We will present a new version of the Squatting Supermarkets installation using augmented reality and computer vision technologies to introduce critical practices for consumers promoting sustainability, ecology and ethnographic narratives using ubiquitous technologies.

More info here

http://www.smirproject.eu/mondovi/?p=24&lang=it

and a detailed report really soon.

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 Her research on the interrelations between emotions and the tendency to perform actions is somewhat outdated, but a milestone in the scientific history on these themes.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 ]

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

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

iSee, Augmented Reality for complex shopping narratives

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

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

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

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

Supermarché Ferraille

A narrative layer was added to ordinary reality in all of these actions, creating liberated spaces, free for personal interpretation. Fakes, detournments, distorsion, surealism and noise become tools that can be used to create opportunity for information, reflection and involvement for bodies and subjectivities that finally become aware of the naked king, with a laugh or with a sincere astonishment, opening up to the possibilities offered by doubt, discussion and the sharing of information, dialogue, knowledge and experience.

AdBusters @ Nike

The Net

Open and acessible possibilities are available, but we are still hard put to defining or discovering their grammars, practices and strategies.

Networks bring with them a series of strategies and practices that potentially allow for reconsideration of several fundamental issues.

Creating information in virtuous and collaborative fashons. Producing and disseminating knowledge. Becoming aware of the progressive de-materialization of commodities and taking advantage of it creating new peer to peer production tools and infrastructures. Invading spaces that were untouchable, thanks to ubiquitous technologies, and opening to pluralized, emergent views. Creating spaces for discussion and collaboration everywhere and anytime.

Synthetizing intelligence, competence, knowledge and opportunities using technologies in contemporary ways. Moving away from the languages of corporations and technocracies, and bringing back technologies and protocols to destinations that are more human, corporal,  physical. Artificial intelligence is not to be found in the monstrous automatic responders that cinema and some science fiction has constantly shown us, but more in the possibility to synthetize content using networks and the possibility to participate to processes and reasoning. Robots move away from those things that try to replicate human behaviour, becoming invisible presences integrated into the environment, thought for an artificially-natural use on bodies and relational domains. Interfaces themselves disappear, replaced by gestures, manipulations, traversals, gazes.

Technology disappears and becomes a consolidated part of the world, a kind of Third Landscape in which information, communication, digital emotions and sensations stand side by side with spontaneous vegetation growing along the cracks of the concrete blocks, augmenting space and reality.

Augmenting reality. Adding spaces for interpretation, expression, critique, using technologies.

We are already doing it: on social networks, on blogs, on mobile phones on SPIMEs.

Candida TV

Corporate rush

Observing corporations is truly interesting.

A brand that can afford to avoid curating its network prsence and reputation does not exist anymore, internationally. Digital reputation and presence builders and curators. Creators of non conventional communication campaigns. Crowdsourcers, viral marketers, SEOs, product placers, aggregators, creators of false crowds of digital workers disguising themselves as ordinary digital people infiltrating social graphs, discussion forums, streams, feeds, twits, disseminating messages and suggestions.

These are becoming common practices for large economic and political organizations and are already well established as tools that can be used to obtain strategic margin in the battles for communication and marketing among the large and not-so-large.

Scandals born on the web and transformes on the web in promotion and profit. Theatrical pieces digitally hosted on user generated content websites, in which false individuals (or even real ones… what is the difference?) expressing false claims about true companies using fake videos, followed by real denials, fake facts, false promises and changes in attitude by real corporations.

Corporations constantly use the practices of adoption and assumption.

The free practices of the internet become a territory for seizure by corporations suddenly becoming promoters and supporters of open licenses, of the freedom of speech and expression for people (users, really), of the possibilities to communicate, participate, share.

It is an explosion of twits, posts, comments, competitions, causes and events. It is a dizzy progression of terms passing through to the other side. Corporate managers were once well willing to breaking the legs of anyone having the nerve to commenting on their actions. As of today, corporations provide at least half a dozen digital location in which to relate to them, telling what you think about their work, what colour you would like the next packaging of their product, what hairdo and dress code you appreciate in their managers and, most of all, they ask you to state how much you love the Internet, giving you the possibility di communicate in a oh-so-free way with your favourite corporation.

This is obviously only a purely narrative dimension used to operate further control, not to adopt truly open practices.

Governance and strategies are never shared, and the web and other digital communication channels become a lounge in which the story of the positivist corporation can be told, a place in which to completely eliminate the possibility for real critique, confined in maximum 140 characters of space. Furthermore, their strongholds are more than granted by the fact that corporations communicate the positivistic and possibilistic philosophies that are typical of their online presence and that are shared with the languages of entrepreneurship. Reinterpreted in a wave of california-ness, they suggest imaginaries that are far from the embraced ones ones, built on control and power.

Everything gets encompassed in corporate languages, and stuffed with innovation, change and openness.

Nothing changes.

What’s up?!?

A desperate situation?

Yes, a little. Obviously.

Corporations can still access capital and resources, even if surrounded by the paradoxes of the continuous global ecosystematic crisis.

Attack is systematic, and sees corporations invading cities with technological aperitifs, meetings for creativity, parties for innovation. Centres for creativity are built, and foundations for young entrepreneurs, incubators for the geniuses coming straight out of Twitter. Local administrations and true culture and innovation producers abide, trying and hoping to tap into the resources. They do this even in bona fide , imagining to eventually being able to promote critical or cultural point of view. Nothing of this obviously happens and everything gets fagocitated by the languages and processes of the corporation. Young entrepreneurs become incubated, cultural producers become innovators, scientific researchers turn into R&D, philosophers become strategists, anthropologists become market strategists, artists become creatives.. etcetera, etcetera, etcetera

It’s the corporate magic: margins drift further apart but with internet they can communicate more.

Squat!

Whet/Where/When/Why.

We live in a world that is filled with codes, images and symbols that power dresses in significates, visions, expectations, desires, politics, strategies. Power owns codes, languages and practices, aiming to extend control and to provide people with packaged interpretations, boxed desires, synthetic ethics, and plastic ambitions.

Turning from menace to ex-menace, digital technlogies and communications are bing transformed into further space fr codification. Creating new public spaces, limiting private ones, defining access policies by offering services and infrastructures. And, most of all, formalizing acceptable critical practices: from call centers to twitter: “stop speaking to operator 428! From now you can speak directly to our CEO! You have 140 characters for it! Think about it, he even answers….”

Subvertr by Liens Invisibles

Critique must move on.

Changing languages, places, methodologies, practices. It must go backinto space, bodies, objects, inside architectures, along the paths that we walk along in our daily lives. It must disseminate codes and symbols, touching visceral, behavioural and reflexive domains.

Fortunately, the worls cannot just be reduced into rigid and predefined codes, and there will always be spaces, cracks, interstices between a code and the other. It has been true with architecture, in the buildings of abandoned industries. Psychologically, with the TAZ. Physically, with squats, raves, occupations. And in contents, with subvertising, detournements, surrealism, fakes.

Action must take place in between the codes and create signs, words, shapes, flows. Recontextualizing everything, superimposing meanings, interpretations and spaces to add further ones, out of control. Losing the desire to establish dialogic dynamics with power, and speaking over, beside and below it.

Technology offers opportunities to generalize squatting approaches, making them accessible and diffused.

To adopt squat as a methodology: identifyng un-coded spaces, make them accessible, use them as a communication, action and expression platform.

Reality++

We can add elements to reality. And interpret others.

Mobile technologies, SPIMES, computer vision techniques allow creating connections between physical and information worlds.

These techniques have been used in the past by commercial and military industries, and allow taking information directly onto bodies, objects and architectural spaces. Pattern and image recognition, augmented reality, GPS, sensors, smart tags can be used to tag things and places, creating bridges with the data and communications we want to associate to them. Through ubiquitous applications implemented on mobile phones and devices we can have experience of these connections, we can see them through these devices, creating new sensorialities, new added senses that are not sensible to light, sounds or tastes, but to information, communication, correlation.

It is possible to write in space, above it, creating a new context that coexists with the ordinary world. Living outside of any control, due to its immateriality. I can write anywhere, read anywhere. I can reclaim the buildings of power. I can criticize the places of commerce. I can whisper in urban spaces, directly to the ears of the people. I can scream in places that I am not allowed to enter.

Squatting Supermarkets II

iSee

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

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

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

I grab the pack back up, simultaneously extracting a smartphone from my pocket: a rapid automatic swipe of my thumb on the touchscreen unblocks it.

Colored icons in one hand, a cold, wobbly package in the other. I run through the icons, finding one with an eye insistently staring back at me, white on black. I activate the application and immediatly frame the package in the viewfinder: red, white, blu contour, thick typeface, readable. A short wait: “Product recognized: XYZ”. Options on the screen “Available information: ecological footprint, social responsibility and sustainability, alternative products. Or you can access the public discussion”. 4 icons.

Squatting Supermarkets III

Squatting Supermarkets is a platform. Mental and technological. It is an attitude suggesting the use of several technologies to create added spaces to reality: for critique, expression, action.

The idea was born when different paths merged.

Some of them were extremely physical, such as the  Superfluo,(Superfluous, but also super-fluorescent), a supermarket in Rome we used to go to because its first floor had been squatted with a joyful action built on  music, useless things and queer performances, rediscovering human relations and creative and sustainble forms of economy, while on the other floors amazed people went about their regular shopping.

Superfluo, (Valeria Guarcini, Dr.Doom, Chiba)

Other paths were extremely immaterial, and featured technologies that had been used to reinterpret the web,  search engines, information flows offered by  governments a social networks.

Other ones were designed to invade bodies and minds with  new forms of sensation and communication, creating brand new forms of identity , or bringing back old ones, reimagined in the surreal worlds of virtual realities.

It is NeoRealismo Virtuale, (NeRVi,Virtual NeoRealism), the creation of digital immaterial spaces superimposed on bodies and architectures. Places for narratives, performance, conscience and knowledge flows.

Squatting Supermarkets IV

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

Squatting Supermarkets

Two goals.

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

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

Squatting Supermarkets @ ToShare 2009, Market Forces

Squatting Supermarkets will be shown at Piemonte Share Festival, as the special project of the  “Market Forces” exhibit, in Turin 3rd – 8th November 2009.

Squatting Supermarkets

A permanent installation and an experiencial workshop will show the many faces of the concepts and practices described in Squatting Supermarkets.

A narrative line will tell the backstage story of the market, the life of products, of their producers, their movements, links, aggregations.

The objective is to go beyond the view of the world offered by global powers and to tell the other side of the story, made by people, cities, natural environments, energy resources, poverty, richness, differences.

Here the three steps of the narration.

1) The Environment.An iPhone is placed so that people can look at a supermarket shelf through its visor. By touching on the screen the products visible on the shelf, visitors can visualzie information on their environmental impacts, on the ecologic and social responsibilities of manufacturers, on statistics for global production, assembly, transport. The sounds of the supermarket mix to the voices telling the stories, statistics and information.

2) The Stories.A supermarket shelf comes to life. When people approach the products the sounds, voices and images of their producers animate, creating a relationship with them, telling their stories and the ones of their families, habits, cultures, of the conditions in which they produce those products that ended up being there on the shelves, after travelling thousands of miles.

3) Bodies. After having granted expression to the products, the third part of the installation is dedicated to the expression of people traversing supermarket spaces. The paths, hand movements, sounds of voices and words, of shopping carts, al become a generative video and audio soundtrack.

The experiential workshop (November 5th) will allow us to discuss the technical and conceptual details regarding the design and implementation of the framework and of the installation, and we will also be able to try out other prototypes of devices and applications.

Comprare, indossare, mangiare, usare. Le nostre vite sono piene di oggetti di cui sappiamo realmente poco.
Gli scaffali di negozi e supermercati raccontano storie parziali, fatte di aziende, di produzioni efficienti, di contadini felici che poggiano sacchi di caffè su camion con il logo della Nestlè, di pannelli solari in mezzo alle campagne e sui tetti delle fabbriche, che sembra proprio che abbiano smesso di versare nei fiumi e nell’aria i loro maleodoranti rifiuti chimici, sostituiti da nuovi prodotti collaterali della produzione, dall’odore di fieno e paglia.

iSee, Augmented Reality for complex shopping narratives

Questo guardando in una direzione, quella della produzione. Ma anche dal lato del consumo le corsie del supermercato mostrano famiglie felici (e, mi raccomando, un uomo, una donna e dei bambini; o, al massimo, l’alternativa della persona in carriera, che sostituisce nell’immaginario la famiglia con il business e il fitness), che acquistano con la carta di credito, che si fidano della spiga di grano che, in maniera rassicurante, spicca dalla confezione del prodotto che lanciano nel carrello, proprio come si fidano delle parole “biologico“, “sostenibile” ed “ecologico” che figurano su prodotti di ogni genere.
I grandi punti di distribuzione portano la narrazione a livelli architettonici, progettando la nostra esperienza fin nei minimi dettagli: la sequenza di espositori, scaffali, temi, suggestioni, colori, svolte, strettoie; i suoni rassicuranti che ci annunciano opportunità imperdibili; i temi sociali, ecologici ed economici, per cui tutto il pane è “quello di una volta“, tutti gli shampoo sono “a basso impatto ambientale“, ogni automobile “riduce le emissioni dannose” e ogni sacchetto di caffè è prodotto dai contadini locali su ridenti montagne, dove tutti sorridono tranquilli.
Una visione parziale, progettata, unidirezionale. Non sempre, c’è da dirlo, in malafede: possiamo, per fortuna, scegliere tra migliaia di produttori che hanno oramai scelto la via della sostenibilità, dell’ecologia e del rispetto delle diversità e delle popolazioni deboli. C’è anche da dire, però, che per quel che riguarda questi temi la possibilità di accedere a informazioni e conoscenza diventa un elemento di primaria importanza.

Molte volte l’arte e la creatività hanno affrontato questa suggestione. Vengono in mente i Supermarché Ferraille, e le loro vetrine improvvisate, i loro cartelloni pubblicitari surreali, i loro prodotti distorti. O AdBusters, e le loro campagne di comunicazione sovversive e detournate. O ancora le performance di Banksy, del National Cynical Network. O, in Italia, di Candida TV, di Serpica Naro, di Anna Adamolo, di Luther Blissett, di Liens Invisibles. (… e, per fortuna, di moltissimi altri. Tanto che sarebbe realmente interessante elencare tutte le azioni di questo genere.)

Supermarché Ferraille

In tutte le loro azioni uno strato narrativo si aggiungeva alla realtà “ordinaria“, creando spazi liberati per l’interpretazione personale. Il “fake“, il “detournato“, la “distorsione“, il “surreale” e il “rumore” diventano in questo senso possibilità di informazione, di riflessione e di coinvolgimento per corpi e soggettività che, scoperto il “re nudo” tramite una risata o un sincero stupore, si aprivano all’opportunità di dubitare, di discutere, di informarsi, di creare dialoghi, di condividere informazioni, conoscenze ed esperienze.

AdBusters @ Nike

La Rete

In questo momento siamo di fronte ad una serie di possibilità aperte ed accessibili, ma di cui ancora stentiamo a definire grammatiche, pratiche, strategie.

La rete porta con sè e rende accessibili una serie di tecnologie e di pratiche che, potenzialmente, rimettono in discussione diverse questioni.

Creare informazione in maniera virtuosa e collaborativa. Produrre e disseminare liberamente conoscenza. Rilevare ed utilizzare la progressiva smaterializzazione della merce creando nuovi strumenti di produzione peer to peer, localizzata. Invadere spazi prima “intoccabili”, grazie alle tecnologie mobili, ubique. Creare ovunque ed in ogni momento spazi di discussione e collaborazione.

Sintetizzare intelligenza, competenza, conoscenza e opportunità secondo un uso contemporaneo della tecnologia. Spostandosi, quindi, dai linguaggi “dell’azienda” e della “tecnocrazia“, per riportare tecnologie e protocolli a destinazioni più umane, corporee, fisiche. L’intelligenza artificiale non è più da cercarsi in quei mostruosi risponditori automatici cui ci ha abituato il cinema e certa fantascienza, ma piuttosto nelle possibilità di sintetizzare contenuti grazie alla rete e alle possibilità di partecipare a processi e ragionamenti. I robot prendono le distanze da quei “cosi” che tentano di replicare comportamenti umani, diventando adesso oggetti invisibili, integrati nell’ambiente, pensati per un uso artificialmente-naturale sul corpo e nelle dimensioni relazionali. Le interfacce stesse scompaiono, rimpiazzate da gesti, da manipolazioni, attraversamenti, sguardi.

In tutto questo, la tecnologia “scompare“, diventando un pezzo consolidato del mondo, una sorta di terzo paesaggio in cui accanto ai ciuffi d’erba che crescono tra le crepe del cemento troviamo informazioni, comunicazioni, emozioni e sensazioni digitali, ad aumentare lo spazio, la realtà.

Aumentare la realtà. Aggiungere spazi interpretativi, espressivi e critici, usando le tecnologie.

Lo stiamo già facendo: sui social network, sui blog, con i telefoni cellulari, con gli SPIMEs.

Candida TV

Corporate rush

E’ interessante in questo senso osservare l’atteggiamento delle corporation.

Non esiste più un marchio a livello internazionale che possa permettersi di non curare la propria presenza sulla rete. Curatori di reputazione online e di presenze sui social network. Creatori di campagne di comunicazione non convenzionale. Crowdsourcers, viral marketers, SEOs, product placers, aggregatori, creatori di false folle di operai digitali che, travestiti da persone digitali ordinarie si infiltrino in grafi sociali, in forum di discussione, in stream, twit, feeds per diffondere mesaggi e suggestioni.

Queste stanno diventando prassi per i colossi e, adesso, sono già gli strumenti con cui i meno grandi riescono ad ottenere margini di vantaggio nello scontro delle comunicazioni di marketing.

Scandali nati sul web e trasformati, sempre sul web, in promozione e profitto. Piece di teatro digitale ospitati nei siti di user generated content, in cui soggetti falsi (o veri.. cosa importa?) denunciavano fatti veri di aziende vere con video falsi, a cui seguivano smentite vere, fatti falsi, promesse false e falsi cambiamenti di atteggiamento da parte delle reali corporations.

Le quali seguono comunque la pratica dell’adozione e dell’assunzione.

Le pratiche libertarie della rete diventano così territorio di conquista, con le corporation che diventano improvvisamente fautori e sostenitori delle licenze aperte, della possibilità di espressione delle persone (degli utenti, in realtà), delle possibilità di comunicare, partecipare, condividere.

E’ un’esplosione di twit, di post, di commenti, di concorsi, di cause, di eventi. E’ un vertiginoso aumentare di termini che “passano dall’altra parte“. Se fino a ieri i dirigenti erano pronti a spezzarti le gambe se osavi commentare o anche semplicemente suggerire, oggi ti mettono a disposizione almeno una mezza dozzina di luoghi digitali in cui raccontare cosa ne pensi del loro operato, di che colore vorresti la prossima confezione del loro prodotto, di quale pettinatura e stile di abbigliamento apprezzi in un dirigente e, soprattutto, di quanto ami internet e la possibilità di colloquiare così apertamente con la tua corporation preferita.

Questa è, naturalmente, una dimensione puramente narrativa utilizzata non per adottare una reale apertura, quanto per operare ulteriore controllo.

Non vengono mai condivise governance e strategie, e il web e le comunicazioni digitali diventano un salotto in cui narrare le gesta del corporativo positivista, un luogo in cui eliminare di fatto ogni possibilità di critica reale, ridotta a scambi di massimo 140 caratteri. Oltretutto assumendo posizioni di forza garantite dall’esprimere filosofie positive e possibilistiche, di origine californiana, che suggeriscono immaginari ben lontani da quelli del controllo e del potere abbraciati dalle realtà corporative.

Tutto viene inglobato nel linguaggio aziendalista, infarcito di “innovazione“, “cambiamento” ed “apertura“.

Nulla, in realtà, cambia.

What’s up?!?

Situazione disperata?

Un po’ sì, naturalmente. Nel pieno del paradosso della crisi globale ecosistematica sono ancora le corporations a poter disporre e distribuire fondi e risorse, grazie a pratiche oscure (almeno per noi “assenti” dai vertici delle corporazioni stesse) e al fatto che, semplicemente, possano accedere ai fondi “finti” ed “inesistenti” creati grazie a pratiche finanziarie piuttosto che produttive.

L’attacco è sistematico, e vede le corporazioni invadere le città con aperitivi tecnologici, meeting della creatività, serate per l’innovazione. Sorgono centri per i creativi, fondazioni per i giovani imprenditori, incubatori per i geni usciti direttamente da Twitter. Le amministrazioni locali e i reali produttori di cultura ed innovazione si piegano, cercando di attingere alle risorse. Anche in buona fede, magari, pensando di riuscire a promuovere punti di vista critici o culturali. Ovviamente nulla di ciò accade, e tutto viene fagocitato dai linguaggi e dai processi dell’azienda per cui i giovani imprenditori si ritrovano “incubati“, i produttori di cultura diventano “innovators“, i ricercatori diventano “R&D“, i filosofi diventano “strategists“, gli antropologi diventano “market strategists“, gli artisti diventano “creativi“, eccetera, eccetera, eccetera.

La magia si applica ancora: i margini si allontanano ancora sempre di più. Solo che, con internet, si possono parlare molto di più.

Squat!

Cosa/Dove/Quando/Perchè.

Siamo in un mondo pieno di codici, pieno di immagini e di simboli che il potere veste di significati, visioni, aspettative, desideri, politiche, strategie. L’appropriazione, ad opera del potere, di codici, linguaggi e pratiche è volta ad estendere il proprio controllo, e a fornire alle persone interpretazioni preconfezionate, desideri in scatola, valori sintetici e ambizioni di plastica.

Da minaccia ad ex-minaccia, le comunicazioni e le tecnologie digitali si stanno trasformando in ulteriore spazio per la codifica. Coniare nuovi spazi pubblici, delimitare quelli privati, stabilire le politiche dell’accesso e della fruibilità offrendo infrastrutture e servizi. E, soprattutto, formalizzare i processi di critica: dal call center a twitter. “Non parlare più con l’operatore 428! Da oggi puoi parlare direttamente con il nostro Amministratore Delegato! Hai 140 caratteri per farlo! Pensa che, addirittura, risponde...”.

Subvertr by Liens Invisibles

La critica si deve spostare.

Cambiare linguaggi, luoghi, metodologie, pratiche. Deve tornare nello spazio, nel corpo, sugli oggetti, dentro le architetture, nei percorsi e nei luoghi del nostro quotidiano. Deve creare e disseminare codici e simbologie, toccando i domini viscerali, comportamentali e riflessivi.

Il mondo, fortunatamente, non può ricondursi a codifiche rigide e predefinite e, quindi, sono e saranno sempre presenti spazi, varchi, interstizi tra un codice e l’altro. E’ stato vero architettonicamente, con i palazzi dimenticati dall’industria. Psicologicamente, con le TAZ. Fisicamente, con i centri sociali, i rave, gli squat, le occupazioni. E nei contenuti, con il subvertising, il detournement, il surrealismo.

Agire tra i codici, in mezzo alle crepe tra le codifiche, e creare segni, parole, forme e flussi. Ricontestualizzare tutto, sovrapporci significati, interpretazioni e spazi per aggiungerne ancora altri, al di fuori del controllo. Perdere il desiderio di dialogare con il potere, per parlare e agire sopra, di lato, sotto.

La tecnologia può offrire adesso opportunità di generalizzare tutti questi approcci, e di trasformarli in strumenti diffusi e accessibili.

Adottare lo squat come metodologia: identificare spazi non codificati, renderli accessibili, usarli come piattaforma di comunicazione, azione ed espressione.

Realtà++

Possiamo aggiungere elementi al reale. E reinterpretarne altri.

Le tecnologie mobili, gli SPIME, le tecniche di computer vision consentono di creare collegamenti tra il mondo fisico e quello dell’informazione.

Queste tecniche, utilizzate fino ad ora dall’industria e dai militari, portano l’informazione direttamente su corpi, oggetti ed architetture. Il riconoscimento di pattern e immagini, la realtà aumentata, i GPS, i sensori, gli smart tag permettono di marcare cose e luoghi, creando un ponte tra questi e i dati che li riguardano. Usando applicazioni ubique, magari implementate sui telefoni cellulari e i dispositivi mobili di nuova generazione, è possibile avere esperienza di questi collegamenti, di “vederli” attraverso i dispositivi che, di fatto, portano nel reale delle nuove sensibilità, dei sensi aggiuntivi che non sono reattivi a luce, suono o odori, ma all’informazione, alla comunicazione, alle correlazioni.

E’ possibile creare una scrittura nello spazio, sopra di esso, sovrapposta e coesistente al mondo ordinario. E fuori da ogni controllo, in virtù della propria immaterialità. Posso scrivere dovunque, e leggere dovunque. Posso rivendicare nei palazzi del potere. Posso criticare nei luoghi del commercio. Posso sussurrare alle orecchie delle persone negli spazi urbani. Posso urlare dentro i luoghi a me inaccessibili.

Squatting Supermarkets II

iSee

Svoltare l’angolo della corsia. Freddo. Prodotti surgelati. Rumori di carrelli, suoni di bottiglie, plastiche, buste, cartone, rotolar di pasta e cereali. Luce completamente bianca. Scompaiono o si appiattiscono completamente i rossi e rimangono le luci riflesse sulla plastica delle confezioni seriali di alimenti standard dalle forme geometricamente accettabili.

Freddo e parole dietro e davanti, richieste di informazioni, chiamate verso altre corsie, richieste di consensi, smarrimenti.

Mentre sollevo il pacco scelto tra tanti tutti uguali, un piccolo incidente dietro di me: si scontrano due carrelli; vomitano parallelepipedi di cartone, reti in fibra sintetica con dentro arance tutte lucide ed uguali, bottiglie dalle etichette geometricamente psicoattive. La piccola burocrazia dello scontro finisce e tutto riprende nell’ordine: le persone ricominciano a seguire i propri vettori direzionali, dettati dalle abitudini e dalle offerte speciali.

Riafferro il pacco ed estraggo al contempo il cellulare dalla tasca, facendo scorrere il controllo di sblocco con un rapido quanto automatico e calibrato strisciare del mio pollice sullo schermo tattile.

Icone colorate in una mano, una busta fredda e molle nell’altra, piena di mozzarelle dozzinali. Scorro le icone e ne trovo una con un occhio, insistente, bianco su nero. Attivo l’applicazione e subito inquadro con lo schermo del cellulare il logo sulla busta. Premo sul touch screen un pulsante che, nuovamente, raffigura un occhio. L’immagine si ferma, immobilizzando il centro della busta, i suoi colori e le sue forme: rosso, bianco, contorno blu, carattere spesso, leggibile. Una breve attesa. “Prodotto riconosciuto: Mozzarella XYZ”. Le opzioni sullo schermo: “Sono disponibili informazioni su Impatto ecologico, Responsabilità sociale e sostenibilità, Prodotti alternativi. Oppure accedi alla discussione.” 4 icone.

Squatting Supermarkets III

Squatting Supermarkets è una piattaforma. Mentale e tecnologica. E’ un atteggiamento che suggerisce l’uso di diverse tecnologie per creare spazi aggiuntivi alla realtà ordinaria: spazi per la critica, per l’espressione, per l’azione.

L’idea nasce dalla congiunzione di percorsi differenti.

Alcuni estremamente fisici, come quelli che si incontravano all’interno di Superfluo, il supermercato di Roma il cui primo piano è stato a lungo invaso da una gioiosa azione fatta di musica, cose inutili e performance queer, riscoprendo relazioni umane e forme di economia creativa e sostenibile.

Superfluo, (Valeria Guarcini, Dr.Doom, Chiba)

Altri estremamente immateriali in cui le tecnologie venivano usate per reinterpretare il web, i motori di ricerca, i flussi di informazioni offerti da governi e siti di social networking.

Altri ancora a invadere corpi e menti con nuove forme di sensazione e comunicazione, creando identità completamente nuove per forma e sostanza, o riportandone in vita di vecchie, reimmaginate nel surreale mondo delle realtà virtuali.

E’ il NeoRealismo Virtuale, la creazione di spazi immateriali digitali sovrapposti a corpi ed architetture, come luoghi della narrazione, della performance, del flusso di conoscenza e coscenza.

Squatting Supermarkets IV

Squatting Supermarkets combina diverse piattaforme: iSee, una applicazione iPhone per la creazione di sistemi di informazione e comunicazione localizzati su loghi e simboli; Ubiquitous Publishing, un insieme di tecnologie usate per creare contenuti territoriali ed architettonici, fruibili direttamente dai luogi attraversati usando dispositivi mobili e realtà aumentata; architettura rel:attiva, DpSdC e OneAvatar, una serie di piattaforme tecnologiche in grado di collegare corpi e architetture ad internet e ai mondi virtuali.

Squatting Supermarkets

L’obiettivo è duplice.

Da un lato, mettere a sistema pratiche e tecnologie, per creare un framework aperto per creare spazi di realtà aumentata, per collegare corpi e informazioni, per realizzare forme di interattività tecnologica accessibili e naturali.

Dall’altro lato attuare azioni e avviare narrative multiautoriali, diffuse, emergenti.

Squatting Supermarkets @ ToShare 2009, Market Forces

Squatting Supermarkets sarà presente al Piemonte Share Festival, come special project nell’ambito della mostra “Market Forces“, a Torino dal 3 all’8 Novembre 2009.

Squatting Supermarkets

Una installazione permanente ed un worshop esperienziale esporranno in varie forme i concetti e le pratiche descritte in Squatting Supermarkets.

Una trama narrativa mirerà a raccontare il retroscena del mercato, della vita dei prodotti, dei loro produttori, dei loro spostamenti, accoppiamenti, accorpamenti.

L’obiettivo è oltrepassare la visione del mondo offerta dai poteri globali e raccontare l’altra parte della storia, fatta di persone, città, ambienti naturali, risorse energetiche, povertà, ricchezze, differenze.

Tre sono i movimenti della narrazione.

1) l’Ambiente. Un iPhone è disposto in modo da permettere ai visitatori di guardare uno scaffale di un supermercato attraverso il visore. Nell’inquadratura, tocando sullo schermo i prodotti sullo scaffale, appaiono informazioni sul loro impatto ambientale, sulle politiche ecologiche e di responsabilità sociale dei loro produttori, sulle statistiche globali della loro produzione, assemblaggio, trasporto. I suoni del supermercato si miscelano a quelli di voci narranti, che raccontano le statistiche e le informazioni.

2) le Storie. Lo scaffale di un supermercato prende vita. Avvicinandosi ai prodotti le voci, i suoni e le immagini dei loro produttori si animano, a stabilire un rapporto con i frequentatori del supermercato, a cui raccontano la propria storia e quella delle loro famiglie, le loro abitudini, le condizioni in cui producono i prodotti che vanno a finire lì, sullo scaffale.

3) i Corpi. Dopo aver dato la parola ai prodotti, la terza parte è dedicata all’espressione delle persone che attraversano gli spazi del supermercato. I percorsi, il movimento delle mani e di altre parti del corpo, e i suoni e le parole di soggeti, carrelli, oggetti, diventano una colonna sonora e una ambientazione visiva generative per l’ultima parte dell’installazione.

Il workshop esperienziale (il 5 Novembre 2009) ci permetterà di raccontare i dettagli tecnici e concettuali dietro la realizzazione del framework e dell’installazione e di sperimentare dispositivi ed applicazioni.

Fake Press. Ubiquitous Publishing.

Ubiquitous publishing and Ubiquitous Anthropology. The next-step in publishing practices and platforms, united with a research on the possibilities offered by location based technologies and by novel approaches to knowledge dissemination, communication and expression. We (Luca Simeone and Salvatore Iaconesi) presented our research at Frontiers of Interaction V in Rome (June 2009), together with the first two applications and an open call.

Everything starts off from the idea of a contemporary evolution of publishing practices. Technologies, the possibility to create platforms to enable relation, expression and emotion and the availability of tools to share, disseminate and interact on knowledge and cultural productions, are all factors that made us feel the fundamental importance of designing new concepts and practices.

The scenarios described by location-based media, by the possibility to mix and cross the borders across different media, and the infinite spaces created by augmented reality were the influences that shaped our research.

We investigated on how technologies and new forms of interactions with other people and with places, time, architectures and objects would change the ways in which information can be created, communicated, shared and distributed. From an anthropological point of view we asked ourselves where would faces and voices emerge from, the self-expressions and representations of people and of their identities. And we also questioned the destinations for these informations, observing the fluid, mutating scenarios that surround us, with wireless, localized, immaterial, augmented layers of reality stratifying on top of the merely-physical one, creating totally new worlds in which information can become part of bodies, of architectures, of spaces, walls, trees, objects.

Displays, interstices, coordinates, tags And gestures, natural interfaces and moving, walking. Using the body to move through space as in an action of reading. We were truly intrigued by the transofrmation of space, by its augmentation with new narratives, new possibilities for the expression of the multiple voices and points of view that constitute the world.

So we designed our very own interpretaton for the idea of Ubiquitous Publishing. Cross-device, cross-medial, multi-author, emergent narratives.

The first idea was iSee, an application that allows for the creation of narratives on logos and brands. The application allows people to use their mobile phones to extract information directly from logo images: take a picture of your favourite detergent and, if the logo is already part of the collaborative database, you can get information from it.

Logo identifies brand, identifies company.

We suggested some possibilities, showing informations on social responsibility, on environmental policies, on the pollution rates connected to product manufacturing. Products come alive and communicate, in a simple, accessible form of augmented reality in which information is embedded into objects.

The second idea was Ubiquitous Anthropology.

A location-based platform allows for the positioning of the expressions, emotions and perspectives of multiple voices. These can be accessed through mobile technologies directly from the geographical locations, allowing people to experience and come in contact with other’s points of view and ideas.

In this form the world itself becomes “readable”. Reading by crossing spaces and architectures.

Reading other people’s texts, watching the images and videos they captured with their cameras, observing their evolution through time an through relations with other people.

The first application shown on this theme, was created by positioning onto the territory the results of a foundamental research by professor Massimo Canevacci and several students and researchers, who travelled many times to Mato Grosso, Brasil, and performed researches on the Bororo. Videos and images created by the Bororo were positioned onto the geography, thus creating a layer of interpretation of land, events and relations that is not covered in any way by classical media, and that allow us to “read” directly on the territory how the members of these populations interpret their land, the other populations they interact and relate with, their culture.

The system has provided as a incredibly useful tool to communicate these population’s political instances. The Bororo are not represented in Brasil’s institutions, allowing for unlimited exploitation of their lands and people. The possibilities offered by the platforms allowed us to write Bororo’s political instances, their desires and expectations, directly in the “places of power” of Brasil’s government. In Brasilia, several institutional buildings have been tagged with the videos and texts of their political demands, thus creating the only form of institutional presence that is currently allowed and accessible for them. In the idea that giving people the control on media and on their own expression and communication is possibly the only viable way to freedom and auto-determination.

The two examples constitute real applications that will be made available and downloadable online on the FakePress website in just a few days from the date of creation of this post. They are currently being enhanced to form functioning frameworks that can be used for these and other projects.

Some of the application’s content is already available on FakePress, and the full applications for web and iPhone will be available for download in a couple of days.

We are curently promoting the call for participation to the project, stimulating the discussion on the next products to publish with Fake Press.

So, if you have a book, research or other content you are going to publish, and you want so explore with us the possibilities to publish it in these ways, don’t hesitate to contact us.

- below a surreal interview I had to suffer from at the end of the show :)   -

Frontiers of Interaction

probabily the most interesting interaction design event in Italy. It’s the most interesting (and only one :) ) in Rome, for sure.

We’ve been there to present FakePress, our next-step publishing house, with two “ubiquitous” projects: iSee, interstitial narratives for shopping centers, and Ubiquitous Anthropology, location based technologies for ethnographic research.

But more on that later. First of all: the meeting.

Frontiers of Interacton V took place in the beautiful Acquario Romano. We’ve been there from the day before, setting up screens, projections, sounds and kilometers of cables.

The meeting originates from idearium.org, a community in which designers, technologists, anthropologists and creatives of all sorts meet sharing points of view on contemporary society, and on the ways in which it is shaped and mutated through technology and its practices.

The meeting shares the same conceptual setup: people come there and, basically, show what they’re up to. People of all sorts: from international superstars of interaction design to students and younger innovators ready, energetic and willing to showcase their creations.

This year (it is the fifth edition), there have been several interesting highlights.

Complexity, visualization, the emergence of natural interfaces, gestuality. And an ever more focused awareness on the needs to integrate a deep understanding of the world that is around us, ecologically, socially and politically.

The hybridization of practices and the idea of human awareness were recurring concepts in the contributions.

As Daniele Galiffa of VISup, showing the ways in which data visualizations can rise the level of awareness, by communicating in expressive ways environmental impacts, cause-effect relations, world mutation. And describing the frontier for infovisualizations and infoaesthetics, which is the representation of social data, and the delegation of the tools for visualization to the “social”.

Or the wonderful Adam Greenfield, with his “Elements of a networked Urbanism“, which managed to perfectly avoid the declaration of yet another manifesto of some kind, and instead presented an observation of the emergence of new patterns in cityscapes. A series of “before” and “after” scenarios, highlighting some really interesting points of view.  Entirely new ways of using cities, unthninkable even just a few years ago. From wayfinding to wayshowing, Adam showed many mutations in which social dynamics truly materialize themselves, allowing people to actively share their views on the world. Even bypassing the idea of “optimization”, typical of previous designs. The ideas, for example, of systems telling you the “best” way how to get from point A to point B cuts off several parts of your experience of cities, which are also composed of several “inefficiencies” that are far from being “bad”, providing you social experiences, enjoyment and rythms, feelings and well-being. “Noise” as not being a negative experience, but a creative, cultural one.

David Orban also presented a truly interesting point of view with his Consciousness Panopticon, introducing the Singularity University and showing the trends in which various people are getting ready for the progression through which we are living, in technological evolution, to our own ability to understand what is happening around us.

Or professor Liam Bannon, demoloshing the idea of “intelligent” devices, or the romantic suggestions coming from artificial intelligence, and promoting the perspective of technology that supports creative and critical thinking, in the development of an etherogeneously positive and (sociallly) interactive world.

Andrea Gaggioli presented in his “Ecologia Partecipativa” a set of ecologic scenarios and the tools through which we all can research, observe and react to our impacts on the environment.

Then Carlo Maria Medaglia of Rome’s CATTID multi-faculty center, presenting some stunnig projects on mobility, technological approaches to disabilities and, in general, several forms of open source approaches to create functional enviroments that are embedded in the natural, urban and social environment, from infrastructure, to hardware, to software.

And other, many things which you will find documented of FoI’s  website.

and, in the next upcoming article, we’ll describe our own personal contribution: Ubiquitous Anthropology, by Luca Simeone and Salvatore Iaconesi.

More info at Frontiers of Interactions

Here some videos