Enlarge Your Consciousness in 4 Days 4 Free

Here are some updates to the project Enlarge Your Consciousness in 4 Days 4 Free

Here is the event on the website of BTF Gallery

Here on Artribune

Here is the official announcement on ArteFiera OFF

Here is a wonderful article on D’Ars Magazine

And on this issue of Espoarte you can find an article about the project

Here is a slideshow of the backstage, preparing the exhibit:

and here’s a slideshow about the exhibit:

More information and materials about the work are coming up in the next few days.

“the most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.” Andy Warhol

EYCI4D4F Diagram 1

Introduction

In this essay, we describe the ideas which led us to participate to the “Enlarge Your Consciousness in 4 Days 4 Free” project, together with Mezzapelle-Deriu.

The mutation of the human being in contemporary times is characterized by drastic speed and by powerful, ubiquitous effects, which are transforming not only ourselves, but also the form and function of the whole planet, including the ways in which we learn, communicate, relate, work, think. And the ways in which we experience emotions.

Art is Open Source has often dealt with the theories and practices of human emotion.

Emotions are not “action”, yet they are the energy that creates action. They are the tool/effect through which we experience the world and with which we decide to take action, and in which direction.

And emotions have profoundly changed in the last decade or so, due to our renewed experience of the world, our re-built perception of space and time, our re-created ways of establishing presence, identity, relations, collaborations. Due to the digital membrane which has been covering all our planet and which is now becoming indistinguishable from the rest of the planet itself.

Multiple types of discussion can be started up while engaging these issues: from the most futuristic ones to the most critical. Incredible positive scenarios perfectly match horrible ones.

In this never-ending struggle between adoption and critique, we choose the way of Nature. The way of Nature, in the sense that it is useless and impossible for us human beings to “decide” what is natural, what is unnatural, what is good and what is bad. What we can do, as free human beings, is to observe the constant, fluid, continuous mutation which we experience, and adopt ethical approaches in making our own decisions.

Human beings, the planet and Nature, change, mutate. This mutation includes all the technologies, networks, dangers and opportunities which we’re currently facing. We can observe, try to gain the best possible understanding of things (from our point of view, determined by personal history, cultural background… ), share knowledge, information and perspectives with people, and act.

Enlarge Your Consciousness in 4 Days 4 Free is about this.

A project through which we reflect on the mutation of human emotions.

Background

The web is increasingly relied upon as a reflection of reality (Bray et al, 2007).

This fact gives rise to great challenges for human beings, who are in a state of great transformation of the ways in which they perceive their identity, privacy, relationships, societies, cities, and in which they perceive their presence and role in the planet.

Every action we perform in our daily lives has measurable effects in terms of digital information: wether we turn the lights on in our living room, buy an apple at the supermarket, use our mobile phone to contact our friends to decide to go to see a movie and, in possibly more explicit ways, whenever we study, work and entertain ourselves using one of the multiple internet-aware processes which have started to be progressively more present in our common routine.

It is possible to recognize the fact that a digital information membrane has covered the totality of our world (Pickles, 2004, Mitchell 2005, Zook & Graham 2007), mutating our perception of the spaces, times and modalities in which we conduct our lives.

It is possible to describe the emergence of novel forms of sensoriality through which we experience the world, deeply connected to digital interactions, technologies and networks, or even externalized onto digital devices. (McLuhan, 1964; de Kerckhove, 1997).

Simple experiments allow to gain awareness of this: a simple mobile phone call will force us to move through space in the case of absent network coverage, just as an additional sense outside of the conventional boundaries of our bodies and externalized onto the mobile phone which makes us aware of electromagnetic fields of specific ranges of frequency.

Just like our brains have shown to be able to mutate, to adapt to drastic effects due to impairment or damage (Doidge, 2007), we are experiencing deep changes due to this re-structuring of reality, to integrate the digital layers of the world into our common perception.

This process has already taken place to a certain degree, as we completely give for granted a series of manifestations of this part of our neo-reality in the tasks which we face each day.

Younger generations show distinct transformations in the ways in which they learn, focus, relate, collaborate, work (Turkle, 1995), and in the ways n which they perceive their own identity, privacy, and the definitions of public and private spaces (as in West, Lewis and Currie, 2009; Pearson, 2009; Thompson, 2011; among many others).

The continuous processes through which we simultaneously construct and experience our reality (de Certeau, 1984) see specific effects from these mutations, as our perception digitally changes, and our ways of constructing/interacting with the world progressively adopt digital tools and have digital characteristics.

For example, the idea of recognizing the urban environments described by Lynch in 1960 updates to the concept of Digiplace expressed by Zook and Graham in 2007.

In this, emotions play a crucial role.

In Myer’s definition (2004) emotion involves “physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience”. It is the way in which we relate to the world and the processes which take place in it: it is not action, but the thrust which creates it.

This centrality of emotions has led multiple scholars and practitioners to place the study of emotion at focal points in multiple disciplines, across Neurobiology, Social Sciences, Cognitive Sciences, Psychology, Computer Science, Robotics, Ethnography, Economy, Design, Architecture.

Theory of emotions is crucial in the analysis of organizational processes, design and multiple areas of communication.

Classical researches on the Theory of Emotions have produced multiple approaches and classifications, such as the ones found in Descartes (353, 1989 edition), Spinoza (1656, 2006 edition), Hobbes (1651, 1976 edition), Plutchik (1980), Elkman (1999) and Prinz (2004), describing evolutionary, social, psychological, dimensional and other types of models with reference to the general nature of human beings or to the specifics of different cultures around the planet.

EYCI4D4F Diagram 3

Emotions are understood to be the turning point according to which we identify, use and create information.

“The central focus of a unified theory of information behavior is the process by which users adapt to the information environment and make use of it for personal and social purposes. By making this adaptation process explicit, the model reveals how the ubiquitous information environment can be viewed as an affective information environment because all information needs, seeking, reception, and use is processed through emotions.” Diane Nahl, Danila Bilal (2007)

Therefore, emotions are placed at the center of strategies and design processes, as both tools and measures of experience.

Our mutated perception of the world through technologies and networks has changed or emotional approaches, as well: the fact that we experience the world and that we enact our actions using digital tools (or, more in general, using modalities which have clearly identifiable digital characteristics, either directly or indirectly), also shifts our emotional domains online.

Designers have incorporated the affective dimensions of technology to the extent that the expression “emotional design” has become identified in ergonomics as “Kansei Engineering” or “pleasurable engineering” (Green & Jordan, 2002; Grimsaeth, 2005; Jordan, 2000).

According to Don Norman, “the focus of emotional design is to make our lives more pleasurable” (Van Hout, 2004).

Yet the experience in the merged analog-digital reality which emerges from the observation of the contemporary world is profoundly different than the precedent one.

“When reading fiction or watching a movie we enter the imaginary world even if we remain aware of its imaginary nature. We suspend disbelief and though, on one level, we accept the fictional reality of the characters, on another we recognize that the situation is make-believe. In cyberspace this recognition is often absent.” Aharon Ben-Ze’ev, 2004.

This comment from Ben-Ze’ev describes in synthesis the different directions according to which the observation of human experience can move along.

In the observation of emotions, it is possible to observe how a constructivist approach is used in experience by human beings.

Identity, public/private spaces, privacy, are all the object of personal creation, thanks to the characteristics of the media and tools which take part to the process.

The possibility of freely creating digital content and to attach it to objects and spaces, transforms the world into a public, accessible, free read/write platform (Iaconesi, Persico, 2011).

This modality progressively takes onto our daily lives.

As Turkle (1995) tells us, the users who are “logged on to one MUD or another for at least forty hours a week. It seems misleading to call what [they do] there playing. [they spend their] time constructing a life that is more expansive than the one [they live] in physical reality.”

Enlarge Your Consciousness

Enlarge Your Consciousness in 4 Days 4 Free grabs emotions in real-time from social networks and uses them to gain better understanding of the way human beings have transformed  by using digital technologies and networks.

A real-time process has been designed to extract real-time public information from multiple social networks. Specifically, the following social networks are used:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Flickr
• FourSquare

Each social network requires specific modalities to be able to read information from it.

For example Twitter allows usage of public APIs of multiple types to query its real-time systems and access information that can be freely used in applications and mash-ups, as long as a series of requirements are met (including correct mentioning of sources, presentation details, the enforcement of restrictions to the types of allowed practices to be performed using the data, etc. ). Using these APIs it is possible to capture, in real-time, the content produced by users relative to specific keywords, timeframes, geographical locations, hashtags etc. .

Foursquare offers a similar mechanism, allowing developers to access real-time data using public APIs. Using these techniques it is possible to extract real-time information about the places people visit (check-ins), the information they value or suggest (tips) and other information which can be easily inferred by analyzing data (for example, great deals  of information can be understood by analyzing the times and time-patterns according to which people access different locations, characterising them as work-places, entertainment venues, commercial places etc).

Flickr also offers extensive support to developers, allowing them to access a variety of APIs which permit multiple types of real-time searches and the creation of wonderful meta-services.

Facebook is the most difficult social network from which to harvest information without breaking any law :) 

While it offers multiple forms of integration to other applications (e.g.: the possibility for users to connect their social network presence to online applications, thus obtaining a variety of different results) Facebook seems to be oriented in ways according to which all possibility to systematically observe societies and communities remain its sole possibility.

Luckily, this enforcement is not too strict, and, together with our lawyers and with the support of the international developer community (including some people at Facebook itself, who have been proved to be very helpful in this, even at our explicit statement that “we are trying to produce a system which lawfully extracts information about the emotions of online users, for non-commercial goals, in respect to your terms of service, and with the sole objective of producing tools for art and scientific research”).

It turns out that by using a combination of the functions offered by the Graph API and with a careful dosage of tuning, it is possible to capture, anonymize and process information from Facebook, in ways which have been proved very useful for our research.

Several automatic processes have been setup to capture information from the aforementioned social networks using these techniques.

The texts, comments, tips, image/video captions published by online users were anonymized and processed using Natural Language Analysis.

Multiple techniques have been developed and documented to analyze textual information to be able to extract from it valuable information.

It is now common practice to process texts to extract information regarding the emotions and issues engaged by user contributions to online discussions, even sometimes being able to identify the places which are being discussed, even when explicit geographical coordinates are not provided in the payload of the messages by using GPS or Assisted GPS technologies.

In EYCI4D4F we decided to avoid using keywords-based analysis, as it often leads to multiple problems:

• words are often used in multiple ways, which cause erroneous interpretation
• words are invented all the time, even by simply using creative spelling for them
• human beings are really creative, and tend to express emotions in multiple ways
• the same words in two different cultures can represent entirely different meanings

Information is processed using Natural Language Analysis by applying techniques which have been inferred by existing highly effective techniques, such as the ones described in the researches of Gentile/Lanfranchi/others, Leidner/Lieberman, Quin/Xiao/others, Shi/Baker mentioned in the references at the bottom of this article.

The processing techniques were prepared using a set of linguistic templates (similar to regular expressions) created in 29 languages to identify syntactical/structural text patterns which would highlight the user expressing an emotional condition.

This approach led us to being able to systematically filter out with a high level of success (around 93%) messages expressing emotions.

Using a large vocabulary (this, too, in 29 languages, including around 25000 elements) of words which are related to the specific emotions, we have in this way been able to classify 16 base emotions according to Robert Plutchik’s classification. In the obtained classification each message was associated to a weighting parameter according to which a certain emotion was expressed. Each message could be associated to more than one emotion (in accordance with Plutchik’s classification which sees complex emotions being represented as linear combinations of base ones).

The results, thus, looked like:

[user XYZ][message KWX][JOY:n1; SURPRISE: n2...]

In this structure:

• XYZ is an anonymized version of the user identification strings used on social networks
• KWX is a reference number of the content, to be able to identify user activity and relational activity
• n1, n2… are numbers from 1 to 1000 describing the intensity according to which the single emotion has been identified in the message

This information was continuously captured from social networks.

A series of services was designed to that they could be periodically queried (polling) to get constant updated on the most recent emotions that were captured from social networks.

These services were used to pilot a series of information visualizations and a physical installation.

A first visualization was the one shown in the video below:

Here, messages are shown at the top of the screen, together with the color blocks representing the emotions which were found in the message.

As soon as a new message is captures, it is added to the central visualization, and connected through color-coded curves to the blocks representing the single base emotions. If the message expresses complex emotions, more than one connection is made.

At the bottom, a bar graph shows the recent intensities of the base emotions. The values of the bar graph are used in an additive sound synthesis process to generate the everchanging sounds which could be heard at the exhibit at BTF Gallery in Bologna for the presentation of the project.

Here below is a sample of a few minutes of the generated sounds:

EYCI4D4F generative sounds

another visualization can be seen in the following video:

Here each block represents a single emotion, as captured in real-time from social networks. In the visualization each block was very small, and it gave a sense of the enormous amount of data which was being captured.

Another visualization allowed to understand the sequences of emotions which were expressed by users:

EYCI4D4F diagram 4

Here three levels showed how one emotion evolved into another for multiple used in the most recent few minutes, effectively showing the trends of complex emotions expressed by individuals.

A further visualization showed the geographical distributions of emotions around the world:

EYCI4D4F diagram 2

The information about the most recent emotions received from the harvesting system was transformed into signals which powered the motion of the installation.

In the installation 16 jellies were created and associated to two intensity levels of the 8 base emotions in Plutchik’s classification.

EYCI4D4F installation

Each jelly was installed onto a silicon base and a step motor was connected to its bottom , so that it would receive a mechanical stimulation from it.

Whenever an emotion was sensed, a signal was sent to the respective motor, thus causing the vibration of the jelly.

A video projector mounted on the ceiling of the exhibition space projected onto the jelly the profile image of the user who generated the emotion.

EYCI4D4F installation

The result was a matrix showing in real-time the expression of emotions on social networks, through a suggestive, poetic physical visualization, also alluding to the variability and instability of human emotions through the typology of the motion of jellies.

Conclusions

One aspect of this project was considered striking from everyone involved: it seemed incredible how substantially easy it had been to capture and process all this information from unaware internet users.

The captured information was public, to all effect. Yet the messages publicly expressed on social networks engage important themes, and describe to a high level of detail the approaches which each user adopts in confronting to news, relationships and multiple subjects, also describing the users’ tastes, likes, dislikes, wishes, desires and, as we have learned, emotions.

This “public intimacy” represents a fundamental issue for research and discussion of the contemporary era, also because it represents the main driver of online service providers’ business models: the possibility to harvest, process, classify and sell this information in multiple ways still represents the biggest money-making methodology which is available to anyone deciding to create a business using technologies and networks.

The modalities according to which this information is captured is also remarkable.

Internet users continuously sign complicated “Terms of Service” agreements when they access online services: these texts are complex and long, and people read them only rarely and understand them even less.

While there is a general understanding about the fact that the information produced through our behavior is the object of business of service providers, this notion substantially gets lost during what is perceived to be a public, open, transparent set of platforms, in which people perform common routine activity without worrying too much about what implication their actions could have.

To remark these issues, we decided to add a final part to the project.

EYCI4D4F users for sale at 9.99 euros

A set of boxes was designed to contain the profile of a single, random social network user. 100 hundred boxes of this type were produced, randomly selecting users whose emotions came up while processing data for the visualizations and installation.

Each box contained a link and a QRCode. They led to an address at which a small interface showed the profile image of the user (but without showing any other data which could be used to identify him/her/it) together with the list of the most recent emotions expressed on social networks.

The user was transformed into a sort of social-network-mediated-tamagotchi.

We put the boxes on sale for 9.99 euros.

EYCI4D4F users on sale

Users on sale for 9.99 euros. Business as usual. 

REFERENCES

• Ben-Ze’ev, A. (2004) Love online: emotions on the internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bray, D. A., Chidambaram, L., Epstein, M., Hill, T., Thomas, D., Venkatsubramanyan, S., Watson, R. T. (2007). The Web as a Digital Reflection of Reality. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, Vol. 18, No. 28. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=961088
• de Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• de Kerckhove, D. (1997). The Skin of Culture: investigating the new electronic reality. UK: Kogan Page Publishers.
• de Spinoza, B. (2006). The Ethics. Fairford: Echo Library.
• Descartes, R. (1989). The passions of the soul. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
• Doidge, N. (2007). The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the frontiers of brain science. USA: Viking.
• Elkman, P. (1999). Handbook of Cognition and Emotion. Sussex: John Wiley & Sons.
• Gentile, L., Lanfranchi, V., Mazumdar, S., Ciravegna, F. (2011). Extracting Semantic User Networks from Informal Communication Exchanges, in The Semantic Web. ISWC 2011, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 7031/2011, pp. 209-224. New York: Springer Link.
• Green, W. S., Jordan, P. W. (Eds.) (2002). Pleasure with products: Beyond usability. New York: Taylor & Francis.
• Grismaeth, K. (2005). Kansei engineering: Linking emotions and product features. Accessed December 15, 2011, from http://www.ivt.ntnu.no/ipd/fag/PD9/2005/artikler/PD9%20Kansei%20Engineering%20K_Grimsath.pdf
• Hobbes, T. (1976). Leviathan. Forgotten Books. Accessed January 12, 2012, from http://www.forgottenbooks.org/info/9781605069777
• Iaconesi, S. , Persico, O. (2011). RWR Read/Write Reality Vol. 1. Rome: FakePress Publishing.
• Jordan, P.W. (2000). Designing pleasurable products: An introduction to the new human factors. Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis.
• Leidner, J. L., Lieberman, M. D. (2011). Detecting geographical references in the form of place names and associated spatial natural language. SIGSPATIAL Special, Newsletter, Special Issue, Volume 3, Issue 2, pp. 5-11. New York: ACM.
• Lynch, K. (1960). The image of the city. Cambridge Mass., USA: MIT Press.
• McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: the extensions of Man. Canada: MCGraw-Hill.
• Mitchell, W. (2005). Placing words: symbols, space, and the city. Cambridge Mass., USA: MIT Press.
• Myers, David G. (2004). Theories of Emotion. Psychology: Seventh Edition. New York, NY: Worth Publishers
• Nahl, D., Bilal, D. (2007). Information and emotion: the emergent affective paradigm in information behavior research and theory. Medford, New Jersey: Information Today, Inc.
• Pearson, E. (2009). All the World Wide Web’s a stage: The performance of identity in online social networks. First Monday, Vol. 14, N. 3. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
• Pickles, J. (2004). A history of spaces: cartographic reason, mapping, and the geo-coded world. New York, USA: Routledge.
• Plutchik, R. (1980). Emotion: Theory, research and experience: Vol. 1. Theories of emotion. New York: Academoc.
• Prinz, J. (2004). Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Quin, T., Xiao, R., Fang, L., Xie, X., Zhang, L. (2010). An efficient location extraction algorithm by leveraging web contextual information. GIS ’10 Proceedings of the 18th SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, pp. 53-60. 2010. New York: ACM.
• Shi, G., Barker, K. (2011). Thematic data extraction from Web for GIS and applications. Spatial Data Mining and Geographical Knowledge Services (ICSDM), 2011 IEEE International Conference on, Proceedings, pp. 273-278. Fuzhou: IEEE.
• Thompson, J. B. (2011). Shifting Boundaries of Public and Private Life. Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 28, N. 4. Cambridge, UK: Sage.
• Turkle, S. (1995) Life on the screen: identity in the age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Shuster.
• Van Hout, M (2004). Getting emotional with… Donald Norman. Design & Emotion. Accessed December 15, 2011, from www.design-emotion.com/2004/12/15/getting-emotional-with-donald-norman
• West, A., Lewis, J., Currie, P. (2009). Students’ Facebook ‘friends’: public and private spheres. New York: Taylor & Francis.
• Zook, M., Graham, M. (2007). From Cyberspace to DigiPlace: Visibility in an Age of Information and Mobility. In H. J. Miller (Ed.), Societies and Cities in the Age of Instant Access. London, UK: Springer.
• Zook, M., Graham, M. (2007). Mapping DigiPlace: Geocoded Internet Data and the Representation of Place. Environment and Planning: Planning and Design, 34. doi: 10.1068/b3311

You can find it here: http://www.artisopensource.net/versus-cities/

VersuS the realtime lives of cities

We will officially present it as part of a novel form of radio show, in which a musical voyage through the cities of the planet will allow us to experience in realtime the emotions expressed by people through social networks.

Music, as other forms of expression, originates from the cultures, backgrounds, emotions and desires of people living in cities, territories and immersed in landscapes and visions. The sounds, fragrances, environments, economies, events of those places generate the sounds which artists express in their music.

VersuS the realtime lives of cities

We can imagine music to be, in a way, a generative form of art, through which the emotions, sensations and visions of people are expressed in aesthetic ways.

Today, we benefit from novel forms of expression, using ubiquitous technologies and networks, and we constantly generate information about our feelings and visions through the many digital interconnections which are interweaved with every part of our daily activity, either voluntarily or even without knowing about it.

With the VersuS (and ConnectiCity) project, we explored the ways in which we can become active observers of this scenario, capturing and interpreting the emotions, feelings, sensations, desires and visions of our cities, as expressed by people using digital devices and ubiquitous technologies, and by the city itself, through sensors and realtime information.

VersuS the realtime lives of cities

In this occasion, we wish to create a tool that can be used to represent and interact with this richness of information, to better understand the cities we live in, and to become more aware and conscious of our environment and of the human population sharing with us our urban spaces.

The VersuS project aims at creating novel ways in which it is possible to listen to cities in real-time.

On January 5th, we will perform a voyage through music, exploring cities, the sounds that have originated in them over the years, and at the same time looking at the emotions which are expressed in realtime in those same locations, finding clues about what people  think, experience, feel, express, and how it relates to the ways in artists capture and represent the essence of urban spaces.

here below you can find the press release, we hope you will be able to join us in this experience.

(NOTE: the project in this version uses the 3D earth and libraries provided in one of the examples of the Three.js 3D javascript library by MrDoob, is created using WebGL and is best experienced on Chrome browsers)

PRESS RELEASE:

Travel through 6 cities, in Italy, Europe and the United States. A live performance capturing in real time the emotions of cities, in an open dialogue with music.

On January 5th 2012, on RaiTunes, the sounds of Alessio Bertallot meet the hybrid, neo-real worlds of Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico. The language of radio will be  contaminated with the language of new media arts, generating novel forms of expression and narratives.

Starting at 11pm and up to 11:40pm, “VersuS, the real time lives of cities” will be showcased in an entirely new version created to interact in real time with the RaiTunes playlist.

This version of the VersuS project will be officially presented during the broadcast, in which listeners will be invited to a realtime voyage into music and the emotions of London, New York, Philadelphia, Berlin, Bristol and Milan.

Moving from city to city, Alessio Bertallot will lead the audience through the discovery of the music that originates in those places, expression of concrete and flesh.

Simultaneously, planet earth will revolve towards the cities: a plunging zoom will allow us to experience cities’ chitchat in front of our eyes; the messages which people, in that moment, are exchanging on social networks will be captured, analyzed, and shown over the places in which they originated, in a dynamic, neo-real, visualization, showing in realtime the sensations of the people which live in that city, transforming us into global eyes, in emotional voyeurs of the whole planet.

January 5th, 11pm – 11:40pm, on RaiTunes.

Realtime updates and dialogue with Alessio Bertallot and the creators of VersuS will take place on RaiTunes’ Facebook page.

SITE: http://www.raitunes.rai.it/

FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/AlessioBertallot?ref=ts

This project on FakePress: http://www.fakepress.it/FP/?p=2140

NuclearAnxiety on Visualizing 2011

Visualizing.org featured NuclearAnxiety in their video and end of year project, looking at the year’s major events through data visualization.

Click here to see Visualizing 2011

and click here to see NuclearAnxiety on Visualizing.org

Valentina Tanni has just prepared an article about artworks using the possibility to listen to emotional expressions on social networks (in the specifics, love), mentioning VersuS among the examples.

Click here to read Valentina’s article titled “Mappare l’amore” (Mapping love) on Artribune.

And VersuS has been featured on the italian edition of Wired magazine with a short highlight of our installation at the Share Festival 2012.

VersuS on Wired Italia

So you might want to check them out and keep on following the VersuS project, also in its next steps: the conference at NEXA Center in Turin on December 14th and on the new ConnectiCity website.

Happy realtime cities to you all :)

VersuS Conference

Latest updates on the VersuS project, observing and analyzing the realtime lives of cities, as seen through social networks and ubiquitous devices.

A video has just been published of the VersuS conference held for the Piemonte Share Festival 2011 at the Officine Grandi Riparazioni, in Turin, hosted by Fablab Italia, who helped us out in the fabrication of the 3D generative sculptures which we produced to give physical representation of the information captured in realtime from social networks to analyze the forms of digital expression of people.

Here is the video of the conference:

During the conference we gave scenarios about the ways in which it is possible to use the practices investigated by VersuS: realtime capture of data from social networks and the application of natural language analysis processes to understand what and how people express their visions on their cities, cultures, emotions, relations, business, politics and ecology can be the key to a new understanding of the city, built through the reinvention of the role of citizens and through a new vision of the role of public space: departing from its administrative definition, it  can become a framework, a space for possibility, an enabler for things-that-could-be, planned and designed through active participation of all stakeholders.

More info about the VersuS/ConnectiCity project can be found here:

• VersuS and ConnectiCity on Art is Open Source
• VersuS on the new ConnectiCity website

realtime turin

Urban planning strategies con now benefit from new sources of realtime information coming from social networks allowing to sense the emotions, visions, desires and tensions of citizens.

Open data, online conversations and ubiquitous publishing as a strategic scenario: we will speak about this subject on Dec. 14th 2011 in Turin at the NEXA Center for Internet and Society, at the Turin Polytechnic.

Using realtime data – with specific emphasis on interoperable data using widely accepted open formats and with strong attention dedicated to the policies and practices which make this data available to the public – can open up scenarios for fundamental innovation in our cities.

The possibility to listen to the ideas, visions, emotions and proposals coming everyday from citizens – both explicitly and implicitly through inference on the patterns of how they use their cities, their workplaces, their shopping centers… –, brings up new positive scenarios.

Social Network Conversation Harvesting techniques allow us to listen to the continuous public discourse which can be actively interrelated with our cities and their transportation systems, infrastructures, architectural spaces, neighborhoods.

“Sensing Networks” can be created by applying natural language analysis techniques to the captured conversations, enabling organizations, institutions, companies and citizens themselves to be able to “read” the city as it is described by its citizens.

Sensor Networks can be included in the scenario to record realtime data on pollution, traffic and other quantities which shape the ecological, social, administrative and political life of the city.

By putting all this together, it is possible to create multiple narratives layered upon the city and allowing us to read the city in multiple ways, according to diverse strategies and methodologies which can highlight how the city (through its citizens and on its own, using sensors) expresses itself on the environment, culture, economy, transport, energy, politics.

This methodology for realtime observation of the city can be defined as a form of “ubiquitous anthropology”, based on the idea of participating in a network structure which can be considered as a “disseminated expert system”, coagulating diffused intelligence into realtime urban information processing frameworks.

In this context infoaesthetic representations act as enablers of radical strategies for information accessibility and usability.

Together with the idea of “user generated search engine”, they contribute in giving shape to a scenario in which the concept of citizenship can be reinvented, tending towards a vision in which the citizen is more aware and active, taking part in a multi-actor, multi-stakeholder, realtime, ubiquitous knowledge and collaboration environment: the city.

Salvatore Iaconesi ( Art is Open Source / FakePress Publishing / La Sapienza University of Rome / ISIA Design Florence / Rome University of Fine Arts )

and

Simone Arcagni ( Palermo Univeristy / NABA Milan / Nòva il Sole 24 Ore / Nòva 100 / XL – Repubblca / Oxygen )

will present their current research on these topics at

37° Mercoledì di NEXA
Wednesday December 14th, 2011, 6pm – 8pm
Via Boggio 65/a, Turin (first floor)
Free Entrance
http://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi-37

Here are the slides we used in the presentations at various venues:

VersuS is a part of the ConnectiCity project, dealing with the ability to observe the realtime life of cities as expressed through social networks, ubiquitous technologies and sensor networks, and to transform this possibility into an opportunity to imagine, design and create tools for new forms of active, aware citizenship, urban planning, ubiquitous anthropology and collaborative processes for planning, design, politics, expression, knowledge and freedom.

VersuS exhibit in Turin

In VersuS the possibility to observe the city in realtime using the expressions of users in social networks is used to suggest the vision of a city in which new forms of reading and writing (and, thus, of expression and of sharing) can be enacted in physical space, describing the city along multiple points of view and stories.

This, for example, is the city of Turin as described by digital ubiquitous interactions on social networks:

digital turin

In the image, each dot represents the intensity of digital communications on social networks (Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare and Google Plus) from red (most intense) to purple and yellow (lower), to green (almost none) and black (none).

And it is clear through this kind of representations how we are able redraw the city, which becomes an incredibly different space, not created by buildings and streets, but through the information and expressions published and exchanged by users on social networks.

Using this approach different narratives about the city can be extracted and made accessible. For example, here is the same visualization, but filtered leaving only messages written using the italian language:

digital turin using italian language

This below, instead, is the same visualization, but filtering content to leave only the ones written in arabic language:

digital turin in arabic language

This example clearly shows how different cultural backgrounds substantially describe different views and perceptions of the city. The possibility to extend this kind of analysis to other forms of observation, becoming able to create new forms of urban awareness on the emotions, wishes, desires, visions, conditions and tendencies of the millions of people who live their cities daily by working, studying, researching, shopping and relating to each other: millions of different stories which become sources of diffused intelligence that can be used to plan the mutation of our cities and to make this intelligence available to citizens, turning them into more active, aware and relational agents who are capable of being actively, critically and relationally present in their environment.

turin citizens expressing wishes and visions for their city using social networks

For example the image above shows the locations for which social network users expressed visions for the mutation of their city (creating new parks, using public squares in different ways, creating new libraries, different services and usages for spaces and buildings… ) thus enacting the possibility of having accessible tools for realtime collaborative planning and design processes for cities and public spaces.

In this scenario we presented two versions of the VersuS/ConnectiCity process: loveVSturin and romeVSriots.

VersuS at ToShare

 UPDATE!

Here below is a video of an interview about VersuS, by Dario Migliardi for la Stampa Newspaper:

VersuS, the realtime lives of cities by FakePress Publishing is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.artisopensource.net/2011/11/06/versus-the-realtime-lives-of-cities/.

This article starts from the analysis of our recent project VersuS/ConnectiCity, in its declinations for the realtime analysis of the emotional lives of cities and for the observation of the realtime digital communications exchanged on social networks during the protest of October 15th in Rome.

This is the translated abstract of the paper:

“On OCtober 15th in Rome the large protest stimulated by the Spanish Indignados and by the Occupy Wall Street movement took place along several different planes, traversing the city in different ways.

The analysis of the activity on social networks in the time/space of the protest shows with extreme clarity a continuous mutual penetration between digital and analog worlds, pushing us to hypothesize the possibility of a liquid, mutating fusion of the two dimensions, defining a new city in which the worlds of molecules and bits merge and flow together.

This observation becomes the opportunity to redefine the concept of publishing, transforming it into a domain which is able to traverse arts and sciences in the creation of knowledge, educatio, culture, information and awareness processes focused onto the enactment of concepts such as ubiquity, multiplicity and emergency.”

The project will be presented on Thursday November 3rd 2011 (at 12:00) in Turin, at the Fablab Italia in occasion of the Share Festival. (at Stazione Futuro, via Castelfidardo 22, Turin, Italy)

VersuS / ConnectiCity

VersuS: love vs turin, visualizing the realtime lives of cities from salvatore iaconesi on Vimeo.

How do people express their emotions on social networks?

Information has become ubiquitously accessible, thus transforming our perception of cities and of the ways we work, learn, communicate and relate to other people.

VersuS analyzes the digital lives of cities to suggest a scenario in which digital and analog realities interweave and become one.

By performing realtime content harvesting on social networks we are able to perform natural language analyses on the conversations running between users, to peek into their emotions, wishes, expectations and desires.

We can make this information available and accessible using information visualizations, mobile applications and generative design artifacts, thus creating the tools which enable the creation of a new form of public space which merges the digital and analog lives of people, transforming them into active agents in a new idea of citizenship, enabling novel forms of expression and representation.

In “love VS turin”, we focus on an emotional approach, visualizing the expressions of love and passion of the citizens of the city of Turin, in a realtime collective conversation.

The visualization is put side by side with 3D objects produced using various digital fabrication techniques, and which represent a tangible representation of the emotional condition of the whole territory of the city of Turin.

“Love” can be replaced with other emotions, thus enabling scenarios of focal importance for ecology, public administrations, security, economy and the overall possibility to evaluate the wellness of the people on a certain territory.

VersuS is designed as an evocative tool for people, institutions and organizations, fostering the creation of new, positive, imaginaries for the future of our lives and our relation with the planet and with our fellow human beings.

VersuS is a concept by Art is Open Source and FakePress Publishing, and it is part of the ConnectiCity initiative.

It has been created together with the Fablab Italia and with the Piemonte Share Festival, in a transdisciplinary process in which arts and sciences collaborate to the creation of innovative, breakthrough, scenarios.

VersuS will be officially presented at the 2011 edition of the Piemonte Share Festival together with the Fablab Italia.

Check these websites for more information:

http://www.artisopensource.net
http://fakepress.it
http://www.toshare.it
http://www.fablabitalia.it/

see the video on Youtube