Reverse Biology
Essay
Towards a Semi-Living Avatar. Investigating the Interface Body-Smart Machines in Stelarc’s Work
Crossing the boundaries from Cyberpunk Fiction to Reality, Stelarc’s work moves gradually towards the realization of a vision: To investigate the interface between the actual and the virtual world, with the body acting seamlessly in mixed realities, and with an intelligent avatar that performs in the real world, with optical density and tactile experience. This idea, seems to permeate his experimentations with engineering, robotic and digital technology, and with artificial intelligence and biot...
Evolutionary creativity. The inner life and meaning of art
Generative art is a key example of a general transformation carried on by many disciplines, which are going to populate our world with increasingly different subjects. [...] In mirroring nature and life, also the generative art forms and processes are leading to the advent of a “Third Life”, the life that little by little humanity is giving to its artefacts.
La scrittura, il cervello e l’era digitale / Writing, Brain and Digital Age
[ITA] Secondo Picchione, la penetrazione a livello neuronale da parte delle nuove tecnologie hanno colonizzato anche l’immaginario, modificando anche la psicologia umana e persino i desideri.
[ENG] According to Picchione the neuronal penetration by new technologies has also settled the imaginary and is affecting human psychology and even desires and the University.
Polyphibionics: from cyborganic amphibians to polyphibians
Returning to the origins of cyborg, conceived in order to automatize the homeostasis of human species of Earthlings, augmenting the human organism to conquer the knowledge of outer space, outside the safety zone of planet Earth, this paper re-examines the relation between the outward and inward directed explorations by considering how the journeys beyond the offerings of our atmosphere enable expansion of our noosphere.
Il corpo e la soglia. Considerazioni sul film Avatar
[ITA] Di Avatar m'interessa considerare gli aspetti relativi al corpo. Se una lezione abbiamo appreso dal parziale fallimento dell'impresa dell'Intelligenza Artificiale forte – che si propone di replicare l'intelligenza umana mediante programmi per calcolatore – è che la nostra intelligenza non può prescindere dalla presenza del corpo, nel quale è radicata: un corpo che è a sua volta immerso in, e in costante interazione con, l'ambiente.
[ENG] In the movie Avatar I'm interested in considering t...
Language and Computational Creativity
We contemplate how to abstract these processes such that in time a machinic system may define its own sense of creativity through enculturation, and later though its own sense of abstraction, expanded conversation, and human/machine socialization. In fact the autonomous machine may develop completely new aesthetic forms that humans have never considered.
L’Ambiente Dentro. Una riflessione epistemologica sul confine / Environment Inside. An Epistemological Reflection on the Border
[ITA] Le nuove suggestioni dalle scienze della complessità erodono un confine ideale e troppo ben definito tra noi e l'ambiente. L'ambiente non è più qualcosa di fisso, "là fuori", ma una produzione delle nostre rappresentazioni individuale e collettive. I nodi epistemologici, ecologici ed economici di questa concezione sono qui identificati.
[ENG] The new suggestions from the sciences of complexity erode an ideal and too well defined boundary between us and the environment. The environment is ...
Dialogismi e biopoetiche / Dialogisms and biopoetics
[ITA] Il libro raccoglie testi che Kac ha pubblicato nel corso di di dodici anni, la cronaca di un viaggio durante il quale ha sviluppato il suo lavoro e ricerche di telepresenza, biotelematica, biorobotica, arte transgenica.
[ENG] The book brings together texts that Kac published over twelve years, a chronicle of a journey as he says, during which he developed his work and researches with telepresence, biotelematics, biorobotics, transgenic art.
Emergence of Creative Machines
Recent years demonstrates a divide between the old humanistic vision that puts the human at the center of all things and the increasing machine autonomy. We witness an effective resistance to the unavoidable cultural change. However, the endeavor to make machines more intelligent, creative and even capable of some consciousness, is determined by need and is now unstoppable.
The Art of Emotional Intelligence
The challenges of the 21st century require new ways of thinking, making it crucial for educators and policy makers to understand the processes of creative thinking and achievement. [...] Emotions are central to all art forms, from painting and sculpture, to music, film, theatre and other arts.
Media fingerprints in the representation
In general sense, representation is a term which implies a distance between a subject and its reproduction. This reproduction must be considered in equal way, in any form of mediated experience. However, our aim is to focus on visual representation and to expose the seams that it wants to hide.
Regulation and Social Media: Speed Bumps or the Code 2.0
“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather (…)” (Barlow 1996).
Beyond the map: an experiment in affective geographies
In this paper I use a recent research creation project and its mobile component (the TiP lab) to draw attention to the importance of regarding the city as an entanglement of sometimes evident, sometimes hidden naturecultural geographies and more-than-human encounters. I argue that while official narratives are not interested in narrating such vibrant multidimensionality, traditional cartographic practices don’t seem to be able to seize them.
Refounding Legitimacy Toward Aethogenesis
The fusion of human and technology takes us into an unheard world, populated by quasi-living species that would relegate us to the rank of alienated agents, emptied of their identity and consciousness. I argue instead that our world is woven by simple, though invisible, perspectives, which may renew our ability of judgment and our autonomy, I have called Anoptical Perspectives.
Staging Aliveness, Challenging Anthropocentrism: Subverting an Art Historical Paradigm
According to Edward O. Wilson, human beings have an “innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes.” And art writer Jack Burnham even maintained that “art is a form of biological signal”.
A Different Theory of Mediation for Technospaces
Diffractive Technospaces undertakes a redefinition of the relationship between space and representation, beginning from a revision of both according to a performative, non-representational perspective. Here, representation is not refused, but differently articulated in a relation of reciprocity with the same articulation of technospaces.
The Tesseract: between mediated consciousness and embodiment
The tesseract is a gravitational wormhole that represents the physical compression of space that circumvents time in order to move from one location in spacetime to another. The index, as part of the body, but also the mechanism for applying a collapsed signification, requires both utterance (mediation) and event (temporal-frame) in order to create cognitive meaning.
Sul concetto di Media Art / On the Notion of Media Art
[ITA] Il fenomeno Media Art nasce dalle relazioni che hanno caratterizzato il mondo degli audiovisivi, del cinema, dei media e dell’arte contemporanea.
[ENG] The phenomenon of Media Art arises from the connections that have affected the world of audiovisual, cinema, media and contemporary arts.
Architectures of Interaction, Architectures of Communication
New ways of using space are emerging and moving towards real time management. The architect has perhaps become a super programmer? In this perspective, we can say that the present city is partly an expression of the 20th century urban and technological utopianism.
Luci, tecnologie, arti… / Lights, Technologies, Arts…
[ITA] Se penso alla luce penso a un'energia e penso a quegli organi - come l'occhioo - che la rivelano, come scrisse Gyorgy Kepes.
[ENG] If I think about light I think about an energy and I think about those organs - like the eye - that reveal it, as Gyorgy Kepes wrote.
Rhizome as an open system: some notes
Rhizome, long before that it became the inspired intro of Mille Plateaux, was published as a stand-alone essay, influencing – in the second half of the seventies – student movements, workerist organisations and political groups.
In the Name of the Pattern
[...] Nevertheless we can find an explicit use of “pattern” as a technical word in a variety of disciplines ranging from science or art to craftsmanship, such as tailoring, software design, architecture, finance, trading, knitting, interface design, decoration, data mining, machine learning, medical diagnosis and many more.
Tapzy: a post-(human)Iconkiller?
[ITA] Presentato al pubblico ad ottobre 2012 con una mostra evento, Tapzy è un progetto di arte ibrida, che vive ormai da un anno grazie all’interazione del suo protagonista – un uomo elefante dal look clownesco – in contesti diversi contemporaneamente, on line ed off line. [ENG] Unveiled to the public in October 2012 with an event exhibition, Tapzy is a project of hybrid art, who lives through the interaction of its protagonist – an elephant-man with a clownish look- in different contexts at t...
Art and Science as the Conjectured Possible
[...] In this manner, by demonstrating the logic in the creation of new technological forms and new identities, art articulates the primary task of the individual living in the age of new technologies: the construction of a living future (that is, a future that endows us with freedom), and not a dead, mechanized future that is being built without our participation.
Apple returns to the symbolic
One thing that is central to think is how technologies, and more specifically interfaces, shape our modes of perception and interaction, and thus our everyday reality, through their "narrative" and ways of representation. It is a vast topic, so this short article will focus on Apple' s GUI (Graphic User Interface) evolution to parallel it with the evolution of the representation of space in Western art, and, hopefully, draw some conclusions, and even more desirable, open some questions.
Aesthetics of transition. New metric of the body
The arts, science and technology are experiencing a period of profound change. Explosive challenges to the institutions and practices of engineering, art making, and scientific research raise urgent questions of ethics, craft, and care for the planet and its inhabitants. Unforeseen forms of beauty and understanding are possible, but so are too unexpected risks and threats.
Political Philosophy of the Information Society
I want to thank the organizers of the International Conference on the Information Society (i-Society 2012) here in London for inviting me to be a keynote speaker. My favorite British writer is George Orwell, and one of the questions that I will ask in my lecture is: if he were alive today, what would George Orwell think of the Information Society?