Category Archives: Arts

Here you will find the Arts related information about Art is Open Source, including participation to festival and events.

ConnectiCity on Leonardo Electronic Almanac

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Our text about ConnectiCity has been just published on Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Volume 19, Issue 1.

Connecticity, Augmented Perception of the City
+ Interview, Statement, Artwork
by Salvatore Iaconesi & Oriana Persico

“We constantly re-interpret and transform the spaces around us. The ways in which we constantly personalize the spaces which we traverse and in which we perform our daily routines communicate information about emotions, knowledge, skills, methodologies, cultures and desires. This process takes place in digital realms as well, which start to ubiquitously merge with cities. Mobile devices, smartphones, wearables, digital tags, near field communication devices, location based services and mixed/augmented reality have turned the world into an essentially read/write, ubiquitous publishing surface. The usage of mobile devices and ubiquitous technologies alters the understanding of place. In our research, we investigated the possibilities to conceptualize, design and implement a series of usage scenarios, moving fluidly across arts, sciences

and the practices of city governance and community design. The objective we set forth sees the creation of multiple, stratified narratives onto the city, set in place by citizens, organizations and administrations. These real-time stories and conversations can be captured and observed, to gain insights on fundamental issues such as ecology, sustainability, mobility, energy, politics, culture, creativity and participatory innovation processes. These methodologies for real-time observation of cities help us take part in a networked structure, shaped as a diffused expert system, capturing disseminated intelligence to coagulate it into a framework for the real-time processing of

urban information.”

Full article is available for download as a pdf here.

Volume 19 Issue 1 of Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) is published online as a free PDF but will also be rolled out as Amazon Print on Demand and will be available on iTunes, iPad, Kindle and other e-publishing outlets.

 

LEA Volume 19 Issue 1
Volume Editors: Lanfranco Aceti and Richard Rinehart
Editors: Ozden Sahin, Jonathan Munro and Catherine M. Weir

ISBN: 978-1-906897-20-8
ISSN: 1071-4391

La Cura, an Open Source Cure for Cancer, at TEDMED

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From La Cura

“We can transform the meaning of the word cure. We can transform the role of knowledge. We can be human.”

Salvatore will be at TEDMed 2013 to tell the story of “La Cura”, a global art performance about the opportunity to transform our societies to become more active, aware, caring human beings by reclaiming information and knowledge, and by feeling the desire to be part of a society whose well-being truly depends on the well-being of all of its members.

La Cura

La Cura

La Cura started when Salvatore was diagnosed with cancer on September 2012. After that none of our lives have been the same: something incredible had happened.

Salvatore was not really satisfied with medicine’s approach to his illness.

As he said many times: “I felt as if I disappeared”.

Doctors are, obviously, the “good guys”: they are people who save lives every day, and who put professionality, intelligence, creativity, passion and dedication in what they do.

Yet human beings who are diagnosed with serious illnesses such as cancer often become part of a process which is too industrial. Medicine too often talks about them, not to them. The language doctors speak is not intended for patients, nor is the information that is generated during the illness. Images, exams results, lab values, are all things that do not speak to diseased person, who literally has to become a patient: to wait for something/someone to do something.

And this is only the tip of an iceberg whose essence is about the complexity of being human and part of a society.

Even the enormous advancements of medicine and its practices haven’t been able to address this complexity. People who are diagnosed with grave diseases disappear, replaced by the disease itself.

They become part of an industrial process (or neo-industrial, or post-industrial or crowd-industrial, in these times of digital change) which reduces human life to a set of protocols, procedures and to a series of services to access to benefit from things that feel like a vacuum in more than one way: the disease becomes the focus of one’s life (and of his friends and relatives), leaving out fundamental unanswered questions about the person’s life, sociality, emotions, knowledge and freedom to express, decide and be active in informed, positive ways.

La Cura is about this: is about avoiding loosing this fundamental perception of this complexity, and about the fundamental need to avoid reducing human life to the simplicity of a set of protocols, procedures and services.

It is a story which has deeply touched all of us, in exciting, emotional, sometimes dangerous, but always overwhelmingly insightful ways:

  • it is the story of human participation to the disease of a fellow human being;
  • it is the story of freedom of expression and decision;
  • it is the story of the desire for knowledge, understanding and comprehension of the human condition in all its complexity, and from a variety of points of view;
  • it is the story of the possibility for human collaboration across cultures, disciplines, times and places of the world, without prejudice and in the explicit will to make sense of things through active participation and with responsibility;
  • it is the story of the dangers and the responsibilities that come with the desire for freedom, and about the necessity of the help of the whole of society to be able to bear them, and to make sense and extract meaning out of them.

And, most of all, it is the story of the will and desire to live a free, informed, active, positive life, and of the need to feel part of a positive human society to fully achieve it.

It is an Open Source Cure for us all.

AOS at “HYBRID CITY II: Subtle rEvolutions” with “Real Time Dissent in the City”

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We will be at

The HYBRID CITY II: Subtle rEvolutions
Conference, workshops, exhibition and parallel events
23-25 May 2013
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

with our contributions:

  • Real-time dissent in the city: tools and tactics for contemporary disseminated, dispersed, recombinant movements

    • Abstract –  During years 2011 and 2012 we have created a series of open software platforms which are able to analyse in real-time the content which is produced by users of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, by combining data-harvesting technologies, natural language analysis and geo-location. We have used these technologies in different ways with the objective of trying to understand the various forms in which dissent manifests itself in the scenario of contemporary urban areas, characterized by the progressive availability of accessible ubiquitous technologies such as smartphones and network-enabled devices.

 

  • Re-thinking public space and citizenship through ubiquitous publishing and technologies. The experience of Ubiquitous Pompeii for the Italian Digital Agenda.
    • Abstract – In this paper, we describe the first instances of a family of projects with similar characteristics. Through these projects, we aim to establish contact with urban communities to a) suggest visions for possible forms of city innovation and to b) start co-creative processes for imagining, designing and enacting transformative processes. These co-creative processes involve technologies and innovative methodologies which are able to create knowledge, participation, sustainable and inclusive business models. One of these projects is the Ubiquitous Pompeii where our research and design team developed a city wide process in the city of Pompei in Italy. Ubiquitous Pompeii started by engaging high school students with a series of workshops structured in two phases: a) students’ awareness about the scenarios and opportunities offered by ubiquitous technologies; and b) the acquisition of the skills used to appropriate the technologies and methodologies and to embrace participatory design processes. Students were able to design and develop their visions for the development of their city and its communities, creating services and digital tools. Peer-to-peer learning and collaboration practices played a crucial role. Tools, methodologies and roles have been designed and developed to support the emergence of practices engaging all agencies into a networked process for the creation of the digital future of the city. Institutions and operators play the role of facilitators in what basically is becoming a citywide co- creative process. Along these lines, we have structured a transdisciplinary methodology and a technological toolkit dedicated to cities and urban communities including collaborative ethnography to observe the various stages and processes of the project and discuss its meta-stories with the different actors. The project has been declared as an official best practice for Italy’s Digital Agenda, and as such will be scaled to other cities in the near future, also envisioning wider knowledge sharing and collaboration tools which will be able to interconnect the different communities.
The HYBRID CITY II: Subtle rEvolutions

The HYBRID CITY II: Subtle rEvolutions

Eisenhower Fellowships: a journey through the changing scenarios of leadership, innovation and creativity

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Salvatore Iaconesi will be on his Eisenhower Fellowship to explore the changing scenarios of leadership in the US, and to understand the opportunities for collaboration and exchange among the arts, sciences, humanities, businesses and public policies.

Eisenhower Fellowships

“identifies, empowers and links outstanding leaders from around the world, helping them to achieve consequential outcomes across sectors and borders. EF provides a transformational experience leading to lifetime engagement in a global network, where dialogue and collaboration make the world more prosperous, just and peaceful.”

Art is Open Source, through Salvatore Iaconesi, will be on the fellowship to explore various types of scenarios.

As we know, everything around us is changing at incredible speed.

The ways in which we learn, express, collaborate, work, consume, relate, exchange information, knowledge and wisdom are very different from they were even a few years ago.

Touched by the impact of digital cultures, the world has mutated and continues in this transformation.

This has extreme, radical impacts on human societies and on the ways in which we can imagine shaping our public policies: our perception of private and public spaces has changed, just as much as what we perceive to be legal/illegal, possible/impossible, suggested/forbidden. Just as our visions, imaginaries, opportunities.

We are in a situation in which giving answers has become not only very difficult, but also not very interesting. What is interesting, today, is to understand what the fundamental questions are, and to create open spaces for discussion, and for their continuous, iterative, participative assessment.

Many signals exist around us that can help to observe – just like anthropologists, ethnographers and cultural geographers – the ways in which things are changing in human societies. These signals can be collected in large quantities and observed according to a series of different approaches: for business, science, art, research, culture, commerce, policies…

We can also imagine collecting these signals to enact some form of forecast.

Possibly the most interesting thing which we can do is to take these signals into account to observe our present and what it says about our near-future, to see which new daily rituals they describe, new ways of doing things, new habits, new things that we have learned to give for granted, or that we have forgotten about.

And to use these observations to create things, be them objects, products, services, processes: real ones, possibly under the form of live prototypes that can be used to inspire further, materialized observations about our near-future.

Some call if Design Fiction, some call it near-future design: what is certain is that it is a practice that needs the contribution of the artist just as the ones of the scientist; of the engineer and the poet; of the businessman and the designer; of the anthropologist and the architect; of the technologist and the politician. In a joint effort to understand, create and leverage the layers of meaning emerging from our human societies.

This is what we will do during this Eisenhower Fellowship, collecting the experiences of leaders throughout the USA, suggesting change and creating the opportunities for exchange and collaboration for a better understanding of our present and of what will come up next.

Eisenhower Fellowships

Eisenhower Fellowships

 

A Course on Fabbing and Nanotechnologies at ISIA Design Florence

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Art is Open Source will be holding this year’s course in Multi Platform Digital Design (Progettazione Digitale Multi-Piattaforma, in Italian) at ISIA Design in Florence.
This year’s course will be focused on the themes of Digital Fabrication, Nanotechnologies and on the shifts in paradigms for production, about which we will imagine, design and enact different scenarios for the near future.
ISIA course 2013

ISIA course 2013

Sites such as http://www.thingiverse.com/ and http://www.shapeways.com/ have become rather common. This fact suggests a radical shift in the ways the paradigms of productions are (and can be) perceived, and brings up a whole series of fundamental issues which will become the commonplace for the (near) future of design.
What is certain is that precursors of these processes, such as the guys from http://www.fluid-forms.com/, have changed the ways in which, now, we are able to perceive objects and the ways in which we design and produce them.
Fluid Forms is a good example for this. When starting out, back in 2005, the concept of a widely accessible role of the Creative Coder operating in a virtual Design Space to design objects which could be physically produced/sold was not something many people had a chance to deal with.
For example, Fluid Forms’ Design Spaces allowed coders/designers to create software-generated objects using a number of information sources, APIs and data.
For example you, given a latitude/longitude pair of geographical coordinates, you could Google Maps to find the streets and landscape in that location and use this geometrical information to produce the design of a jewel, or a clock, or of something else. The object was, then, put on sale and users could specify their own set of coordinates (e.g.: of a place that was particularly meaningful for them) and produce their own, generative object.
This has been a steady trend ever since, and, progressively, we are starting to find it rather easy to identify objects with software.
Objects can be produced directly starting from the 3D files that describe them, and this changes the whole scenarios and the supply chains that were traditionally found in design and production:
  • 3D files (and programs to generate them) are exchanged and used to produce the objects (through 3D printing, for example)
  • files can be freely modified, reproduced, copied, redistributed etc

This obviously determines a radical change in the ways in which we traditionally perceive intellectual property when we deal with physical objects.

Imagine a scenario:

  • Ikea enters the 3D Printing market
  • You go to the Ikea store, you buy your 3D Printer, your supply of base materials (usually resins of some sort) and you go back home
  • you connect to the Ikea website, browse the 3D printable products, choose one and download it
  • it is a 3D file
  • you feed it to the 3D Printer and there you have it: your fresh-printed brand new Ikea Ashtray
  • then you send the file to one of your friends, as she has a 3D Printer, as well
  • your friend takes the 3D file, opens it in an editor, makes some changes to it (“here, with this added curve it looks just wonderful!”) and prints it out
  • then she puts the file up on Thingiverse, where everyone may download it, print it, etc

Whose copyright (if any) is it? Ikea’s? The original purchaser’s? His friend’s? The downloaders’? And so on…

Nothing we’re used (yet) to thinking about when we speak about physical objects.

Tendentially: the factory comes home!  Meaning that production will progressively disperse, become disseminated across a number of different scenarios in which digital files will be distributed in peer-to-peer ways across a number of small production facilities (even single households) in which they will be use to produce objects, and where they will also be modified and redistributed.

And companies such as http://www.makerbot.com/, http://objet.com/ , http://cubify.com/cube/ , and http://futurecnc.code.arc.cmu.edu/ (and a lot more, lately) are making wide efforts to making sure that this will happen.

The outcomes of this tendency are practically infinite. Here are some examples:
A 3D vending machine:
A 3D printed skull prosthesis:
A smart phone application that works as a 3D scanner:
A doodler, a 3D Pen:
A 3D printed home:
Obviously, these practices raise quite a few interesting issues for discussion, as well:
  • at ecological and environmental level:
    • where do the raw materials come from?
    • are they sustainable?
    • how do you dispose of them?
    • could the possibility to 3D print anything bring on phenomenons of over-production?
    • etc…
  • at social level:
    • will be become new forms of stay-home consuming (producing) machines?
    • will we ever get out of our house? :)
    • will we be the target of the strategies of global strategies that will see us really busy with bringing up printing/modifying/commenting businesses for operators, and progressively loose contact with traditional markets and the world outside?
  • at ethical level:
    • what if i 3D print a rifle? or a bomb?

Obviously, some of these issues are exaggerated, for the sake of clarity, and some of them have already (partial) answers. But we’ll learn about them along the way, during the course.

The advent of nano-technologies allows these processes to radicalize even more.
For example, the nanotech factory-in-a-box scenarios allow for the disappearance of the limitations found in current 3D printers about the materials which can be used to produce the objects (mostly resins of some sort) and their achievable quality: the possibility to assemble more complex molecules starting from simpler ones theoretically allows to produce objects in any material, and the nano-scale of the production would allow for unmatched precision and quality.
Or as with the possibility to produce objects that are “alive”, or that relate with the human body at some level (e.g.: organs, eyes, prosthesis…): as with anything that could be in such tight relationship with our bodies and identities, these scenarios provide both great hopes and fears for the future. (e.g.: imagine if i nano-printed a replacement for my diseased liver using a service which is able to remotely stop it from working if I’m not able to pay their monthly fee…).
Or at the level of being able to produce objects which can chemically, mechanically and organically activate themselves, even in “intelligent” ways, to take actions of some sort. (from t-shirts which spontaneously change color, up to hordes of nano-robots which are able to use the materials around them to build skyscrapers)
Or HIV-curing nano-robots, nano-energy mechanisms which produce energy using waste etcetera.

What will happen during the course:

We will learn about the scenarios of fabbing and nanotechnologies, and will prepare and use tools which will enable us to observe their processes, evolutions, events: we will establish a sort of observatory unto the state-of-the-arts and to catch the signals which will use to infer the future scenarios.
Then we will discuss and design scenarios for the near/far future. Be them far of near, scary or hopeful, positive or negative, we will make works of design fiction that will explore these scenarios.
And then we will create transmedia narratives for these projects.
Have we designed a service which people use for replacement organs for a monthly fee? A peer-to-peer market of 3D printed molecular cuisine? A peer-to-peer production system to produce nano-energy from waste? A 3D printing service to replicate our pets?
We will make them as true as possible by producing websites, apps, prototypes, fakes, installations, performances, street advertisements, guerrilla marketing campaigns and more.