CoS Consciousness of Streams

In just a few days we will be at transmediale in Berlin, to create CoS: Consciousness of Streams!

CoS will be something that we’re calling a cognitive virus on the festival, as it will be a cross-medial, emergent, performative, multi-author publication created by processing the festival itself: what goes on, how people move and feel, what people do at workshops, their ideas, connections and expressions.

The definition of CoS went through various stages and we defined it the way you will see it at transmediale by transforming  the initial proposal to harmonize it with the rest of the event, to what will be going on in the other spaces and, last but not least, with budget constraints :)

For download (PDF): CoS Consciousness of Streams Proposal, first version

The second version of the proposal describes what you will actually find at transmediale:

For download (PDF): CoS Consciousness of Streams Proposal, second version

For download (PDF): CoS Consciousness of Streams Proposal, notes to the slides of the second version

From the concept:

“Far from the image of Rodin’s Thinker, the contemporary world definitely abandons the idea of an isolated human, forming thought, ideas, concepts and shapes by isolation, contemplation. “Cogito, ergo sum”, yes, but thinking becomes a very different practice in respect to what had been envisioned by Descartes, transforming the ideas of contemplation, attention, conception, cognition : influencing and open-sourcing them to a series of additional channels and challenges which are enabled by the extension of our bodies and sensory systems through digital technologies.
Multiple sources, different timescales, contemporaneous, asynchronous, overlapping sources, interleaved attention spans that leave linearity behind in favor of networkedness; unconscious becomes predominant; an informant sound forms from the mutual suggestions that all information samples provide along a polyphonic multidirectional timeline in which interference, difference and noise are possibly the most important things to take into account.
Harmony/linearity leaves the stage, enters noise/nonlinearity, deconstruction, emergency and ubiquitousness. Multiple realities overlap, possibly denying each other and forming a neo-reality, that is browsable, filterable, mixable, mash-up-able, sharable, confrontable, storable, morphable, synthesizable, aggregatable.
Cognitive spaces form around fake, unverifiable, temporary bits of information whizzing by, at incredible speeds, clustering and disassembling along complex emergent patterns: multiple, anonymous, collective.
Connect the dots: each emerging shape is different and unrelated, yet it is the explicit expression of the same voices involved.
Time disappears replaced by immaterial places for our traversal: immediatcy; near-past; short time-spans; multiple time scanning; global timezones; recurring times; loops; feedbacks.”

CoS observes the novel condition of networked humanity, definitively suspended in a condition of continuous-present and delegating the ideas and perceptions of past and future to external mechanisms and devices.

CoS Consciousness of Streams - general architecture

The main idea of CoS is to create an additional, interpretative, layer of reality, to stratify it on top of the festival and to provide collaborative access to it to everyone (present, remote, connected… ), thus multiplying the voices and expressions defining the many versions of reality which we all experience.

From the concept:

“The immersion in the global stream of consciousness forming the current cognitive scape can be seen as an emersion. Dive right through media and emerge from the other side, in a reality that completely changes.
COS, Consciousness of Streams, is a complex yet natural initiative imagining the explosion of our human condition into an observable form.
COS is an environment, a series of networked workshops, a performative practice, an observation/representation methodology, and a second order cybernetic system resulting in an open-ended, on-going, multi-author, emergent, ubiquitous publication.
COS aims at disarticulating the practices of human beings and reassembling them from vantage points for expression and investigation: Identity, Time, Emotion, Place.
Each vantage point is a multidirectional observer: COS uses interfaces and interactions to observe individuals who, in turn, observe COS to form their physical and emotional state.
COS produces and analyzes streams: as a series of matrioskas, the environment is embedded into its container, and into the physical, digital and hybrid realities. The vantage points can be used to explore any level of this containment/intersectional hierarchy and, in turn, are affected by the whole system and by its
individual components.
COS, Consciousness of Streams, hosts the streams of consciousness of the people traversing it or attending its workshops as well as the ones of the global population of the social networks: in, out, in-between, in time, space, relations, difference.
COS is formed by poles focused on the vantage points and implementing interactions that guide individuals through a unique experience through a disassembled reality.
COS gathers all these experiences, and the ones of the people online and transforms them into information, expressing them through practice (the workshops), representation (the cross-medial environment) and performance (the collaborative/performative parts of the workshops).
COS expresses and then observes itself: the technological system embedded in various ways along the whole of COS aim at creating an ongoing experience.
A CMS (Content Management System) uses COS to produce an innovative form of publication, whose process does not end with the event: an open-ended, ubiquitous, multi-author, emergent, augmented reality, cross-medial publication that can be printed, interacted with, used through a location based system and by an augmented reality system: layered over the world and its stratified reality, in a continuous stream.”

CoS is a performative artwork that assumes the form of an interactive framework. The performance will be on-going, meaning that it will still be accessible after the festival, transforming it into a real, open, usable environment.

The technology used and created for CoS will also be accessible, under the forms of OpenSource APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) available to create additional functionalities for CoS, and as the framework itself, released under a GPL3 license right after the festival.

Everything happening at CoS will be part of the project/performance: the workshops, interactions, connections, expressions. Everything that people, present or remote, will decide to share will be included in the publication/environment, thus opening up the space and making it accessible, usable and reinventable.

Hope to see you all at transmediale for CoS, Consciousness of Streams.

Learn more about CoS, Consciousness of Streams at these links:

CoS Consciousness of Streams at Transmediale, including Workshops and installation information

we are participating to a number of conferences at transmediale: program found here

ConnectiCity, cities tell stories

The event featured an incredible set of international projects being showcased using the style called Pecha Kucha, with each presentation being shown using 20 slides automatically moving to the next one after 20 seconds.  My personal favourites of the night were maO, featuring some interesting thoughts on interactivity and on letting people define the borders of spaces, Michael Caton, a young designer who presented a software/photography project showing the “backstage” of the colossal architectural building grounds in Dubai and the rough condition of their workers, Weekend in a Morning, who presented a beautifully surreal and poetic project in which the traffic situation in Rome was confronted by designing an air transportation system using hot-air balloons from the borders of the city, and 2A+P/A, with their wonderful project about the productive condos in which a housign system was integrated with facilities for urban gardening, energy production and all sorts of activities that implement a sustainable living scheme. But all the projects were really interesting in proposing views on the city that created alternative interpretations of given reality, discovering how architectures could describe new forms of life either by suggesting – through spaces, materials and what you can do with them – different ways of living – more sustainable, more sensible to people and the environment and, most of all, intriducing the possibility for people to decide what to do with their spaces – or by doing it first-hand, following processes in which human beings, their self determination and their expression, are the most valuable thing that is taken into account.

At the event we presented two things: a project featuring wide sensing techniques to publish the stories of cities, and what we called the Atlante di Roma.

The first: Cities tell stories

this are the presentation slides we used:

As you can see by following the slides we told the story of how we gave thousands of people electronic devices capable of generating info and bio feedback, and combining this information with other sources to generate visual narratives of the city.

We chose 3 persons among the thousands and we created a story. On each person’s callout you can see the red bar, showing heartbeat rate, the blue bar showing stress conditions as gathered from galvanic skin response feedback, and the green bar showing emotional arousal information as collected from the interface of a mobile application that was given to them together with the devices.

The story followed the life of the three characters, describing a little urban love story, in which the sensors, traffic conditions, CO2 production, and mobile traffic profile of the the characters effectively created a time-based infoaesthetic tale.

The project was fake.

Together with FakePress we did similar projects and many people all over the world are currently creating and researching on these themes, making them more and more actual and feasable every day. So the fact that we presented a fake project is not really a big deal :) (and, halfway through the presentation we actually told people, and justified using the argumentation that I will use in a coule of lines or so)

We presented a fake project because it was probabily more real than any project presentation that we could have made.

Project presentations can be done in several ways: be them poetic, minimalistic, corporate… But, mostly, they represent only a single point of view. A single, incomplete, point of view.

So they do not represent, in any way, reality (or, at least, some indefinable, absolute “thing” that some people may have the temptation to call “reality”) which is, by definition, an interactive cohexistence of multiple points of view.

So we decided that it would be more significative to tell a lie, to describe a fake project, but, while doing this, to describe our perspective on the world and to delegate the discussion of our peojects to the projects themselves, that can be experienced online, used on mobile phones and even worn, in the case of our wearable technologies.

The second thing that we did during the event was to present one of these projects, in total adherence to what we described in the fake project presented with the slideshows. So, after all, it was not a fake. or, better, the presentation was a fake that described a real thing, so that the real thing could be more understandable. And, actually, it was fantastic how people believed more in the fake than in my expanations of the real project presented, which I will give you all a few lines below.

the project was presented as Atlante di Roma, but, after the presentation, it should actually be called “ConnectiCity“.

Let’s see why.

Atlante di Roma was an extraordinary architectural installation that we have been invited to create by Paolo Valente, the curator, for the Index Urbis Festa dell’Architettura in Rome. The installation featured a large-scale urban screen (about 35 meters long) that enacted a series of generative interfaces through which the visions on the city produced by institutions, organizations, studios and single individuals could be navigated using multitouch technologies, across space, time and subjects. The installation was though as something that could remain persistent, with an information system feeding its information that in a first phase (the one for the event) would have been fed by the responsibles of the organizations involved, but that would have been opened to public access so that anyone could express their vision on the city by uploading text, multimedia and their own voices.

Apart from the ever-present technical problems and some adjustments and changes in the interactivity that, after seeing it in action, we all agreed, together with Paolo, were needed, the Atlas perfectly did its job. And the online version is still working (if quite unattended, while we gather our forces and funds to keep the project going), and ready to be reproduced here in Rome and in other parts of the world.

What we presented at the event was something different.

You can see a scaled down version of the software used for the installation here at ConnectiCity: the City tells its stories

The concept shows a prottype for an urban screen that collects in realtime all the information generated by citizens on social networks and discussing their city, radiating outward from its geographical position. Imagine the screen placed in a neighborhood: walking by, you would could read what the people there, in that instant are saying about their city.

It is a way to communicate the multiple perspectives that effectively build the city, creating an architecture on top of it made from emotion, imagination, desires, ambitions and fears, and to make them part of the architectural landscape.

We decided to call this new concept using another name: ConnectiCity.

Atlas and ConnectiCity are two different things, thay have different objectives: the Atlas is a system that allows to create an environment with a specific form that is used to represent the visions on the city in which it is placed (as the Atlas of Rome does for Rome); ConnectiCity is a stream of consciusness, a situated collective stream of ideas, projects, visions and emotions emerging in a specific area thanks to whoever decides to express. While the Atlas focuses on the creation of a form, ConnectiCity focuses on the creation of a process.

Both share a vision: to create architectural spaces in cities that are dedicated to expression, emotion, and self-determination, tolerance, multi-culturalism.

visual narratives and explorations in anthropology

A continuous flow of perspectives, voices, desires and emotions creates a poliphonic form of expression that goes well beyond written language, creating an experience that is closer to the world we live in.

AC is a simple actionscript interface that will be used as a starting point in a series of developments.

The first one simply grabs pictures about “anthropology” in real time from flickr.com, displaying them in a mobile, variable, multi-author visual composition that aims to create a visionary stream of consciousness of the multitude of people involved. A chaotic, suggestive, emotional, harmonic-and-dissonant narrative.

click here to open: AC, Antropologia Culturale

In the next steps, this form of narration will be expanded to define a world-medium that will be used to build a digital layer of reality that you will be able to experience in physical space, trough mobile phones and other handheld and wearable devices. A narrative augmented reality and a new form of publishing.

Stay tuned. :)

A latex cyborg suit is created to connect a dancer’s body to the interaction of the live and internet audience.

All of the dancer’s senses are replaced by user-generated ones, and all of the sensations and movement of her body are used as sound and video feedback to the live environment and to the web interfaces.

A body transformed into an user-operated audio/visual instrument, to explore the concepts of identity, of perception and of the role of the audience in art.

Talkers Performance

Talkers Performance

more info:

> website

> videos on YouTube

also seen at:

> PEAM 2006

> Intelligenza Polimorfa

> Noema Labs

> Marita Cosma

> Perpetual Art Machine

> TEDance

> MyMedia magazine

> DigiCult magazine

> Bruno Menei

Talkers Performance