Tag Archives: realtime

AOS at “HYBRID CITY II: Subtle rEvolutions” with “Real Time Dissent in the City”

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We will be at

The HYBRID CITY II: Subtle rEvolutions
Conference, workshops, exhibition and parallel events
23-25 May 2013
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

with our contributions:

  • Real-time dissent in the city: tools and tactics for contemporary disseminated, dispersed, recombinant movements

    • Abstract –  During years 2011 and 2012 we have created a series of open software platforms which are able to analyse in real-time the content which is produced by users of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, by combining data-harvesting technologies, natural language analysis and geo-location. We have used these technologies in different ways with the objective of trying to understand the various forms in which dissent manifests itself in the scenario of contemporary urban areas, characterized by the progressive availability of accessible ubiquitous technologies such as smartphones and network-enabled devices.

 

  • Re-thinking public space and citizenship through ubiquitous publishing and technologies. The experience of Ubiquitous Pompeii for the Italian Digital Agenda.
    • Abstract – In this paper, we describe the first instances of a family of projects with similar characteristics. Through these projects, we aim to establish contact with urban communities to a) suggest visions for possible forms of city innovation and to b) start co-creative processes for imagining, designing and enacting transformative processes. These co-creative processes involve technologies and innovative methodologies which are able to create knowledge, participation, sustainable and inclusive business models. One of these projects is the Ubiquitous Pompeii where our research and design team developed a city wide process in the city of Pompei in Italy. Ubiquitous Pompeii started by engaging high school students with a series of workshops structured in two phases: a) students’ awareness about the scenarios and opportunities offered by ubiquitous technologies; and b) the acquisition of the skills used to appropriate the technologies and methodologies and to embrace participatory design processes. Students were able to design and develop their visions for the development of their city and its communities, creating services and digital tools. Peer-to-peer learning and collaboration practices played a crucial role. Tools, methodologies and roles have been designed and developed to support the emergence of practices engaging all agencies into a networked process for the creation of the digital future of the city. Institutions and operators play the role of facilitators in what basically is becoming a citywide co- creative process. Along these lines, we have structured a transdisciplinary methodology and a technological toolkit dedicated to cities and urban communities including collaborative ethnography to observe the various stages and processes of the project and discuss its meta-stories with the different actors. The project has been declared as an official best practice for Italy’s Digital Agenda, and as such will be scaled to other cities in the near future, also envisioning wider knowledge sharing and collaboration tools which will be able to interconnect the different communities.
The HYBRID CITY II: Subtle rEvolutions

The HYBRID CITY II: Subtle rEvolutions

Realtime cities at the MACRO Museum in Rome for Audiovisioni Digitali

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Art is Open Source will be featured at “Audiovisioni Digitali“, curated by  Lino Strangis and Veronica D’Auria, with this video above about the realtime digital lives of cities.

Audiovisioni Digitali at MACRO

Audiovisioni Digitali at MACRO

The video has been selected by Giovanni Viceconte from the ArtHub archives and shows a typical day in the digital life of the city of Trieste, composed by capturing a full day of social network activity generated in the city of Trieste on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Google+. Each dot in the video represent one digital interaction on social networks: maybe a post, comment, video, image or text published by someone in the city. When dots connect, it means that a conversation/relation of some sort started between users: a comment, a sharing, a re-publishing.

What emerges is a complex, living diagram, which shows the organic digital life of the city, a map of the town which is not composed by streets and buildings, but rather from human relations and immaterial content and information. The city transforms, merging people’s physical experience of its public and private spaces with the digital ones.

Here is the info about the event:

Audiovisioni digitali
video e ricerca artistica oggi

curated by Lino Strangis and Veronica D’Auria

Friday January 18th 2013, 6pm and
Saturday January 19th 2013, 11am

MACRO – Contemporary Art Museum of the City of Rome
via Reggio Emilia 54, Rome, ItalyLino Strangis, A new Big Bang

ITALIAN Press Release

Art Hub Artists – selected by Giovanni Viceconte:
Gabriele Pesci, Lino Strangis, Nicola Bettale, Dario Lazzaretto, Lello Masucci, Diego Caglioni, Mauro Rescigno, Donato Maniello, Piero Chiariello, Toba Toba, Colette Baraldi, Barbara Agreste, Rebecca Agnes, Luca Lumaca, Salvatore Iaconesi, Otolab, Sonia Laura Armaniaco e Igor Imhoff.

http://www.arthub.it/index.php?action=pagina&idpag=1357747974

 

C.A.R.M.A. Artists – selected by Le Momo Electronique:

Rebecca Agnes, Alessandro Amaducci, Piero Chiariello, Nhieu Do, Guglielmo Emmolo, Mattias Harestam, Igor Imhoff, Gabriele Pesci, Arash Radpour, Mauro Rescigno e Lino Strangis.

 

 

MACRO, Sala Cinema, via Reggio Emilia 54, Roma

Venerdì 18 gennaio dalle 18:00 alle 21:00; Sabato 19 gennaio dalle 11:00 alle 22:00

www.museomacro.org, +39 06 67 10 70 400

 

C.A.R.M.A.,

www.carmaweb.org,

http://www.facebook.com/assCARMA, info@carmaweb.org

 

Press Office

Veronica D’Auria, 349 2304021, veronica.dauria@gmail.com

Accelerator, proposal for COLLIDE@CERN

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Sometime ago we submitted our Accelerator project to Collide@CERN

This is the presentation video:

This is the project description:

“Accelerator” establishes a poetic, emergent parallel between the particle accelerator and the transformation of human communities around the globe due to the progress of sciences, technologies and of the planetary conversations which are triggered from them.

In the Age of Information, human beings experience flows of recombinant information in which “official” sources and peer-conversations interweave in the emergent creation of knowledge and awareness: languages form, relationships fall into place, words become commonplace. Conversations produce knowledge, in a planetary process which radically changes how people learn, work, relate, express, consume.

While fundamental science researches on how matter, space and time work, people’s visions, imaginaries and languages transform, expanding cultures and sense of possibility.

While particles are observed in accelerators their effects escape research labs, accelerating the transformation of people’s perception of their Universe.

People become particles in a planetary accelerator, receiving stimuli and signals (information about the results of fundamental science), moving (thinking and communicating), colliding (discussing) and transforming into other entities (transforming cultures, forms of awareness and visions for their future).

Accelerator is about this process.

A real-time info-aesthetic visualization in which a timeline of the news of the “things” which happen at CERN is compared to the emergence of words, conversations, debates, jokes, images and videos on social networks, all over the planet, across languages and cultures.

A “Human Accelerator” of the Information Age, a landmark accessible from the web and smartphones, and through a large-scale visualization to be placed at CERN, Ars Electronica and selected locations across the planet, to create planetary awareness about the transformation of human beings – and of their languages, visions, desires and perspectives – towards a new perception of possibility.

Accelerator @ Collide

Accelerator @ Collide

VivaCosenza: how to transform a city event into a real-time participatory performance

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Realtime VivaCosenza

Realtime VivaCosenza

VivaCosenza Performance Lab is 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 AOS we 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

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

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

Digital Citizens in Cosenza

 

What digital citizens discuss 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

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!

the real-time life of cities transforms into usable knowledge, at Information Visualization 2012

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In Montpellier for Information Visualization 2012.

Here we will present the updates for our research projects dedicated to the real-time observation of cities: ConnectiCity and VersuS.

With these two projects we have tried understand the current transformation of urban contexts and in the ways in which citizens learn, work, relate, consume and are aware about their environment.

ConnectiCity, the Atlas of Rome

ConnectiCity, the Atlas of Rome

We have started our analysis by observing how the affordances of space are generated at different levels, such as social, cultural, political, administrative and relational, defining in our perception what is possible, impossible, suggested, advised against, prohibited.

Mobile devices transform our perception of space, time and relations.

Landmark consumer products such as the Sony Walkman have opened up the way for the possibility to personalize our experience of public space. While we walked through cities, devices like the Walkman allowed us to reinterpret space and reconfigure it, transforming it into places of our emotion, fantasy or memory.

Mobile devices, such as cell phones and smartphones, radicalize this process.

While running in a park a mobile phone call will be able to completely transform our perception of space, which could become – even for a limited amount of time – an ubiquitous office, a global living room or a place for distributed entertainment, emotion, relation.

Citizens have started using digital technologies and networks to express their ideas, visions, wishes, emotions and expectations.

I have an idea... on social networks in 2011

I have an idea… on social networks in 2011

This image above represents (in red) the locations of many (over 7 million) internet users who, in 2011, have used social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, Google+) to say “I have an idea!” (e.g.: messages in one of 29 languages expressing the sentence “I have an idea” or one of dozens of variations) and at least 3 other users replied to them (in meaningful ways, including comments, ways to make the idea better or offers for collaboration, as understood by an automatic natural language analysis of the follow-up posts).

turin redrawn using social media

turin redrawn using social media

In this image above we can see the city of Turin completely drawn through social media and user generated content (starting from a black canvas, every time a geolocated user generated content is sensed on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare, a corresponding pixel is augmented in saturation; this process has been done throughout August, September, October and November 2011 to obtain the result visible in the image).

From these and other examples it is possible to see how citizens are constantly using social media to express themselves in city spaces, describing their points of view on fundamental topics such as mobility, ecology, job market, emotions, consumption, entertainment, culture.

Through the ConnectiCity and VersuS projects we tried to design and develop systems which are able to capture this emergent user-generated information and transform it into usable knowledge for citizens, administrations, activists and companies.

Many results have been produced including:

  • the Atlas of Rome, a 35 meter urban screen capturing in real time the ideas, desires, visions and expectations of citizens of the city of Rome
  • VersuS, a realtime system which can visualize and explain the ways in which citizens use social media to express themselves about fundamental issues for the city
  • VersuS planet edition, dedicated to the possibility to observe and compare multiple cities
  • Maps of Babel, in which cities can be observed to gain better understandings about the ways in which different cultures and nationalities express and relate in cities
  • AR for riots and Hatemeter
The two last projects (AR for Riots and Hatemeter) have just been presented at TED Global 2012 conference in Edinburgh.
AR for riots

AR for riots

The first one is a system which is designed for violent or emergency scenarios in cities (such as riots, earthquakes, natural disasters…). A realtime system collects information generated through social networks and parses them using Natural Language Analysis to understand the locations (through GPS and Geographical Named Entities) of violent, dangerous, emergent events, or of safe locations, places of first assistance and, in general, safe spots or way outs of difficult situations.

This information is made accessible to users through a special interface, designed for use in emergency situations, where an immediate, thought free information visualization can make the difference in allowing people to react quickly and effectively: an Augmented Reality display shows a color coded arrow; scan from left to right to understand the safest way out or the nearest safe spot, as inferred from the information provided by users (and, eventually, by institutions and organizations) on social networks, in real time. Red means danger, green means safe.

Hatemeter

Hatemeter

The second one, the HateMeter, uses the same technologies to identify the direction in which a certain emotion (“Hate” in the presented prototype) is strongest, as inferred in realtime by harvesting user generated content on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare.

Both applications provide scenarios according to which the forms of emergent expression enacted by users across cultures and languages can be used to produce useful, usable information, available in accessible ways, designed to transform our perception of public space and redefining the concepts of citizenship, transforming it into a more active, informed agency.

This series of projects will be our main focus for the next few months. We welcome suggestions, collaborations and ideas for novel forms usage scenarios.