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.
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
The video has been selected by Giovanni Viceconte from the ArtHubarchives 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
The musical tracks are disseminated through the locations of a city, created to integrate with the city’s texture, with its daily sounds, with its atmosphere. They connect to the things that happen everyday in those places, or with things which happened in the past, in its history, maybe revealing some interesting facts or stories, or building upon them to suggest narratives and possibilities.
This would be a remarkable thing, as the music in the album would create an alternative version of the city, in which the people, buildings, monuments and natural environment would interweave with the sounds of the musical tracks and create new experiences.
Just wear your headphones and walk: when you reach the proximity of one of the specified locations your smartphone would vibrate, alerting you that “something is there”, and you could start the experience.
When you hit the “play” button, you would start hearing the sounds designed for that specific place (and specific time) interweave with your surroundings, bringing up a novel sensation of the place you are in.
Some more interesting side effects would happen:
lots of people could autonomously gather at the locations of the musical tracks, bringing up possibilities for tourism, commerce, socialization, politics;
you could create a flow of people through the city, a novel form of urban narrative, a new form of art;
you would have actually created a happening, a concert, a performance, without having to rent a stadium, or pay for administrative permissions, or other taxes and fees;
you could enhance the experience of your city’s monuments, locations or natural environment;
you could transform the city into a platform for creativity, suggesting artists to create other compositions and creations for the various spots of your city, and supporting them by creating a platform which could transform the whole city into an ubiquitous museum and performance space.
A Serenade in Rome, an digital symphony you have to walk through
To listen to it you have to download an App and come to the city of Rome anytime from April 3rd 2013 (Salvatore’s birthday) to Sept. 6th 2013. And walk through the locations pointed out on the map shown in the app.
“The first in a series of revolutionary music formats.
a Serenade in Rome is a musical experience you have to walk through.
To listen to this electronic music you will have to go to the city of Rome anytime from April 3rd 2013 to September 6th 2013.
While walking through the city of Rome, in the places shown by the map, the tracks of this digital symphony will become available.
Each track has been composed for its specific location and for the unique experience and atmosphere which the beautiful setting of the tiny streets and monuments of the city of Rome are able to suggest.
A smell of bread in a little “vicolo” of Trastevere, near the back door of a traditional bakery, brings up a peaceful electronic sonata.
The beautiful hills of the ancient Villa Doria Pamphili urban park will enable you to experience a soothing natural sensation.
The labyrinth of small streets in the surroundings of Campo de’ Fiori will place you in the middle of a joyful composition of sounds.
And so on, with 12 unique musical compositions created to allow for a walk through the beauty of the city of Rome as you never experienced it.
So, if you plan on coming to the city of Rome anytime between April 3rd and September 6th 2013 consider downloading this App: it’s free and it will offer you the chance to see and feel the city in ways which you will just not find in guided tours or on online reviews of the city.
Imagine an alternative reality in which the tiny details of the daily life of the city make it unique become enriching sound experiences.
“a Serenade in Rome” is just like that.
Put on your headphones, turn on the app and start walking (or using public transportation, or a bicycle).
A map shows you where the musical experiences are, and your current location.
a Serenade in Rome, the tracklist
On the tracks list, a color code shows you when you will be able to experience each track.
Color “red”: you’re too far. Color “orange” and “yellow”: you’re getting closer.
Color “green”: you arrived at the spot of the experience.
A time-based countdown tells you how far you are from the time in which you will be able to experience the music.
“Now is the time…” is shown when the time has finally come to start experiencing the city of Rome in a completely new way.
When this happens, and whenever you are able to listen to a track (e.g.: you are in the right place at the right time) a vibration will notify you and the track will change color.
Just tap it to listen to it, while you walk in the surroundings. You can wander off as much as you can, as long as you remain in the area (100 meters radius) for the music.
Remember: the music has been designed for that specific place, so try to remain there and experience it fully, to gain a novel vision of the city.
You can experience each track as many times as you want.
When the time has finished (after September 6th) you will be able to purchase the songs in permanent format (only one song, more than one or all of them): please consider buying them (or some of them) if you enjoyed the experience: you will support us in producing more urban experiences like this one, in multiple cities and locations of the world.
a Serenade in Rome, music in the city
“a Serenade in Rome” is the first of multiple experiences we will release in the next few months to promote a new concept of tourism and multimedia. Imagine a movie which is disseminated across several parts of a city, and in which you actually have to go to the movie scene to experience it. Or, like the “Serenata”, a music album which is designed to enhance and transform your experience of a certain location. Or a multimedia experience which can be accessed only when you are near a specific object, person or place. Or a worldwide musical, video and cinematic treasure hunt.
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
