Arteractive in Turin

The project unites a group of artists who have been working with new digital technologies and with specific focus on the research about novel forms of establishing relations with the audience.

Arteractive is an exhibit whose aim is to investigate these the effects of these researches and the potential for innovation of these forms of art and iconographies, which inject a direct possibility for action and reaction for people, creating explicit mutations at aesthetic and social levels.

The exhibit will feature a set of different metaphors and techniques, assessing the virtual domains and activating emotions and sensations in visitors and interactors, establishing multiple types of connections with social media, networks and virtual technologies.

The opening of the exhibit will take place on Thursday November 3rd starting at 6pm.

There will be a preview event on November 2nd at 7pm.

The exhibit will be open to the public on November 3rd, 4th and 5th from 11am to midnight, and on November 6th from 11am up to 8pm.

The address is:

Parcheggio Residence Cristina, 52, Turin
(access is from via Principe Tommaso, at the corner with via Oddino Morgari)

The concept and exhibit is curated by Chiara Canali.

Invited artists are

Alessandro Biagetti, Mirko Canesi, Umberto Ciceri, Davide Coltro, Giuliana Cuneaz, Nicola Evangelisti, Daniele Girardi, Glaser/Kunz, Vincenzo Marsiglia, Gabriele Pesci, Gianfranco Pulitano.

We (Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico) will be featured in the exhibit with the Electronic Man, our global performance created in occasion of Marshall McLuhan’s Centennial celebrations, with the partnership of MediaDuemila under the scientific direction of prof. Derrick de Kerckhove.

the Electronic Man

The Electronic Man: A Global Performance.

Renee Carmichael interviews Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico from,
Art is Open Source (AOS) and the international think-tank FakePress,
about their recent project The Electronic Man.

Interview:
http://www.furtherfield.org/features/interviews/electronic-man-global-performance

“You Are Now the Electronic Man” are the words that appear before even
opening the website for The Electronic Man, a project initiated by
Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico of Art is Open Source (AOS) and
FakePress. And by becoming part of The Electronic Man, sharing your
emotions as they become linked through QR Codes and help to build the
frame of The Electronic Man, you are participating in a real time global
performance. We discuss AOS’s ideas and intentions, regarding their
activities of performance and use of technology, and methods of
engagement with anthropology and biology.

This real time global performance relates to conceptual experiments in
remixing reality and creating new sensual experiences with technology.
The email interview took place after their recent exhibition at
Furtherfield’s gallery in London, REFF – REMIX THE WORLD! REINVENT
REALITY! (http://tinyurl.com/66mb85e), February, March 2011, and during
their current project The Electronic Man, part of the ADD Festival in
Italy 2011 (http://www.addfestival.com/).

Renee graduated from Goldsmiths with a Masters in Interactive Media:
Critical Theory and Practice. Her most recent work arose from working
with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) support groups to intrepret
their perception of objects within the home alongside theories of
discreteness and technology. She is currently interested in exploring
relationships between food, data and technology.

Other Info:

A living – breathing – thriving networked neighbourhood – art,
technology & social change – claiming it with others ;)

http://identi.ca/furtherfield
http://twitter.com/furtherfield

Other reviews,articles,interviews
http://www.furtherfield.org/features

Furtherfield – online arts community, platforms for creating, viewing,
discussing and learning about experimental practices at the
intersections of art, technology and social change.
http://www.furtherfield.org

Furtherfield Gallery – physical media arts Gallery (London).
http://www.furtherfield.org/programmes/exhibitions

Netbehaviour – Networked Artists List Community.
http://www.netbehaviour.org

ADD Festival in Rome at the MACRO Future museum

The Electronic Man will be the special McLuhan project for ADD Festival second edition!

From 22th to 26th June you will find us at MACRO Testaccio (Rome) with a new interactive installation.

For the occasion, a whole wall will be dedicated to the contributions sent by the all performers and authors disseminating allover the world the body of this new connective artwork and identity.

Come to visit the new installation at MACRO Testaccio and join us in the performance! All the contributions send until the 20th Jun will be printed and exposed during the Festival, and published on the official site of the project (instruction below).

And please: if you have an iPhone/iPad, download for free the application and experience on your body the creation of a new global sensoriality!

Electronic Man is an opportunity to feel connected to your fellow humans.

the Electronic Man

INSTRUCTIONS

Give an emotion to the Electronic Man and help us to disseminate its digital body! It will only take you a couple of minutes:

1. download the PDF file at the address:http://electronicman.artisopensource.net/electronic-man-qrcode-stickers-a4.pdf

2. print it out: it contains the stickers that allow people to become part of the electronic man

3. cut the stickers apart, and attach them somewhere in your city, in your office, in your favourite bar, in your school, wherever you want

4. take a picture of the sticker and send it to us at info@artisopensource.net (If you want, include your name, a link to your website, and a short bio: we will include all images and info at the exhibit for the big event for McLuhan’s Centennial celebrations in Rome, and on the Electronic Man’s website

5. if you want, you can scan the QRCode on the sticker with your smartphone: it will take you directly to the Electronic Man, and you will be able to join its ubiquitous body

Or, if you don’t know how to scan a QRCode, you can go to this address:

http://electronicman.artisopensource.net/index.php?i=1

(both modes will ask you for your location: it is used to understand the distribution of the body of the Electronic Man, we won’t do anything bad with/to your info, and we will throw it away immediately)

**ATTENTION!** if you will send us your contributions until the 20 June, your photos will be printed and exhibited from becoming part of the installation at the MACRO Testaccio!

The ELECTRONIC MAN

http://electronicman.artisopensource.net/

iPhone / iPad APPLICATION

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-electronic-man/id440988777?mt=8&ls=1

MULTIMEDIA GALLERY

The Enectronic Man @Marshal McLuhan Centennial, Rome, Università La Sapienza: backstage & installation

http://www.flickr.com/photos/xdxd_vs_xdxd/sets/72157626876028200/

First Body Disemination: the Electronic Man urba stickers allover the world

http://www.flickr.com/photos/xdxd_vs_xdxd/sets/72157626811219056/

DOWLOAD THE APPLICATION

The Electronic Man for iPhone and iPad

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-electronic-man/id440988777?mt=8&ls=1

Credits

Salvatore Iaconesi: concept | design | technology

Oriana Persico: communication | process | networks

FakePress Publishing: production

Art is Open Source: production

Maria Pia Rossignaud: curator | production

Media Duemila, Associazione Amici di MD, Osservatorio TuttiMedia: production

Dipartimento di Comunicazione e Ricerca Sociale della Sapienza: event production

Derrick de Kerckove: scientific direction | inspiration

Marshall McLuhan: this project could not have existed without him

More info at:

ADD Festival

http://www.addfestival.com/

Convegno “McLuhan: Tracce di Futuro” – 31 maggio Università “La Sapienza”, Roma

http://www.mediaduemila.it/?p=3612

FakePress Publishing

http://www.fakepress.it/

Art is Open Source

http://www.artisopensource.net/

Media Duemila

http://www.mediaduemila.it/

Osservatorio TuttiMedia

http://www.osservatoriotuttimedia.it/home

the Electronic Man for iPhone/iPad

The Electronic Man mobile application for iPhone/iPad is now available for download.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE APP

This application will let you join in the global performance from wherever you are, and will allow you to experience people’s participation to the project directly from your pockets.

The application will be including several additions and updates during the next few days, so be sure to download it so that you will be automatically be updated of these new features, creating a real, ubiquitous, connective body with your fellow humans.

the Electronic Man

The Electronic Man performance is going really well. Many people are participating from all around the world and in just a couple of days we will be publishing the updated results and some more lovely news.

In the meanwhile: here at the link below, you can find an article we published on Mediaduemila with some interesting reports that show some information which you might not expect from a performance of this kind. And it also shows a wonderful scenario for intersection and collaboration between arts and sciences. The article is in italian but it is easily translatable and the numeric data is sufficiently simple to interpret.

Read the report of the Electronic Man performance, on MediaDuemila

And

The Electronic Man

Some updates for the Electronic Man global performance

Check out the new interface we created on the Electronic Man website:

http://electronicman.artisopensource.net

We made the site lighter and we’re fully exploiting the possibilities offered by HTML5. We’re also using some Processing.js so feel free to check around the code of the interfaces if you want: there’s somethings you might be interested in.

Participation is wonderful! Everyone seems to be really excited by this experiment and there have been thousands of visits and hundreds of emotional contributions to the body of the Electronic Man.

Check out the website to see the information visualizations showing the situation in real time.

We’re also getting ready for the celebrations of the McLuhan’s Centennial in Rome (see the info of the event HERE). The Electronic Man will be officially presented in that occasion together with all the conference participants:  Gianni Letta, James Fox (Canada’s embassador in Rome), Derrick de Kerckhove, Mario Morcellini, Francesco Passerini Glazel, Gianpiero Gamaleri, Norman Doidge and Philippe Cahen and Maria Pia Rossignaud.

Here below for you the first images of the Electronic Man’s images disseminated across several countries (more will come in the next few days). Remember that you can download the PDF of the Electronic Man’s stickers at this link.

If you stick them out somewhere, please send us your name, a picture (of yourself or of the sticker, or both), a short bio and we’ll add it to the credits for the performance (we’re putting them up on the websites the day before the conference)

And now, below: the Electronic Man all over the world! :)

The possibility to design using emotions has always intrigued me and, yet, it seemed like an unachievable task.

The notion of being able to identify emotions in an automatic (or assisted) way is quite a complicated activity, and it needs to enact complex classifications and profund analisys of cultures, contexts, noises, ironies.

FakePress - Publishing Emotions

Theory

Some theories come to our rescue while approaching the enormous feat of identifying and classifying emotions.

Plutchik‘s psychoevolutionary theory is based on ten postulates that identify basic emotions as entities derived from primordial behaviours, with actual, complex, emotions being represented as linear combinations of the basic ones, disposed in 2D and 3D geometries that highlight similarities and opposites among them.

Paul Ekman researched on models for identification and classification that have been very useful in the analisys of facial expression.  Our faces are one of the most evident places in which our emotions show, and Ekman’s research is very important from a cross-cultural point of view, as he identified a limited set of emotion/facial expression pairs that are virtually unmodified across all cultural extractions.

Magda B. Arnold provided an incredible surge in interest on the theories of psychology of emotions by researching them in the 1940s, when the behavioural perspectives were the main trend. Her research on the interrelations between emotions and the tendency to perform actions is somewhat outdated, but a milestone in the scientific history on these themes.

Nico Frijda focused, like Ekman, on the connections between facial expressions and emotions, in somewhat of a behavioural perspective in which emotions were the indicators of the readiness and tendency to perform actions.

Carroll Izard,  Jeffrey Allan Gray, John B. Watson and Jaan Panksepp provided a somewhat more physical form of interpretation of emotions, creating their own schemes for classification originated from the idea of basic emotions as being hardwired into our bodies and primordial mind setups. Watson specifically dedicated several chapters of his books to the analisys of emotions as hereditary modes of response.

William James and Carl Lange produced a theory on basic emotions according to which within human beings, as a response to experiences in the world, the autonomic nervous system creates physiological events such as muscular tension, a rise in heart rate, perspiration, and dryness of the mouth. Emotions, then, are feelings which come about as a result of these physiological changes, rather than being their cause. James and Lange arrived at the theory independently. Lange specifically stated that vasomotor changes are emotions. A bodily connection with emotion and a classification scheme deriving from it.

William McDougall produced a theory intercnnecting emotions and basic instincts, in main opposition with Watson’s behaviourism. According to McDougall, behavior is not simply a response to a stimuli but is goal seeking and purposive. For McDougall, a person’s emotional core was stable and unimpacted by learning.

O. H. Mowrer presented some interesting results on the possibility of interpreting emotions through the lens of a learning process. His exaples were particularly effective on guilt and other forms of emotion that were easily imposed by cultural contexts.

Silvan Tomkins focused his research on understanding the level of neural activity connected to the activation of emotions. His Freudian derives were originated from the idea of the behavioural importance of the mechanisms generating from “lacking” something. His classification of nine pairs of affects depict this idea.

Oatley and Johnson-Laird assume in their theory, called by them “communicative theory of emotions” (Oatley & Jenkins, 1996, p. 254), a hierarchy of parallelly working processing instances, which work on asynchronously different tasks.  These instances are coordinated by a central control system (or operating system).  The control system contains a model of the entire system. This is a semantic theory of emotion that is particularly interesting for our purposes, as it is specifically designed to be implemented on a computer.

Ortony, Clore and Collins assume that emotions develop as a consequence of certain cognitions and interpretations. Their theory exclusively concentrates on the cognitive elicitors of emotions. They postulate that three aspects determine these cognitions: events, agents, and objects. The main objective of their research is to investigate the possibility to design a formal system or a computer that is able to draw conclusions about emotional episodes which are presented to it.

Roseman bases a theory on a model in which five cognitive dimensions determine whether an emotion arises and which one it is. The first dimension describes whether a person possesses a motivation to a desired situational state or a motivation away of an unwanted situational state. The dimension thus knows thus the states “positive” and “negative”. The second dimension describes whether the situation agrees with the motivational state of the person or not. The dimension thus knows thus the states “situation present” or “situation absent”. The third dimension describes whether an event is noticed as certain or only as a possibility. This dimension knows the conditions “certain” and “uncertain”. The fourth dimension describes whether a person perceives the event as deserved or undeserved, with the two states”deserved” and “undeserved”. The fifth dimension finally describes, from whom the event originates. This dimension knows the states “the circumstances”, “others” or “oneself”. From the combination of these five dimensions and their values a table can be arranged (Roseman, 1984), from which, according to Roseman, emotions can be predicted.

For Scherer five functionally defined subsystems are involved with emotional processes.  An information-processing subsystem evaluates the stimulus through perception, memory, forecast and evaluation of available information.  A supporting subsystem adjusts the internal condition through control of neuroendocrine, somatic and autonomous states.  A leading subsystem plans, prepares actions and selects between competitive motives.  An acting subsystem controls motor expression and visible behaviour.  A monitor subsystem finally controls the attention which is assigned to the present states and passes the resulting feedback on to the other subsystems. Scherer is especially interested in the information-processing subsystem.  According to his theory this subsystem is based on appraisals which Scherer calls stimulus evaluation checks (SEC).  The result of these SECs causes again changes in the other subsystems.

A very interesting approach comes from Aaron Sloman, according to whom emotions are not independent processes, but develop as emergent phenomenon from the interaction of the different subsystems of an intelligent system.  Therefore, no necessity exists for an own “emotion module”.  A look at psychological emotion theories leads Sloman to the conclusion:
“Disagreements about the nature of emotions can arise from failure to see how different concepts of emotionality depend on different architectural features, not all shared by all the animals studied.” (Sloman and Logan, 1998, p. 6)
Sloman’s approach intentionally disregards physiological accompaniments of emotions.  For him these are only peripheral phenomena: “They are peripheral because essentially similar emotional states, with similar social implications, could occur in alien organisms or machines lacking anything like our expression mechanisms.” (Sloman, 1992c, p. 20)

Dacher Keltner focuses on a social approach to emotions. In his own words: “My own studies have focused on the social functions of emotion, arguing that emotions enable individuals to respond adaptively to the problems and opportunities that define human social living. Based on this approach to emotion, I have documented the appeasement functions of embarrassment, the commitment enhancing properties of love and desire, and how awe motivates attachment to leaders and principles that transcend the self.” This is a really interesting perspective, as it accounts for the possibility to analyze emotions from a point of view that encompasses complex interactions among social contexts, cultural backgrounds, emergent dynamics.

Design

The visualization shown on FakePress’s homepage represents the beginning phase of a design process.

It uses Plutchik’s classification and applies by leveraging the availability of several realtime search engines that allow our systems to fetch information from a multitude of sources on social networks, blogs, websites. Services such as Collecta, OneRiot and the APIs offered by Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and Google .

This first implementation had two main goals in mind:

• the possibility to design and implement a system that is able to analyze great amounts of data in realtime to search, identify and classify “emotional data”, meaning data that can be interpreted as the expression of an emotional state
• the identification of representation schemes that are characterized by a high degree of expressivity, accessibility and synthesis

What we wanted was a “device” that was able to present low-doses of highly expressive information obtained by processing great amounts of information that were collected as being “emotion expression related”.

This first prototype does just that:

• data is priodically collected using the aforementioned realtime services (every 2 minutes, the system collects the last 10 minutes of information, keeping a history of 40 minutes in its databases)
• processing the data, before storing it (also to avoid problems related to privacy and intellectual property), by selecting the information regarded as “interesting” and “relevant” (e.g.: sentences with a definite structure, such as “i feel…”, and others), anonymizing it (removing references to actual sources) and, finally, storing it in a parametricized way (e.g.: the whole sentences making up messages are not stored; the list of words, relevancies and phrase structures are)
• use Plutchik’s classification, applied using about 2000 synonims (and growing) to identify and classify emotional states
• grouping data together with its identification indexes to aggregate it into the synthetic, graphic form shown on the visualization

Plutchik’s classification is far from satisfactory from our point of view. But it served two purposes: on one side it was easy enough to implement (in its necessarily approximated form for what concerns the need to filter input data); on the other side it offered useful insights for the deisgn of a global process that we will use for the next steps.

Next steps

In the next steps this concept will be expanded in the following directions:

• implement a different classification methodology to achieve a more significant result: we will probabily use Keltner’s or Sloman’s methodologies to obtain results that assess social and anthropological issues
• expand mechanisms and systems to include the possibility to analyze multiple cultural contexts, different languages and diverse communities or individuals
• include in the system a generalization of the input layer, to be able to connect devices that collect biometric information to be used side by side with written language and other types of interaction to infer emotional states
• create a multi-community structure, where individuals can join in to share and disseminate their emotional states
• expand the set of visualizations and representations, to include the creation of emotional maps, body stimulations, visual compass-like visualizations

We will head toward a broadened definition of augmented reality in which “ordinary reality” is augmented with emotional layers acting as “interpretative layers” on the world we live in. What happens when i can share my emotions with people, associating them to specific places, times, objects, environments, bodies? What kind of comunication forms can arise? What kind of education processes can this practice stimulate? How can cultural production, knowledge sharing, education, creativity, innovation, entertainment, commerce, ethics, politics and, in general, science  and arts benefit from such practices.

Stay tuned and collaborate with us while we start this research process.

FakePress welcomes contributions and participation from interested researchers, artists, creatives, interaction designers, academics, entrepreneurs and experimenters wishing to join in the research process.

[fundamental contributions for this text come from this webpage ]

possibly the most difficult one was the creation of an architectural installation called rel:attiva presenza.

rel:attiva presenza in Mexico City

the installation constituted a practical example of the theories we exposed at this congress and it was created in the beautiful cloister of the Italian Cultural Institute in Mexico City, in the colonia Coyoacan.

The concept behind the installation was a contextualization of an architectural intervention we designed by the same name, transforming a public square into an interactive location for mixed-media urban dialogue.

The installation show/performance took place together with the inauguration of the exhibit “El viaje en la mirada: dibujos italianos de dos arquitectos mexicanos” from which some drawings were taken and virtually re-interpreted for the installation’s components.

The installation was built using the openframeworks programming libraries, and it featured 2 network synchronized computers handling the sides of the visuals and the spatialized sound.

A narrative was created by juxtaposing 7 scenes projected on a cylindrical artefact hanging on top of teh cloister’s fountain.

Each of the 7 stages featured a methodology for layering virtual and physical domaind of reality.

The sounds from other spaces/times that were recreated in spatialized form in the environment.

The images from various locations of Mexico that were morphed into each other together with their localized sounds, to form new, virtual places.

The drawings exhibited, taht were used to create narrative voyages that superimposed the palces that inpired teh drawings with fantastic, non-existing ones.

Virtual architectures that were projected onto real ones, creating hybrids.

Interaction was assured by means of teh environental sound and by a simple cloister-wide motion capture system that used people’s movement to generate sounds and parameter values for the various algorithms involved in the software.

A special thanks must be given to the people at the Italian Cultural Institute, especially to Franco Avicolli, the institute’s cultural expert and responsible for inter-universities relationships, appointed by Italy’s Ministry for Foreign Relations, and to his assistant Valeria Ricci Apiròz: their enthusiasm was probably the most enabling technology that we used for this installation. :)

An enormous “thank you” goes to the Institute and to its director, prof. Marco Bellingeri, and to Felice Scauso, the Italian Embassador in Mexico, who gave us an incredibly warm hospitality.

check out the review on ArtsBlog

the review on Networked Performance ( turbulence.org)

people using DpSdC

ABSTRACT

Degradazione per Sovrapposizione di Corpi (DpSdC) investigates on interaction mechanisms created using low cost DIY technologies, aiming at the creation of emotional environments that can be used to break the users’ inhibitory barriers to narratively access dialogue on socio-political issues.

Categories and Subject Descriptors:

J.4.3 [Computer Applications]: Social and Behavioral Sciences – Psychology, Sociology.

General Terms:

Algorithms, Performance, Design, Economics, Experimentation, Human Factors, Legal Aspects.

Keywords:

interaction, emotion, design, copyright, perception, inhibition.

Links:

the report from (re)Actor3 with some videos

the original version of the installation

INTRODUCTION

In DpSdC common household gestures become extraordinary ones. DpSdC is an experiment in interaction design using an emotional approach to technology to break the inhibitory barriers commonly found in the visitors of an exhibit. Classical arts and media left their mark on the fruition processes of contents and experiences: visitors embrace passive roles and limit themselves to visually browsing what they see shown in the museum, festival, or movie theater. This passive condition propagates to everyday life, where the audiences of the information flows (be them on television or on the internet) only partially grasp the possibilities for interaction. Socially, interaction with information and with experiences means the possibility for critical mindsets to form in the users’ perception. Contemporary technologies offer the possibilities for these forms of social activeness to develop and to be truly accessible. Yet streams of inhibitory and practical barriers have to be bypassed to let these possibilities be broadly available. This is true for all the parties involved. The developers of technologies must gain the technical competences needed to create effective products. The skills involved are not only to be found in the technical knowledge needed to create hardware and software, but also the ones needed to research on the neuro-psychological levels of user interaction, on product design, on the economic and production models that the new technologies enact. Also, technologies can be expensive, and the alternative, more accessible techniques, often embracing “Do It Yourself” production paradigms, can only be learned by social interaction of some kind with other developers, building communities and communication channels based on open source practices and free licensing schemes.
The users of technologies are often faced to systems/interfaces/artifacts that they don’t technically or conceptually understand, or that they find boring or only partially engaging, or that don’t confront with issues that they perceive as relevant or, even, interesting. Or, on the other side, they are sometimes simply used to having passive experiences with contents and information. DpSdC is an experiment trying to assess all of these issues. A low-cost, low-technology, recycling, DIY approach is used to create an interactive environment that uses common, well-known household gestures to create a fun, entertaining, engaging tool that is used to establish a dialogue on the international debates on the issues related to copyright and intellectual property.
DpSdC has been shown for the first time at the Live Performers Meeting 2008 in Rome, where it was used by hundreds of visitors, with amazing results.
Technique
Visitors can approach the installation from all sides.
The floor of the space is filled with an overhead projection, coming from a standard Personal Computer running a custom software. A standard, low-quality, webcam connected to the PC looks at the installation floor. The camera’s optics have been prepared by removing the infrared (IR) filter, and replacing it with a small square of black photographic film, effectively turning the webcam into a basic, low-cost, IR-sensible device. The scene is lighted by the standard light provided by the projection, by the rest of the environment’s lighting, and by a custom-built IR light source, created by assembling the printed circuit boards (pcb) of 5 recycled television remote controls, hooked to a simple on/off switch and to a power source created by using a series of 9V batteries and a couple of simple electronic components (resistors, capacities, an inductor).

Cleaning up art history

As visitors approach the installation’s floor they are presented with various common household tools: a broom, an ironing board, a feather duster, a vacuum cleaner. Visitors could freely grab any one of these tools to perform the simple gestures we all performed once in every while to tidy up our homes.
The gestures of sweeping the floor, of ironing a t-shirt, of dusting a piece of furniture, were immediately and reactively captured by the installation’s software – constituted by a truly simple set of motion capture algorithms – and mapped to curves and strokes of varying pressure and width on the projection.
The calculated strokes were rendered on the projection by cutting up pixels from the digital images of the paintings coming from the last 300 years of Art History. A stroke with the broom would mean, for example, the “magical” appearance of an equal stroke of a painting by Andy Warhol or by Salvador Dali, as if removing the dust from the floor revealed the paintings underneath. Continuous interaction created a progressive overlay process, revealing the parts of the (about) 1500 paintings included in the installation, creating visual remixes that the users created, in delight, by brooming the floor, ironing, dusting and vacuuming.
Emotions and aesthetics

The first exhibition of DpSdC was in a very specialized setting: an international VJ meeting. People walking around the event space expected to see very “standard” presences: MIDI controllers, laptops, projectors, knobs, DJs, VJs. Arriving at the installation space, and confronted with a broom and with a vacuum cleaner, various expressions emerged from their faces, showing curiosity, interest, laughter and, sometimes, diffidence. The question clearly appearing along their facial traits was: “What the hell is this?”.

the installation

The installation was anything but neutral. The presence of household objects that were immediately recognizable within a setup that had definite aural components created different  kinds of approaches: people asking for explanations; other people asking if they could “touch it”; some other people asking what the “objective” was. Everyone eventually grabbed the broom or the feather duster and started dusting the floor and the furniture.
As soon as this happened the change in attitude was immediate. The simple gestures became extraordinary: the way in which well-known material actions acted on the immaterial plane created by the installation was fascinating, and had a light psychedelic feel to it.
The interaction was captivating and people stayed at the installation for dozens of minutes, eventually returning, hours (or even days), later bringing their friends with them to show the “magical” installation.
The installation was designed so that the technological elements disappeared from perception. The resulting environment featured a minimalistic representation of a house, with two recycled TV sets taken out from their case, with the circuits exposed, a small cabinet with the feather duster on top, and the projected floor with the broom and the vacuum cleaner. No technology was visually present to distract the visitors from the household setting. The projection and interaction were, thus, perceived as additional, immaterial, levels of a physical reality to which they were accustomed. The familiarity and “friendliness” of the aesthetics immediately lowered inhibitions: once they started interacting, people just kept on going, even starting to experiment with lighters, or by rolling their bodies on the installation floor to see what effects it would produce.

Copyright

When asking for information visitors were greeted with the explanations about the basic mechanisms making the installation work, and with the description of the conceptual themes of the installation, regarding the use of interaction design and of emotional approaches to technologies to discuss issues related to copyright and to intellectual property.
The installation allowed to create content by using in creative ways existing contents, bringing them to new forms of life and value through collaborative, accessible practices. This approach was explained as being the metaphor for what is currently happening in the global re-definition of the concepts of intellectual property, of knowledge, of creativity and of legality.
The avant-gardes of the XX century artistically materialized the contexts produced by the industrial revolutions, as described in Walter Benjamin’s theories: art has radically changed, becoming an entity that is characterized both by aura and by reproducibility. The post-industrial revolution brought this change to exponential levels of growth, with the emergence of the communicational metropolis to point out a definitively new concept of production and merchandise.The “remix” has become a formal artistic and creative tool. William Burroughs’ cut up, pop art, conceptual art, situationism, street art, net art, advertising, contemporary literature, performative arts, video-art, DJ-ing, VJ-ing have extensively approached the concepts of re-elaboration, of de-structuralization/re-structuralization, of the “false” and of the “reproduced”, of the augmented and of the degraded, transforming them into practices that are at the foundation of contemporary arts.
Stepping away from arts, and entering into more general contexts, digital technologies have created entire new methodologies that are globally used in cultural production and content fruition: streaming, peer to peer networks, virtual realities, hyperlinking, multimedia processing are all techniques that are used to create content. Many (most) of the times by simply creating new structures, elaborations and connections with existing content. This power, provided by digital technologies in contexts that are social and, potentially, universally accessible, is of fundamental importance for the cultural practices of the contemporary era: knowledge sharing, collaborative processes, free circulation of information and contents are the keys that will enable future philosophical and economic models. Even more, these practices are the only ones that are recognizing the true essence of content, information and production in the contemporary era, providing feasible business models that are rewarding and sustainable, and democratic practices that bring the population to face the need for critical approaches to information and knowledge, and to embrace usable tools to appropriate these spaces and practices.

DpSdC proposed all of these concepts through a simple, interactive experience. By collaboratively interacting on pre-existing (and, in some cases, copyrighted) contents, using widely available, autonomously obtainable, simply enactable technologies they could create beautiful compositions and democratically share a living space together with the other participants.
People had fun and learned many things about fine arts: some people were clearly more acknowledged to the history of arts than others, and could guess a Pollock from a Botticelli with just a few strokes of the broom, revealing even small handfuls of pixels in the global composition of remixed paintings. This proved to be a very interesting collaborative educational experience (“oh! that’s a Hopper!”) in which the “game” was effectively (and autonomously) being used as a tool for knowledge sharing.
People were actually gratified by the beauty of the creations they could achieve by remixing with such a simple technique the paintings of Picasso or by De Chirico. They immediately recognized the importance and value of the original content, but they clearly identified the collaborative compositions as “new” products, as different in essence and in their definition of value itself: an entity created by interaction and communication, by an immaterial level of reality, and “meant” to be shared and communicated.

Conclusions

Exhibiting DpSdC has been a wonderfully rewarding experience. The installation was extremely successful in implementing a simple mechanism with infinite dialectic possibilities. Two unexpected, and welcomed, results have proven to be quite interesting among the others exposed in the previous sections: the educational perspectives emerged during the interactions and the opportunities to expand the collaborative processes at the base of the creation/implementation of such technologies.
On the educational side the exhibition at the LPM 2008 created the will to define an experimental project to be executed with children of all ages in which the “game” dimension will be expanded to create learning processes that are based on interaction, collaboration and sensorial perceptive levels. On the production side, people clearly felt the value of the DIY methodology: The availability of technologies that are structurable and enactable by individuals and by communities with few financial resources was immediately perceived as a tool that was truly democratic and of fundamental importance. These considerations have produced the ideas to expand on these areas of activity towards the creation of something that, now, is taking the form of an experimental laboratory in which consumer electronics and widely available technologies are (conceptually and physically) disassembled and reassembled in new ways, in a process of “social reverse-engineering” of technology.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We wish to thank all of the people that made the first exhibition of Degradazione per Sovrapposizione di Corpi possible: the staff and organization crew of Live Performers Meeting 20082, Flyer Communications3, DelirioUniversale.com4, PhagOff5, all of the artists at DegradArte6, Nova1007 of the “il Sole 24 Ore” and Art is Open Source8.

Just back from Liverpool where we attended the (re)Actor3 and HCI2008 events presenting Degradazione per Sovrapposizione di Corpi.

check out how it went with full video coverage here:

> report from Liverpool

connect to the events at

> (re)Actor3

> HCI2008