the workshop

In this article you will find some of the images of the workshop and, here below, is a view taken from the this.astro projection we showed in the entrance hall of the museum:

A great part of our presence was focused on the creation of Come in Cielo Così in Terra, a software-enabled participatory performance through which people can collaborate in drawing constellations onto their cities using their bodies:

1. you form groups,
2. you choose a constellation,
3. each member of the group heads off towards a star (or, more precisely, to the city-location where the star is placed)
4. when each star is covered on the map by at least one member of the group: YOU WIN!
5. You have actually just collaboratively drawn a constellation onto your city, showing up on the global map.

You can see the application HERE: Click here to open CiCCiT (Come in Cielo Così in Terra)

the workshop

And here are the sources (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP) for the application:

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE SOURCES

The application is designed completely using HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP on the back end: just unzip onto your server online, create a database, update the parameters found in the “db.php” file to reflect your DB configuration and you’re done! You have Come in Cielo Così in Terra on your server.

the workshop

The application is designed for access through smartphones: just open up the URL using your iPhone or Android and you will be able to start right away.

A couple of things:

• there are bugs: we’ve just started this project and haven’t had time for the righteous tests until now; we will do them in a few days; if you find any bugs/strange behaviors, please do CONTACT US and tell them to us! You will do us a great favor and we will be able to correct issues and distribute updates for the application!
• there is no security in this app!  for now this is a proof of concept, so that there is only a minimal registration/login/logout process implemented, with the password in clear on the DB, no email verification, no-nothing; we will replace it soon with a decent authentication model; if you want to go ahead, you can work on the login.php, logout.php and accountManager.php files.

So: just download and install its, or use it FROM HERE and check for updates on Art is Open Source for new releases.

the workshop

And, as a follow up to the workshop: here are is a basic tutorial on how to make an HTML application which can track users’ positions using only standard features of W3C compliant browsers.

the workshop

TUTORIAL

What we want to achieve is an application which runs on a user’s web browser (for example Firefox, Chrome or Safari) and:

1. asks the uses if he/she would like to have their geographic location taken
2. if the user decides to do so, it grabs its geo position
3. sends it to a database
4. generates a map and shows the user’s position on it

Let’s start.

First step: localize the user

The geolocation API specified by the W3C consortium allows us to do just what we require.

First let’s create a standard, almost empty HTML page.

Then, in the HEAD section, let’s add these lines, to create some javaScript:

If you wrote everything correctly, you can upload this file (save it as an HTML file) to your webserver (if you don’t have a web server anywhere, you can download and install on your computer one of the Bitnami Stacks from here: choose WAMPStack for Windows, LAMPStack for Linux or MAMPStack for OSX).

You can now access your file using your browser (for example, if you installed a Bitnami Stack you can point your browser to http://localhost/the_name_of_your_file.html).

The browser should ask you if you want to be geo-located: if you answer “no” it will pop up an error message, if you answer “yes” it will pop up your geographical coordinates.

This should work consistently on both your computer web browsers and on the web browsers found on your smartphones.

the workshop

STEP 2 CREATE A DATABASE:

Now we want to store our coordinates somewhere.

So we need to create a database and, inside it, a table to hold them.

Use the tools you have to manipulate your databases (for example, if you installed the Bitnami stack, you will have the PhpMyAdmin application which you can use through your browser) to create a table (let’s call it “coordinates“) with two FLOAT columns named lat and lon, to hold the coordinates.

Here is what my PhpMyAdmin schema looks like:

the table created for the coordinates

now, let’s create a PHP file (a regular text file, saved with extension “.php”), and let’s save it as “storeCoordinates.php“.

Inside it, let’s write this code:

Put this file on your webserver, as right next to the one we created before.

This file:

1. checks that two parameters have been passed in the HTTP request (using the isset command, and the $_REQUEST variable, which contains all parameters which have been passed on by whoever invoked the script)
2. if they are present: opens up a database connection (“DB_*” parameters, which you have to configure to reflect your DB’s configuration, and the mysql_connect command)
3. prepares an INSERT query in SQL language, concatenating the values for latitude and longitude which we will see in a bit being passed on by our HTML page
4. executes using the mysql_query command

THIRD STEP: store coordinates

 Now we will modify our HTML file to invoke the functionality we just implemented using PHP.

Download the jQuery library from HERE.

This is a JavaScript library which offers many useful functionalities. We will use some of these.

Save the javascript library file naming it “jquery.js” and upload it to your web server right next to the other files you just created.

Add the following line right after the <head> tag in the HTML file we created in the first step:

This tells the browser to load the jQuery library.

Then modify the updatePosition function we have created in the first step, so that it looks like this:

What we are doing with the getJSON command is to call the storeCoordinates PHP file we created earlier on and pass to it the coordinates we just captured.

THAT’S IT!

Just update the file you just modified on your web server (so, in the same folder used by the web server there should be the HTML file together with the jquery.js file and the storeCoordinates.php file.

If you navigate to the HTML file using your browser and you answer “yes” when it asks you to be geo-localized, you should see a row being automatically added to your DB, containing your coordinates.

(about accuracy: if you are using this through a web browser, accuracy could not be perfect, as localization will be performed using your network information; this, according to the setup of your provider, will yield results of different degrees of accuracy; the same can be said when using GPS enabled devices: according to where you are, the GPS could provide more or less accurate results)

Here’s my first coordinates automatically captured in this way:

my geo position, finally on the DB

LAST STEP: SHOW’EM ON A MAP!

To show these coordinates on a map, let’s prepare another PHP file to get them from the database and add them to a Google Map. To use Google Maps you have to register and obtain a KEY. Click here to know how to obtain your key (read under the “Obtaining API Key).

Create another PHP file, and call it “map.php“.

Inside it write the following code:

Phew! that’s quite a lot of code!

let’s browse through it to see the new things which we introduced here. Starting from the top, here are the interesting lines:

• the <meta name=”viewport” … HTML tag, is used for smartphones, so that the content adapts to the device’s screen
•  the <style>…</style> tag and its contents: some CSS rules to define the margins and dimensions of our resulting HTML page
• the <script …> tag through which we add the googleapis.com/maps… javascript library: it includes Google Maps functionalities in your web page; please note that it is here where you have to add your API key
• in the next <script> tag:
• we define a map variable (var map;)
• we define the initialize javascript function
• we define the MapOptions javascript object to contain configuration information for our map (in the example: we set the zoom level and the type of map we want to use); more information about the MapOptions object can be found HERE
• we use the google.maps.Map object to initialize the map, and we use the document.getElementById javascript function to tell where we want the map to appear on our web page (in the example: in the DIV element with ID=”map_canvas” found below in the body of the web page)
• then we open a PHP section to query the database and obtain the info we need to create the markers
• we create a SELECT query using the SQL language and we put it in the $q variable
• we execute the query using the mysql_query command and we store the result in the $r variable
• we check if the result was obtained correctly ( using if($r) )
• we use a while loop to fetch each row of the result into the $row variable using the mysql_fetch_assoc command, which gives us a series of associative arrays
• we use the values contained in the rows to fill in the parameters of each marker, printing them out using a series of echo commands (through which we are actually injecting values coming from the DB into the HTML, using PHP)
• each marker is a separate javascript variable; to make them all different we have chosen to use a PHP variable named $i which will contain 0 for the first variable, 1 for the second one, 2 for the third, and so on (if you see, it is incremented using the $i++; command at the end of each while cycle); so the variable names for the markers will become var marker0, var marker1, var marker2 etcetera;
• each marker is initialized by using an instance of the google.maps.Marker class provided by the Google APIs
• each marker gets a series of parameters, such as position (through an instance of the google.maps.LatLng class), the map parameter which takes as a value the map we have initialized before, and a title)
• out of the cycle, the <head> section ends, and the <body> section begins with the onload=”initialize()” event handler to invoke the map initialization function as soon as the page has completely loaded.

And that’s it!

If you upload this PHP file to your web server and open up these two web pages we created (this last file and the initial HTML file with the request for geo location) on two different tabs of your browser (even on your smartphone) and you refresh first one and then the other (maybe moving a block or two between each refresh, so that you will record  different coordinates) you will see the map populate with the markers describing your movements.

the workshop

this.astro

“Even the ties with stars are misleading. But, even for a single moment, believing in the shape brings us joy. And that is enough.” R. M. Rilke

On April 28th, 2012, AOS will be at the MACRO museum in Rome with this.astro and Come in Cielo Così in Terra, an installation and a workshop created in occasion of the Global Astronomy Month.

Both the installation and the workshop invert the direction of the axis running from earth into space, to the stars.

Horoscopes, oracles, astrology, have brought the life of the stars into our lives, establishing relations between the destinies of the universe and those of human beings.

We chose to reverse this radically top-down approach, to investigate on the bottom-up philosophy which is central to our contemporary years: enabled by the ubiquitous accessibility of digital technologies and networks, the destiny of human beings seems to progressively interconnect to our possibility to establish collaborative relationships and peer-2-peer dynamics.

THIS.ASTRO generates a star-filled sky in real time: each star is an interaction on social networks; stars join together to form evolving constellations, according to the ways in which people take part in discussions online. A peculiar User-Generated Horoscope in which the destiny of human beings (e.g.: the shapes and positions of constellations) is determined by the ways in which people collaborate.

Come in Cielo Così in Terra is a workshop in which we will bring the sky into the streets of our cities. A free/libre application will be created/used during the workshop allowing people to form groups, select a constellation and draw it onto the streets of the city of Rome by walking through it, in a city-wide GPS-based drawing performed collaboratively with our bodies. An investigation on collaboration, ubiquitous technologies, collaboration, and the new ways of experiencing cities and the relations with our fellow human beings.

And here is the info for the event:

April 28th 2012

Connect the Dots and See the Unseen

MACROeo (electronicOrphanage) presents, on Saturday April 28th 2012, staring at 13:13, Connect the Dots and See the Unseen, an event focused on the relationships between arts and sciences, in which artists and visitors will actively reflect onto the observation and explanation of celestial events, through workshops, projections, internet-connected artworks by the Laurent Faulon and Delphine Reist, Stefano Canto, Daniela De Paulis and AOS – Art is Open Source.

The event is curated by Elena Abbiatici and Valentina G.Levy, and is organized in occasion of the GAM2012 (Global Astronomy Month 2012), organized by Astronomers Without Borders, an organization which promotes knowledge and interrelation among human beings, going beyond national and cultural borders, gathering together professional astronomers, educators and sky lovers from all parts of the world.

PROGRAM

at 13.13: Stellarium Antipodor site specific installation by Stefano Canto

starting at 13.13: this.astro real-time installation by Art is Open Source

at 14.14: Come in Cielo Così in Terra, astro-workshop by Art is Open Source

at 18.18: video by Delphine Reist

at 20.20: performance by Laurent Faulon and Daniela De Paulis

more info at the MACRO Museum:

http://www.macro.roma.museum/mostre_ed_eventi/eventi/connect_the_dots_and_see_the_unseen

“Anche il legame delle stelle inganna. Ma ci dia gioia per un attimo soltanto credere alla figura. Tanto basta.” R. M. Rilke

“I can boast to having experimented this truth: human beings, at the entrance to life, when not able to persist in mother’s womb anymore, and starts living on his own, receives a mark, an image of all the celestial constellations, the marks of the influences of planets; and conserves this characteristics until the tomb” Keplero

“A concatenation of cause and effect does not constitute between human and stars; on the opposite, stars and humans are engaged in a global simultaneity, such as that stars are the signs of human beings in the way that human beings are the signs of stars. [...] One is externally what the other one is internally [...] Stars determine us, because we carry this determination inside ourselves.” A. Barbault

“the starry sky is an open book of the cosmic projection, a reflex of the mythologems, of archetypes” C. G. Jung

VersuS, city visualization

Lately we’ve teamed up with an impressive series of partners to investigate on the future of our cities.

On May 2nd – 4th we will be in Berlin for re:publica to gather up and summarize our efforts so far.

Re:publica represents an enormous convergence of individuals and organizations who are dedicating their efforts to the conceptualization and enactment of innovative scenarios for humanity, with specific focus on urban contexts, as the locations in which most part of the destinies of our territories and populations are shaped and put into action. And, accordingly, Action! is the slogan of the 2012 edition of Re:publica.

We will participate to two sections of the event:

In the panel SMART CITIES : (IN) VISIBLE CITIES we will discuss about the emergence of novel visions for the cities of our present and future.

Together with Susa Pop, of the Public Art Lab (who promoted and organized the panel), a keynote by Tim Edler, of realities:united, Martin Spindler, and Khaldoun Al Agha we will investigate on

“How could urban media as temporary communication platform facilitate the exchange between citizens to support the diversity of a city? How can we use the networked infrastructures for the shaping of a socio-cultural urban development? Due to our understanding of the human as crucial reference point for our future cities, the citizen centric model will be a key topic in this session.”

Then, in the roundtable URBAN MEDIA LOUNGE, organised with the kind support of Enterprise Europe Network Berlin-Brandenburg, we will join the project European Urban Media Network for Connecting Cities, a research on three visions for the city of the future: the Participatory City, analysing the communicative potential for community-building through urban media, the Visible City fostering a city that is intelligent, efficient and sustainable and the Networked City. (initiator: Public Art Lab, 2012 – 2016)

The Lounge will also host the launch of the publication Urban Media Cultures (release: April 2012, avedition).

In the roundtable we will present the initial concepts of the Living Cities project, a massive initiative that we initiated with an impressive list of partners to design and implement novel scenarios of the creation of participatory practices for city and community development in cities, focused on P2P models, participatory governance, digital inclusion policies and a high level of attention to the scenarios of diversity and multiculturalism, to create wellness, richness and opportunities in urban contexts. The project has not yet been disclosed, and will be officially presented at the event.

VersuS, the co-creation of cities

Is it possible to imagine ways to use ubiquitous technologies and the emergent narratives which take place on social networks to design cities using co-creation practices?

On May 7th – 9th we will be in Florence at the ECLAP 2012 Conference on Information Technologies for Performing Arts, Media Access and Entertainment to discuss these issues.

We will participate with a paper and a research contribution in which we explore our most recent projects on the themes of Urban Sensing, Citizen Science, P2P Urbanism, and on novel ideas for the design of smart cities, more focused on the idea of human collaboration and relation than the “classical”, data-focused visions of smart cities.

Here below is the abstract of our intervention:

“Is it possible to imagine novel forms of urban planning and of public policies regulating the ways in which people use city spaces by listening to citizens’ expressions, emotions, desires and visions, as they ubiquitously emerge in real-time on social networks and on other sources of digital information?

This paper presents the theoretical and methodological approach, the investigation and research phases, the design and prototyping processes constituting the ConnectiCity initiative, a collaborative, multi-disciplinary series of projects in which artists, scientists, anthropologists, engineers, communicators, architects and institutions participated to the design of innovative ubiquitous and pervasive systems which were able to transform the ways in which the concepts of urban planning and city-wide decision-making are defined. Novel forms of urban life were imagined, in which cities became the time/space continuum for multiple, stratified layers of information expressing the ideas, goals, visions, emotions and forms of expression for multiple cultures and backgrounds, producing new opportunities for citizenship: more active, aware and engaged in the production of urban reality, and in the transformation of city spaces into possibilistic frameworks.”

A provisional programme of the ECLAP 2012 conference is available at the following link:

http://www.eclap.eu/drupal/?q=node/65281

Come In Cielo Così in Terra

On Friday May 18th we will be in Milan, at Meltingpot for the Come in Cielo Così in Terra Workshop.

Come in Cielo Così in Terra (translates to: “on earth as it is in Heaven”, reminding of the christian prayer “Our father”), is an Astro Workshop on Ubiquitous Publishing – creative coding, augmented reality, open source, iOS/Android apps and urban psycho-geographies.

An astro psycho-geographic walk to re-map the city in search of the constellations inscribed in streets and crossroads.

The dimensions of above and below, the axes of shy and earth, invert: starts project onto urban space.

Using simple and accessible location-based technologies workshop participants will be invited to search for the shapes of constellations in the urban geographies that surround them, to recreate them by traversing the city.

Participants will form groups and each of them will choose a constellation.

Each group will embrace a mobile device and head out into the city, trying to recreate the constellation’s shape by drawing it onto the city by walking and generating a GPS trace.

Maps will be populated in real-time with the urban constellations drawn by the movements of the different groups.

At the end of the astro-urban-promenade the images of the city-filled-with-stars will be shown through a real-time generative video installation.

The workshop includes training to learn how to use the technologies and platforms that will be used in the process.

All used technologies are released under open licenses (GPL3) and, thus, participants (and everyone else interested) will be able to use them for their own practices.

The workshop will begin at 10:30 and will end at 18:30, for a total of 8/9 hours, followed by the astro-urban-promenade.

The address is

Meltingpot, Cantiere Creativo

Via San Barnaba 48,

at the Società Umanitaria,

Milan

Check out the website of Meltingpot, Cantiere Creativo for the details, requirements, costs and other useful materials (it is in italian; make sure to contact us should you need additional information)

layers, a workshop un ubiquitous publishing

We will be at Ualuba, in Brescia, Italy, on May 19th-20th for LAYERS, an intensive workshop on Ubiquitous Publishing.

LAYERS

SALVATORE IACONESI & ORIANA PERSICO

May 19+20 2012
16 hours / 2 days / 1 week
from 9am to 6pm
intensive workshop (registration needed)

at:

Cen­tro Arti&Tecnologie
via Forcello 38/a
25124 Brescia
Italy

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

The spaces of contemporary cities are covered by membranes of digital information.

The wide and ubiquitous availability and accessibility of digital technologies and networks transform our perception of spaces.

Ubiquitous publishing technologies and methodologies – such as augmented reality, location based applications, digital tagging and near-field computing – allow to design natural interaction systems in which content, information and experiences become accessible through bodies, objects and architectural spaces.

In the workshop we will design and build an ubiquitous cinematographic experience: an augmented reality movie, disseminated in the city and accessible by traversing its spaces.

Minimum requisites:

The workshop is designed in order to be accessible even for people who never had experience in technological design and development.

Main requirements: curiosity, desire to learn and, most of all, to work in collaborative groups.

The workshop is also designed to provide insights about novel uses for technologies to people who already have previous experiences in Java, C++/Objective-C, graphics, animation, mathematical models, environmental and architectural design.

Program:

• augmented reality context: design methodology for physical spaces which include ubiquitous interactive experiences;
• interactive ecosystems: design of interactive ecosystems which traverse media and physical spaces;
• content management systems: how to transform a plain content management system (we will use a WordPress installation during the workshop) into a system which allows to manage ubiquitous content (location-based, tag-based, augmented reality), optimized for use on multiple devices (iPhone, iPad, Android, tablet computer);
• design of ubiquitous narratives: what is an ubiquitous narrative and how is it possible to design one; non-linear, emergent, multi-author, disseminated in space;
• accessibility and usability: digital inclusion and alternative strategies; how to include in experiences people who do not possess smartphones;
• technologies: cocos3D, cocos2D, Android SDK, iOS SDK, OpenGL ES, OpenFrameworks, Processing, QUalcomm AR SDK, PHP, SQL
• implementation of an ubiquitous cinematographic experience

It was a brilliant conference, for both content and process, and was really focused on creating the best possible environment to allow free, open emergence of the expressions of the many areas of innovation on knowledge, learning and education practices which the impressive list of researchers and practitioners are leading in multiple parts of the world.

The great feeling and the effectiveness of discussion is reflected in the newly published proceedings of the conference.

Designs on E-Learning 2011, conference proceedings

You can download a copy BY CLICKING HERE or on the download link for DoEL 2011 conference proceedings, PDF here on our website.

The book is available for download at the Aalto University bookstore, by clicking on this link.

please cite the book as:

Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss (ed.), Owen Kelly (ed.), “Future Learning Spaces”, 2011, Helsinki, Aalto University publication series, ISBN 978-952-60-4517-7

please cite our paper as:

Salvatore Iaconesi, Luca Simeone, Cary Hendrickson, Oriana Persico, “Connective environmental education: augmented-reality enhanced landscapes as distributed learning ecosystems.”, in “Future Learning Spaces”, Designs on elearning conference proceedings, Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss & Owen Kelly (eds.), pp. 312-321, 2011, Helsinki, Aalto University publication series, ISBN 978-952-60-4517-7

we will be participating to a great collective exhibit in Como, Italy, at the Spazio Natta, showing the Electronic Man and VersuS in a program which investigates in the new signs of mutual contamination of  different media.

Supported by the City Administration of Como, Poetroniche Magazine, the Brera Academy of Fine Arts

the exhibit is created and curated by Gabriele Perretta

the technical and scientific committee of the exhibit is composed by Alberto Maria Sestante, Nicola Amore, Nathalie Celen, Elias Safal, Mark Elushi, Giovanna Castalia

The organization is by Rachele Bernini

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE PRESS RELEASE (in italian) WITH INFO AND LOCATION

The title of the project is Creation and Publication of the “Digital Manual”: Authority, Authorship and Voice. The information can be found here at the Website of the Digital Manual project.

From one of the project information pages:

“Digital manuals, or emerging forms of the book, function as a resource and platform for digital practitioners, including artists, in their use and manipulation of technology for new forms of writing and publishing. It allows a co-creative community to arise through this interaction of agents (e.g. technology, users) and has serious implications for notions of control and ownership over resulting creations. When such digital manuals are developed, used and shared by creative communities, it enables them to employ technology to change the contours of their creative practice and how it is accorded peer recognition, thus shaping the creative community itself. More broadly, the development of the Digital Manual is contextualised by concerns with emerging forms of authorship, production and knowledge-making and how these might be intrinsic to processes of social formation.”

The project will involve the collaboration of a wide research network and the study of a series of open source creative communities, including us at FakePress and Art is Open Source, UpStage and Make-Shift, an open source platform for cyberformance and a very interesting festival, FLOSS Manuals, a collaborative publishing platform that enables fluent collaboration with local and remote writers, and Sauti ya Wakulima,  “The voice of the farmers”, a collaborative knowledge base created by farmers from the Chambezi region of the Bagamoyo District in Tanzania by gathering audiovisual evidence of their practices using smartphones to publish images and voice recordings on the Internet.

Stay tuned for more info. :)

maps of babel

The Maps of Babel project is an effort we embraced after our experience with the VersuS and ConnectiCity projects.

Our original projects focused on very wide-angled objectives, dedicating all efforts to the creation of systems and experiences through which it is possible to observe and (try to) understand the impacts that the wide and ubiquitous availability of digital technologies and networks has on the ways in which we perceive and use our city spaces and on the ways in which we relate, learn, work and entertain ourselves.

With Maps of Babel ( as well as with other experimental research projects we have recently brought up or participated to, such as the projects which you can find HERE and which we are doing together with Luca Simeone, Giorgia Lupi and Paolo Patelli, together with Milan’s Polytechnic University, its Department of Architecture and Planning, Density Design and Accurat) we started focusing on more specific perspectives, trying to address real-life issues of our cities, and we started from the practices of Urban Planning.

This is the abstract of the paper we presented at Human Cities:

“Urban design and planning literature stresses the role of and need for meaningful urban public spaces for the experience of public life and social interaction. How to determine relationships between specific public places, their physical characteristics and the patterns of social activities they support, in order to promote meaningful innovation in terms of urban design and planning? How can we discover denizens’ perceptions that are affecting their urban experience? From what observations can we deduce what makes denizens satisfied? How do we get to situated everyday patterns, trends, social relations and possibilities? How can we see the relationships between these patterns and cultural and ethnic groups within and across cities?

Traditional data collection methods such as surveys, interviews, questionnaires and, more recently, data harvesting and analysis (e.g. on the use of mobile devices) have provided interesting insights on the social life of urban spaces. Recent technological development and the emergent participation of internet users in terms of social interaction, though, are leading us towards a redefinition of the possibilities of gathering and sharing first-hand information. Today virtually every denizen can produce and share information about their everyday experiences and they actually do so, mostly using social networking services and website, such as Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare.

Can geo-referenced User Generated Content (UGC) shared over social online platforms be useful for the creation of meaningful, real time indicators of urban quality, as it is perceived and communicated by the citizens? Is it possible to use real-time text mining and conversational analysis methods on UGC in order to draw a series of maps depicting the very many and co-existing mental images of a city? How does an urban semantic layer – the meanings we attach to places – look like? How are well-being and happiness linked to places and how can we map them in real-time?

The paper presents a methodology and an experiment aiming to recognize multiple stories, as they emerge, influence each other, unfolding from city users’ mental representations and spatial experiences of city spaces, by conducting an analysis on location-based data sets extracted in real-time from UGC.

In particular how different ethnic groups are distributed spatially and temporally within the city of Milan and what are their sentiments towards the city spaces they name.”

Reading through the abstract, it is clear how the concept expressed in VersuS evolved along a specific direction: to try to understand and describe/visualize the mental models through which citizens of different cultures perceive and live their cities, harvesting their expressions on social networks to infer emotions, approaches, desires and visions.

This is obviously a very delicate domain, which engages multiple issues which are very difficult to approach even one-by-one:

• the lack of extensive research in the field, leading to the necessity of performing massive tests and to engage multiple other researchers in validating the results which progressively are produced
• the lack of real understanding of how the issues of digital divide allow to consider these kinds of results as being relevant now, and of the ways in which it is possible to forecast how they will be relevant in the (near) future
• the lack of real understanding of the ways in which it is possible to truly promote digital inclusion on these topics (in this: the answers to this question which sound like “enable free network/wifi access in cities” are obviously incomplete, as they do nothing to address the cultural dimension of “inclusion” and the need to understand diversity in cities, the effects it produces and the opportunities which it opens up)
• the lack of real understanding of the ways in which it is possible to conceive inference methodologies which allow to identify and classify emotions, wishes, visions, desires and expectations expressed by people, in multiple languages and contexts (that is: if we really want to go beyond the idea of “buzz” which is promoted by marketing professionals, which really lacks the complexity which is needed to approach the important issues of our cities)
• the lack of a real, diffused discussion on the ethics of these processes (e.g.: “listening” to social networks, harvesting information, inferring knowledge, using it )

maps of babel

All these items (and more) transform this kind of research into a truly delicate domain, and researchers wishing to engage it are continuously forced to stop and deeply consider the implications of their actions, the validity of their methodologies, the relevance of their conclusions and the ethics of the practices they promote.

Luckily, many researchers are more than ready to engage the challenge in meaningful ways.

The issues raised by these processes never fail to bring up lively discussions in public occasions for debate.

This happened at Human Cities, as well.

Giorgia Lupi, who was representing us all in Bruxelles at the symposium, was faced with a very active audience: here you can read her report of the presentation and of the debate

From our point of view in this research (and, in general, in this type of research): artistic approach has proven to be truly insightful and really useful, as well.

As you might know if you follow the things that get published here on Art is Open Source, our main focus is the process of exposing and understanding the mutation that the ubiquitous availability and accessibility of digital technologies and networks has brought on to human beings and the ways in which the live, relate, work, learn.

Human beings have already transformed.  And so did cities, workplaces, schools, shopping centers, streets, cinemas, everything. Digital technologies and networks have already mutated the way in which we perceive the spaces and processes of our daily lives and the ways in which we define what can be called public and private space, identity, work, entertainment, relationship, memory, knowledge. Transformation has taken place in time/space/function, is taking place right now and it doesn’t show any trend in slowing down.

In this process, multiple ethical approaches clash, hence the debates, the critiques and also the dangers and perils which we face when companies, organizations and other subjects use the effects of these transformations in ways which are not properly positive. We can think of many aspects of this, from the whole international debate on the transformation of labor, to the planetary discussion on crisis, to censorship, to privacy, to the dark-side of crowdsourcing practices, etcectera.

In this whole scenario, possibly the most relevant thing to take into consideration is that transformation has already taken place. On one side, the multiple layers of digital information which wrap the spaces we use in our daily lives have great influence on the way we perceive the world and the way in which we act. On the other side, we constantly produce digital information, wether we’re turning the light on/off, paying with credit card, using our mobile phone or adopting one of the many ways in which, during these last few years, we have learned to express ourselves in new ways.

This process causes multiple, simultaneous, emergent uses of the same space co-exist at the same time in public/private spaces, ruled by the possibility that people have to access digital technologies and networks and to use them to perform the activities of their daily lives. According to this point of view a park bench can instantly transform itself into a temporary, full-blown, mobile office, triggered by a single phone call, just as well as a table at a bar can instantly become the place for a family reunion across continents, thanks to a simple videoconferencing application. In the same ways, humanity is already in the process of fully adopting the possibility to express judgements, ratings, ideas, visions and desires about places and situations using ubiquitous social applications, making their thoughts and presence available to everyone else, in a new definition of both privacy and public space.

Now: this information can, obviously, be used for the most different purposes, from the most positive ones to the most devious ones.

What we believe is that there is no single answer, and that the possibilities must be exposed and critically evaluated.

Through art and projects like VersuS and ConnectiCity (and, before that, with other projects such as Squatting Supermarkets, REFF and more ) we have been able in the past to coordinate multiple disciplines and methodologies in performing this exact task: exposing possibilities and critically evaluating them. Along the way we have been able to realize a series of things among which is the consideration that a series of models which directly originate from peer-2-peer methodologies are now available and applicable to the most varied domains, from what-was-once industrial production to the production of knowledge, to education, and so on. These models’ accessibility is directly related to the availability of tools and strategies according to which information is freely accessible, remixable, recombinable, mash-up-able, layer-able, re-programmable and directly interrelat-able to the objects/spaces/processes of our daily lives. These models directly promote a vision by which citizens become active and aware agents of society, producing and accessing information to gain understanding and insights about the environments they live in, the societies and communities which they are part of. In this scenario, the accessibility of real-time, accessible sources of information about the ideas, wishes and expectations of their fellow citizens, together with ways to interconnect to one another and to freely express , constitute the basis to rethink those processes to which we refer to as “politics”, “education”, “urban planning”, “city governance” and so on.

The possibility to redesign in such radical ways these fundamental building blocks of our societies, allow us to also re-imagine many of the things we use each day as the basis of our lifestyles, and the possibility to redefine these public information/interaction/participation spaces is directly connected to the possibility to enact the new, emerging, models for production of energy, products, services, knowledge, food, transport.

Obviously: this domain is still an area for pioneers. And, luckily, many researchers, artists, designers, architects, engineers, social scientists, anthropologists, hackers and more are constantly dedicating more and more efforts to try and establish the first few reliable answers to the enormous doubts which we all have when we, eventually, see those dots on the maps, colored according to the emotion they represent, as inferred from a specific social network message using algorithms  which originate from artificial intelligence and expert systems. What are they about? How can I use them? How can people use them?

The fact is: they are there, available and free; easily obtainable from social networks. For positive, negative and in-between purposes.

All perspectives should be taken into account.

In a recent artwork, we used the exact same technologies which are used for VersuS and Maps of Babel: real-time harvesting from social networks; georeferencing / geoparsing / geoprocessing; natural language analysis; emotional analysis.  We used them to power an interactive installation. As artists, we felt the need to go beyond form and interaction, and to also explicitly expose the implications deriving from this now simple act of listening to planetary communities through social network information harvesting. A fundamental part of the project was to expose the techniques and the results of these processes from a rich variety of points of view.

In the exhibit, people could purchase internet users for 9.99 euros, in a little box. In the box: information visualizations and a QRCode connected purchasers to a simple interface which showed the most recent emotions expressed by their “purchased” user on social networks. Practically: an unaware user became your personal emotional tamagotchi.

That is to say: we must take in critical consideration and evaluation as many scenarios as possible, paying great attention to the negative outcomes that might be produced, and we also need to be as transparent as possible in the process.

That is also to say: these processes we are experimenting are constantly granting us a series of incredibly rich insights on the ways people live in their cities. In the first experiment with VersuS produced for the Piemonte Share Festival at the Natural Science Museum in Turin we have shown the city of Turin as expressed through social media by people speaking different languages: the stories of markets, streets, neighborhoods, historical areas and commercial areas as experienced by all the different cultures came out in incredible detail, as the same corner of the street became a place for quick traversal, a place for worship, a location for business, a meeting place and a community node according to the people, times and modalities through which it was used in the various hours of the day, day of the week or period of the year. This kind of experience, we believe, can be positively transformed into a tool which is useful to engage people, through knowledge and information,  to take active, participative, informed role in the governance of their cities and communities.