Everything you see, hear, touch and smell is decided my store managers, according to commercial and marketing strategies.

The things you read on product labels are decided from manufacturers and corporations, and you have no control over it.

Even the spatial layout of the supermarket itself is the result of a strategic decision.

Squatting Supermarkets wishes to confront this scenario by using Augmented Reality to bring radical, participatory communication back into supermarkets.

Using the Squatting Supermarkets smartphone application it is possible to scan the labels and packaging of products and

• add information to it (text, sounds, images, videos)
• see information that has been added by other users
• browse information related to the product or to its manufacturer, as aggregated from a series of institutional, research, activist sources

We will present Squattng Supermarkets at UAMO festival in Munich from the 27th to the 30th of October. The presentation will take the form of a performative action and we hope to be able to organize a live workshop in some supermarkets around the city.

Join us at UAMO!

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:

• an ebook, which you can download here (click here to download the ebook of the “La Rete, Una Sinfonia”)
• an infoaesthetic visualization shown on top of the pages of the website (for example HERE you can see the infovisualization on the home page)

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.

Bluetooth

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.

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

We will analyze Bluetooth, a technology that is mostly used to connect devices to our mobile phones, but that can be transformed into a powerful tool for local, pervasive and independent communications.

We will create an open source bluetooth media server and do some experimentations in media distributions, experimenting the aesthetics of mobile media and the practices of pervasive communication.

As a side issue, we will also use our media server to research on the possibilities offered by mobile technologies to observe people, their habits, their movements. We will try to wear the clothes of the Big Brother for once, to investigate just how observed we can be while using our mobile phones and other electronic devices.

RomaEuropaFAKEFactory

AOS at the AHACamping

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 pictures

Here is a review on ArtsBlog

we will upload some videos in just a few days, together with a more detailed report.

This:

s1_s2_doc_v1

is the PDF of the research we presented at the AHACamping: S1/S2 a peer to peer (p2p) social network built on a parallel internet, implementing a true relational ecosystem assessing the issues in terms of privacy, control, user exploitation currently found in classic social networks such as Facebook, Youtube and the others like them.

You can find a first, fast report in the rest of the post, below.

Special focus was put on the critical approaches to social networking.

We (xDxD.vs.xDxD and penelope.di.pixel) presented S1/S2, the first phase of an experimental project featuring a social network built on the Netsukuku network: a meshed network that redefines the classical internet protocol stack to create a new network that is piggy-backed on the internet. This technique allows users to escape the control operated by service providers and by governments, as the parallel network is peer to peer and encrypted, and it is separated from the providers’ areas of control.

Or, to say the least, Netsukuku makes monitoring users a real tough job (practically impossible).

S1/S2 is a social network that is being implemented on the Netsukuku network. It has been presented at the AHACamping for a specific case study dealing with the possibility to implement a collaborative History of the Arts, but it really is a more generalized project.

S1/S2 approaches two main issues:

- infrastructural squatting

- the relational ecosystem

By infrastructural squatting we designate all those techniques through which an internet user can use the physical connectivity in ways that guarantee users autonomy, privacy and self-determination in terms of the posibility to define who can what/when/where a person can do something on the network, and in terms of being able to decide who can observe our informations, our relations, our interests and, in the end, our lives. Netsukuku has been chosen as the base platform to perform infrastructural squatting.

By relational ecosystem we describe the lives of the users on the S1/S2 environment. Everything is oriented to create the tools to enable people to freely define their own identities and to establish relationships, processes, services, information and content exchange. S1/S2 deeply differs from classic social networks: there is no “profile”, no authentication, no centralized service. There actually is no website, as S1/S2 is designed as a set of tools through which people can define their own data, store it on their computers or servers, and connect and communicate with others by using a peer to peer network built on Netsukuku. Identities are self-defined (even for everything that concerns the structure of data), as is content. Both can interact and be integrated, creating structures and relationships described by networks of identities, concepts, multimedia, informations, communication channels.

S1/S2 also introduces the concept of networked welfare, defining the tools through which the network can collaboratively enact processes whose aim is to create services that can be used by the collectivity, with specific concern for the weaker components of the ecosystem: content persistence, high availability and reliability, communication facilities, distributed, co-hosted stored facilities, virtualized systems to serve specific purposes and internet gateways that will allow for publication of people-selected contents on the “regular” web.

S1/S2 is currently under development, and our estimates indicate that there will be a first usable release of the environment in about 3 months.

We are currently looking for support. If the you find the concepts behind S1/S2 and Netsukuku interesting, and if you feel like contributing in any way you can (develop, execute beta installations and tests, explore the nexts steps…) you are truly welcome to do so, and you can contact me at:

xdxd.vs.xdxd [at] gmail [dot] com

Here is the document (only in italian for now: check back in a week or so for the english version) presented at the AHACamping for a case study of an S1/S2 application: a social network created to support a collaborative Art History.

s1_s2_doc_v1