AOS will be at NextFest in Milan on Saturday June 1st 2013 to speak about La Cura, the Open Source Cure for Cancer, Hacking culture and the opportunities to reclaim our rights and human perspectives in our contemporary times.
Here’s the title and abstract of the talk:
Medicine, Hacking, Re-appropriation, Revolution
A brain cancer becomes the opportunity to try the impossible: to find an Open Source cure for Cancer. And, in the meantime, to understand the many ways in which our human societies have changed and have become ready to perform an enormous qualitative leap: an interconnected, global, relational, peer-to-peer humanity, aware and willing to reclaim and re-appropriate our identities and our ecosystemic vision of the world.
VivaCosenza Performance Labis an international event about art and performance that will be held on December 8th and 9th, 2012 in the city of Cosenza, an ancient and beautiful site of the south of Italy.
The event will feature multiple international artists, a city-wide forum engaging the whole population in cultural design and activities dedicated to the creation of public strategies and policies, as well as a series of innovative scenarios dedicated to education, for high school and university students.
At AOSwe have been invited to design the digital life of the festival. A first, early version of the website which will host all this part of the initiative can be seen here: http://vivacosenza.it/viz
We decided to create some tools which could be used by students and citizens to enact the real-time, participatory narratives of the event, as fundamental part of all of the education, communication and cultural formats which have been designed for the festival.
Using a series of open technologies which we had developed for the ConnectiCity and VersuS projects, we have setup a system which is able to capture in real-time all of the social network activity of citizens, students, visitors, organizations and institutions of the city of Cosenza and also of the people who will use social networks to communicate about the festival and the city from other locations.
A set of language-based technologies will then be used to classify all this information, in real time, being able to understand the themes, issues and subjects which all this information is talking about.
Special focus will be given to the projects created by high-school and university students, who have been asked to create communication formats for the festival, dealing with arts, food culture and new forms of journalism and storytelling. The contents created in these formats will be given special highlight and the best ones will be awarded a prize and be taken into consideration for further development for next year’s edition.
Even more, all of the emergent communication which will be generated in real-time during the festival will be captured from social networks, and visualized both online, on smartphone/tablet applications as well as using a projection mapping in a public space in the city, so that all citizens will be able to experience the digital life of the city directly from public space.
The objective of the platform is to understand the ways in which these kinds of technologies can be used to transform the life of the citizens of the city, to imagine, design and enact novel participatory approaches.
In this, we suggest a new role for institutions, who become promoters and maintainers of new forms of expression which are available and accessible to everyone.
Justas we used technology to create an infrastructure for expression to be used by students to create their own formats, we imagine a “city as a platform” (for example as we suggested in Trieste a few weeks ago), where ubiquitous infrastructure (both cultural and technological) is made accessible and usable through public policies, enabling citizens and city dwellers to basically have the tools to design and build their own digital, cultural, business, communication, storytelling, envisioning ecosystem.
We will start from scratch with the students and, thus, we have setup a basic set of technologies, for them to be used as building blocks for their communication and storytelling formats.
For example, we have setup a platform which will capture all city relevant public content generated on social networks (relevant either because it was generated in the city, or because it discusses on city-relevant issues).
Here below you can see a visualization of the data in the system being captured in realtime:
Data being captured and visualized in Cosenza in realtime
The green dots show topic clusters (larger means “more important”), while red dots show user clusters, being connected to the topics they are discussing.
Data can be analyzed according to time, using timelines such as the one below:
the Digital Days of the city of Cosenza
And users can be analyzed for their activity (how many contents they produce on social networks) and according to the topics they discuss, as seen in the two images below
Digital Citizens in Cosenza
What digital citizens discuss in Cosenza
For example, topic clusters can be organized into easy to access groups, thus establishing multiple possible participatory communication formats.
Here, for example, we have assembled some for the beginning of the festival (bars are almost empty for now, as the festival has not begun yet), and by simply clicking them people will access what students and city dwellers have produced, shared and communicated in the specific format, across social networks and sites.
some formats, dedicated to the festival
It must be highlighted how these technologies allow capturing in real-time the public communications which citizens publish on social networks (for VivaCosenza we will be using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube). So we will capture all (and only) those messages which are intended as being public by their publishers (users/citizens).
Yet this is a delicate issue, as the definitions of privacy, public/private spaces are rapidly changing, and many times people have a hard time in understanding the reach and scope of visibility which the messages they post online have.
We will use this occasion to also explore these important issues: we do not wish to promote a novel form of Panopticon, but a cultural approach according to which individuals and groups can freely decide what and how to communicate, to whom it should be visible and accessible, and to use this information to create opportunities for collaboration, sustainable business, social innovation and art.
So heads up and come at VivaCosenza Performance Lab!
Emergenza was presented at the Internet Festival 2012 in Pisa, as an installation and a performance dealing with the future scenarios of our cities, as enabled by the wide and ubiquitous accessibility of digital technologies and networks.
Human polyphonies for digital-analog cities.
Our planet is a continuous conversation between people, information systems, sensors, digital ecosystems, social networks, objects, natural ecosystems, processes and organizations who use ubiquitous technologies to read and write their points of view on the world, under the form of content, data, information, and to freely recombine them, associate, aggregate and use them, to produce knowledge, wisdom and economies.
This scenario completely and radically transforms our perception of public and private spaces, of citizenship, of intellectual property and copyright, of sustainability, privacy, anonymity, transparency.
The ways in which we work, learn, produce, establish relationships, feel emotions, have fun, and in which we coordinate ourselves and collaborate with each other have already radically changed.
EMERGENZA is an interactive narrative, creating suggestion and emotion, engaging people in this scenario, as applied to the city of Pisa by imagining it into a near future, but using the data, information and tools which are ready and available today, now.
A human-centered smart city which becomes a sustainable place, active, polyphonic, free, resilient, recombinant, emergent.
The title of the project refers to both the “emergent” characteristics of the phenomena which take place in this kind of scenario, and to the “emergency” brought on by the possible dangers and uncertainties of these technological approaches.
Both aspects are analyzed in positive, constructive ways.
The installation
The installation uses three real time visualizations to show the scenario proposed by Emergenza.
Emergenza at Internet Festival, the map
The first visualization is a map showing, in real time, all the public social network activity (facebook, twitter, instagram harvested) classified using natural language analysis (as seen in the VersuS project), to highlight the ways in which people use social networks to discuss city governance, the environment, emotions, relations and desires. (two specific categories are also shown, describing in realtime the ways in which people use social networks to take part in the festival and also how they participate to the Pixity action, taking place during the festival).
This is the kind of system we use to analyze the digital public discussions which take place in cities, to realize the systems which can be used to create new tools for city governance, urban planning and human relation which operate on peer-to-peer strategies.
This below is the second visualization of the installation:
Emergenze at Internet Festival, the world
The second visualization is very simple and minimal, and it shows the places which, in real time, are publicly using social network in some ways to interact with the city (of Pisa).
It shows something which we might imagine as being the instantaneous public relations (or influence) established by the city of Pisa with the rest of the world.
Lines connect places which are interacting with the city of Pisa (by talking about the city, by interacting with some of its users…) and colors show the topic domains of these connections (green is environment, blue is commerce, orange is information or updates, etc.).
This is the kind of visualization we use to analyze the influence of a city in respect to other planetary locations, being able to identify opportunities for relationships, collaborations, and the themes which they relate to.
This below is the third visualization composing the installation:
Emergenze at Internet Festival, the circle of relations
The last visualization shows the relationships among city dwellers established in real time using social networks.
Each slice on the circle is a social network user. If a line connects two users, it means that they interacted in some way (e.g.: they publicly messaged each other, or one retweeted a message, or a comment was made, etc).
We use this kind of visualization to observe the emergence of communities and spontaneous collaborations among citizens/dwellers, and to identify emergent trends, and to recognize opportunities for collaborations and participatory project design.
The performance
The Emergenza performance was created as a pragmatical experience of this kind of near-future scenario.
To do this, we decided to use an oxymoron: in the future we describe typical television formats such as the “news show” will radically change, if not completely disappear (at least in the way we know them).
We decided to produce a format of a News Show from the future called “Pisa real-time: the news from now“. The format is completely polyphonic, meaning that it is not a standard news show as we’re used to: all news come by interpreting the digital information which is constantly produced by citizens using social networks.
(the images shown below are screenshots of the graphics used during the performance, organized as an on-stage TV show)
So, instead of the weather forecast, there is the emotional forecast of the city.
Emotional forecast in Emergenze Performance
Here the emotional expressions are used to create emotional maps of the city much in the same way in which weather forecasts in TV show the presence of clouds, wind and rain, and are used to show the emotional trends which might be appearing in the city, trying to expose important information about the city’s lifestyle.
Then there are the real time user-generated news about the city governance.
Emergenza performance, real time user generated city governance news
In this case, social network activity is interpreted to understand how people discuss city governance relevant themes, such as opinions about public budgets, choice of representatives, city maintenance issues, trash, etc.
All information is shown also as coming outside of the city boundaries, as in this vision the city does not end where the administrative borders are. In the case of Pisa, many comments about the conditions of the public spaces of the city came from tourist reports who had just been in the city.
Emergenza Performance, the multicultural city
Also important were the news from the multicultural city, showing the various languages and cultures present in the city, and the ways in which they represented themselves and their urban life using social networks, including the timelines of their online discussions and the relative percentages of their sentiment.
An one other part of the format which raised much interest was the part exposing the perception of security and safety, as expressed by people’s expression on social networks.
Here maps show the locations in which people expressed sense of insecurity and uncertainty.
An interesting surprise was that this kind of analysis proved to be much more intimate than expected, as people were not really discussing about the safety of walking in city streets, but about the safety of their future, jobs and relationships.
To further remark the polyphonic approach, we decided to speak the least possible amount of time during the performance, and we auto-replaced ourselves with messages coming from a series of interesting points of view.
First was the contribution of prof. Alberto Abruzzese:
(extract from “Intervista ad Alberto Abruzzese” by IULM)
Next was prof. Antonio Caronia:
(extract from “Interview with antonio Caronia”, by Alessandro Guerriero for NABANEXT)
Then it was the turn of prof. Massimo Canevacci Ribeiro:
(extract from “F for Fake” created for the book ”REFF. La reinvendione del reale attraverso pratiche di remix, mash up, ricontestualizzazione, reenactment”.”)
And then it was the intervention by Alex Giordano:
(extract from “Alex Giordano” by Internetbenecomune)
And here is a video showing a short speech we gave at the end of the performance (in italian for now) :
We then decided to end the performance asking for a special contribution (in italian):
(realized in collaboration with https://www.eigenlab.org, acting by Alessandro Belsandro Moirano. Directing and editing: Gianmarco Bonavolontà)
Special Thanks
EigenLab, Ilario Gelmetti, Teatro LUX, Adriana De Cesare, Mariangela Della Monica, Edoardo Fleishner and all the Internet Festival staff, all the citizens of the city of Pisa
Il DEberlusconiZER è lieto di annunciare DE_ZER Vol. 4, la quarta puntata di un ciclo di mostre in cui alcuni artisti contemporanei sono chiamati a restituire un senso allo spazio informativo liberato dall’ingombrante presenza del presidente del consiglio italiano, in un inedito adattamento alla rete dei codici della street art e dell’arte pubblica.
A un primo ciclo di mostre collettive (DE_ZER Vol. 1, DE_ZER Vol. 2 e DE_ZER Vol. 3), verranno nei prossimi giorni fatte seguire due mostre personali, per meglio rispondere al carattere peculiare dei lavori proposti: La Merde, di Luca Bolognesi (dal 27 maggio al 5 giugno) e Always on My Mind, diSalvatore Iaconesi (dal 6 al 15 giugno).
I due progetti sfidano entrambi l’infrastruttura tecnologica e concettuale del DEberlusconiZER, ma non potrebbero essere più diversi per approccio e ispirazione. Giocando ironicamente con il funzionamento e i propositi del DEberlusconiZER, Luca Bolognesi ha deciso di non proporre alcun contenuto sostitutivo. Il livello frapposto tra il contenuto da censurare e lo spettatore è trasparente, immagini e testi rimangono quelli di cui ci si vorrebbe liberare, e il DEberlusconiZER viene convertito in una macchina celibe che fallisce miseramente il proprio compito. Questa didascalia, che ne riporta il titolo, rimane l’unica chiave per identificare il lavoro. E tuttavia proprio il titolo (ottenuto, stando all’autore, da un generatore online di testi casuali nella sua versione in lingua francese) rivela che l’intervento di Bolognesi è tutt’altro che nichilista, rinunciatario, e polemico nei confronti della possibilità offerta dal DEberlusconiZER. Quale che sia il suo significato, e a dispetto della sua invisibilità, La Merde finisce per produrre un’associazione di immagini di una forza inaudita.
All’inesorabile vuoto di Bolognesi si contrappone il troppo pieno di Iaconesi. Sberleffo e scatologia ritornano anche in Always on My Mind, di cui non riveliamo nulla per non farvi perdere il gusto bruciante della sorpresa che abbiamo provato noi, appena l’abbiamo aperto. L’appuntamento è per il 6 di giugno.
Il DEberlusconizerZER è un progetto di Elisa Giardina Papa, Fabrizio Giardina Papa, Giovanni Salerno e Floriano Lapolla.
Gli artisti sono stati selezionati e invitati dal critico d’arte Domenico Quaranta.
The DEberlusconiZER is proud to announce DE_ZER Vol. 4, the fourth of a series of exhibitions in which some contemporary artists are invited to give a new meaning to the informational space “liberated” from the unwieldy presence of the Italian Prime Minister.
After three group shows (DE_ZER Vol. 1, DE_ZER Vol. 2 and DE_ZER Vol. 3), the DEberlusconiZERwill host two solo shows, in order to allow a better understanding of two very peculiar projects: La Merde, by Luca Bolognesi (May 27 – June 5, 2011) and Always on My Mind, by Salvatore Iaconesi (June 6 – June 15, 2011).
Both the works – very different in terms of content and inspiration – challenge the technological and conceptual infrastructure provided by the DEberlusconiZER. Ironically playing with the workings and intentions of the project, Luca Bolognesi chose to refuse submitting any alternative content to the original images and texts. The level interposed between the censored content and the spectator is transparent, images and texts are still the ones the DEberlusconiZER wanted to set us free from. The program becomes a celibatory machine that fails its target. The caption you are reading, with the work’s title and explanation, becomes the only way to identify the work itself. And yet, the title La merde (according to the artist, provided by an online text generator in its French release) proves that Bolognesi’s contribution is far for being nihilistic, defeatist and polemical against the possibilities provided by its host body. Whatever it’s meaning is, and despite its invisibility, La Merde ends up creating a strong, unprecedented association between images.
After Bolognesi’s inexorable void, the DEberlusconiZER will host Iaconesi’s lavish filling. Sneer and scatology can be found as well in Always on My Mind, a work that we are not going to describe here in order to let you enjoy the biting taste of the surprise we had when we first tested it. Save the date: June 6, 2011.
The DEberlusconiZER is a web tool that replaces the images and words related to the Italian Prime Minister. The software subverts the media machine created by one of the most controversial figures in Italian politics by reclaiming the space devoted to him and using it for new porpuses.
The DEberlusconiZER is a project by Elisa Giardina Papa, Fabrizio Giardina Papa, Giovanni Salerno and Floriano Lapolla.
The artists have been selected and invited by art critic Domenico Quaranta.
