Squatting Supermarkets at Mondovì

Squatting Supermarkets at Mondovì

On Friday May 5th 2010 Art is Open Source , FakePress and The Hub Roma will be in Mondovì together with the Piemonte Share Festival and associazione Marcovaldo to present the next steps of the Squatting Supermarkets / iSee project.

Squatting Supermarkets is one of the projects included in the SMIR (Spazi Multimediali per l’Innovazione e la Ricerca / Multimiedia Spaces for Innovation and Research) project, an european project inolving the restoration of two ancient churches in Mondovì (Italy) and Embrun (France) to create a trans-frontier media research center that will investigate on the possibilities for digital arts to collaborate with the development of territories and populations.

We (as AOS and FakePress) are investing a lot on this project, as we feel that arts and social innovation go well together hand in hand in exploring new practices for a more sustainable world.

And we are not alone in this. The Sharing (the association behind the Piemonte Share Festival) and Marcovaldo (an association with a long history of territorial interventions promoting development, the arts, local economies and creativity) have been truly active, lately, on our involvement wih Squatting Supermarkets, and they are setting up an ecosystem of local producers that will form a first official experimentation base for the adoption of the practices designed with iSee / Squatting Supermarkets.

During the next few months we will add a layer of digital reality to the wonderful traditional cheeses, wines, vegetables, salamis and meats, through which producers will be able to inform people about their sustainable production and distribution processes, and people will be able to gather information on what it means for them and for the rest of world to consume critically, accessing informations, documentaries, global sources of information. Finally the products we eat and consume every day will have a story: we will be able to know who produce them, where, how and with what effects on our world. And we will be able to communicate with them and among ourselves, near and far, directly throgh the products that shape our daily lives.

So, we are really excited to get this part of the project going!

And “We” is growing by the minute, as you can read here about the recent collaborations with our friends and partners at The Hub Roma, the research group at the Tor Vergata University in Rome, the students that will produce end-of-course project works on Squatting Supermarkets and iSee at La Sapienza University in Rome. And there will be additions by the minute.

In Mondovì we will present a research poster (you can download the PDF of the poster here) that describes the current state of the research (titled “the Active Consumer“) and the planning we have set up for the next important date for Squatting Supermarkets, around the half of July 2010, back in Mondovì for the next steps of the project and a beautiful event in the medieval city square together with all the artists and initiatives of the SMIR project.

In Mondovì we will also present the new features of the iSee application for iPhone / Android that is at the heart of Squatting Supermarkets, including a new information visualization technology that will be released as Open Source.

So, as usual: stay tuned!

please register at the Facebook Event if you’d like to inform us that you’re coming, and if you want to stay updated on the event:

Facebook Event

More info at:

Squatting Supermerkets – info
Squatting Supermerkets – artistic statement by Salvatore Iaconesi
iSee – info
Zero Impact Technology Prize offered by the EnviParc in Turin – Piemonte Share Festival ‘09
Presentation  @Faculty of Architettura “La Sapienza” May 4th 2010 – Rome

Site Reference
www.smirproject.eu
www.toshare.it
www.artisopensource.net
www.fakepress.it
www.hubroma.net
www.designinteraction.it