Source: concept, technologies

Salvatore Barbera (Greenpeace International): project management and creative direction

Andrea Pinchi: visual design

Aslihan Tumer and Jan Beránek (Greenpeace International): Nuclear Campaigners

 

some links:

Are You at Risk? on Repubblica

Squatting Supermarkets and REFF featured on Memefest

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An update from a little while ago: Squatting Supermarkets and REFF have been featured at the Memefest.

REFF and Squatting Supermarkets at Memefest

REFF and Squatting Supermarkets at Memefest

Memefest is a international network of good people interested in social change trough sophisticated and radical use of media and communication. We create, think, research, educate and work on the intersections of art/science/communication profession/activism/theory and practice.

As a platform Memefest has two main dimensions. It is a festival and a collaborative community.

In this scheme we proposed our projects Squatting Supermarkets and REFF, RomaEuropa FakeFactory.

Squatting Supermarkets on Memefest

REFF on Memefest

Squatting Supermarkets as described on Memefest:

“Buying, wearing, eating, using. Our lives are full of objects of which we know very little about.

Shop’s and supermarket’s shelves only tell partial stories made from companies, efficient productions, happy farmworkers laying down coffee boxes on trucks with the logo of Nestlè, solar panels amidst fields and atop the roofs of factories who seem to have really stopped vomiting their foul toxic wastes in rivers and air, replacing them with new by-products of production that smell like straw and wheat.

All this happens if we look in one direction. And if we look in the other we see the aisles of the supermarkets spreading messages telling the tale of happy families (politically correct ones: a man, a woman, possibly mixing races and continents, with children, with the only possible alternative to be found in the images of career boys&girls, replacing family with business and fitness) buying things using credit cards, placing sincere trust in the ear of wheat almost protruding from the box of the product X that they throw into their shopping cart. Just as they trust the words biological, sustainable, ecologic showing up in products of all kinds.

Great commercial distribution points take narratives to an architectural level, designing our experiences up to the deepest levels of detail: the sequence of racks, shelves, themes, suggestions, colors, turns, tight spots; the reassuring sound announcing incredibly special offers; social, ecologic and economic themes, by which all bread is that of the old times, every shampoo has low ecologic impact, every automobile reduces polluting emissions, and any pack of coffee is produced by locals living on cheerful mountains upon which everyone peacefully smiles.

Visions that are partial, designed, mono-directional. Not all of the time. We must say that: luckily we can choose among many producers that have made the transition towards sustainability, ecology and the respect of diversities and of fragile populations. What we need to state is that for everything concerning these issues the possibility to access knowledge and information is an element of primary importance.

Art and creativity often confronted these points of view. The Supermarché Ferraille comes to mind with their improvised store displays, their surreal advertisements, their distorted products. Or the AdBusters, their subversive and detourned communication campaigns. Or the performances by Banksy, National Cynical Network.Or, in Italy, the ones by Candida TV, Serpica Naro, Anna Adamolo, Luther Blissett, Liens Invisibles. (… and loads of others. So much that it would be truly interesting to list and map all f the actions of this kind)

Squatting Supermarkets combines several platforms: iSee, an iPhone application used to create information and communication systems localized on logos and symbols; Ubiquitous Publishing, a set of open technologies that can be used to create location and architecture based contents, accessible directly from the places tht we walk through by using mobile phones and devices, together with simple, affordable augmented reality techniques; architettura rel:attiva, DpSdC and OneAvatar, a series of technological platforms that connect bodies and architectures to the internet and to virtual worlds.

iSee

Turning the corner of the aisle. Cold. Frozen products. Sounds of shopping carts, bottles, plastics, bags, cardboard, rolling pasta and cereals. Light completely white. Reds disappear or flatten completely, leaving out the reflections on the shiny plastic of serial packages of standard food items wih geometrically acceptable shapes.

Cold and words, in front and behind. Requests for information, calls to other aisles, requests for consensus, children getting lost.

A small accident takes place behind me, just as I lift a package taken randomly among others: two shopping carts collide, pouring out cardboard boxes, synthetic fibers holding together oranges that look all the same, bottles labeled in geometrically psichoactive ways. The fast bureaucracy of the accident ends and everything orderly starts back up : people start following their directional vectors, dictated bi habit and special offers.
I grab the pack back up, simultaneously extracting a smartphone from my pocket: a rapid automatic swipe of my thumb on the touchscreen unblocks it.

Colored icons in one hand, a cold, wobbly package in the other. I run through the icons, finding one with an eye insistently staring back at me, white on black. I activate the application and immediatly frame the package in the viewfinder: red, white, blu contour, thick typeface, readable. A short wait: “Product recognized: XYZ”. Options on the screen “Available information: ecological footprint, social responsibility and sustainability, alternative products. Or you can access the public discussion”.

Two goals.

On one side, to systematyze practices and technologies, creating an open framework that can be used and evolved to instantiate augmented reality (or, berret, Virtual NeoRealist) spaces, connecting bodies and information, implementing accessible, relational and natural interaction schemes.

On the other side, to act, starting multi-author, diffused, emergent narratives.”

REFF as described on Memefest:

“Romaeuropa FakeFactory is an act of artistic and technological hacking, a platform for global discussion and a performance that, beginning in 2009, has dealt with the themes of active, critical and creative innovation, confronting the management of cultural and technological policies related to these areas. The story begins with the opening of the Romaeuropa WebFactory, a digital art competition launched in 2008 by the Romaeuropa Foundation (Fondazione Romaeuropa) and Telecom Italia. Oppressive copyright conditions, such as the unilateral transfer of the rights to the works submitted and a ban on the use of techniques like mashup, cutup, remix but conversely giving the Romaeuropa Foundation and Telecom Italia the right to remix the works, inspired the creation of a Fake capable of becoming a point for multi-disciplinary analysis of the possibilities offered by freely available knowledge, contents and resources: a chance to reverse the logic of the competition and bring to light the contradictions, limits and implications of such a typical, reactionary cultural policy.

“Remix the world! Reinvent Reality!” is one of the principal themes that has inspired the REFF, from an act of détournement and cybersquatting – that brought to life the creation of a remix skills competition determining in 2009 a reversal of the Romaeuropa Foundation and Telecom Italia’s policy on the management of intellectual property rights – to the presentation of REFF’s instances and methodologies to the Cultural Commission of the Italian Senate (Commissione Cultura del Senato della Repubblica Italiana), up to the current production of the REFF book, as a global effort to create a working business model that implements the concepts and demands expressed by the RomaEuropa FakeFactory. Supporters of the REFF are found all over the world: over 80 partners among universities, artists, academies, associations, hackers, researchers, designers, journalists, politicians, magazines, networks, activitst, art critics, architects, musicians and entrepreneurs together with all the people who share a belief that art, design and new technologies can unite towards a critical, yet positive vision of a world that can create new opportunities and new ways of being, collaborating and communicating.”

The projects will be featured in a publication produced by Memefest in the next part of the year.

 

 

 

 

the Network: a symphony on freedoms

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This is a really hard time for Italy, and economic downfall and repressive strategies are only two of the symptoms.

La Rete, una sinfonia

La Rete, una sinfonia

In the continuous debate on culture and freedoms, the most powerful italian agencies for the preservation of the current, repressive regulations on copyright and intellectual property are defending policies which constitute a real danger not only to the possibility to invent and promote innovative economic models for arts and creativity, but also represent a real threat for the freedoms of expression in our country.

Some of these rules, for example, provide that: should any copyright holder deem a website is breaking his rights, he can have it shut down without notice. There are subtleties, obviously, but the main point is this: if I think that you are breaking my copyright I can shut down your website.

It is clear how this kind of regulation can be used for all kinds of political purposes, including the creation of widespread, centrally controlled political censorship practices. Let’s remember how Italy has all major media controlled by only one (or two, maximum) enormous subjects.

In the last few days the AGCOM published a set of really threatening regulations.

While doing it the SIAE published a set of 10 really single-minded questions, to ideally (and unrealistically) promote dialogue on the subject.

The questions are obviously made to sustain only one side of the story, and are full of wrong assumptions and fabricated  starting points. This has created an enormous response in the network, with lawyers, journalists, organizations, hackers, artists and entrepreneurs publicly answering and making questions back to the offenders.

Together with Agorà Digitale, AVAAZ, FakePress Publishing and a whole incredible crowd of people supporting our freedoms, we have brought up a resonant, collaborative reply.

You can find it here on

La Rete, Una Sinfonia

the website holds all the questions and answers given on this occasion. It also is planned as a collaborative tool.

All the contributions that are collected are being published in two ways:

The ebook collects in realtime all the contributions arriving from twitter (using the “@AGCOMunica” tag, so that the contributions arrive directly to AGCOM, as well :) ) and all the contributions added to the website, under the form of further articles and comments.
The book is generated in realtime, meaning that if you add your contribution, it will be included in the publication.
The visualization is done in realtime, as well, by using Knowners, another tool produced by FakePress Publishing: by tagging content on the website a structural representation is built using HTML5 which can be interacted with to explore in a visual way the themes covered in the publication.
So: contribute to the discussion and let’s join forces to defend our freedom of expression and information!