HumaniTies and Artificial Intelligence
Ideas
L’età dell’ansia. Egloga post-digitale / The Age of Anxiety: a Post-digital Eclogue
[ITA] A Transmediale si è riflettuto sugli aspetti della vita contemporanea nell’epoca del capitalismo digitale: quali sono le attività e i comportamenti che la caratterizzano?
[ENG] Transmediale's focus was on aspects of contemporary life in the age of digital capitalism: what are the activities and behaviors that characterize it?
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.
Transmediale15: a reflection about algorithmic life
[ITA] Si è conclusa la ventisettesima edizione di transmediale15, nell'incontro tra cultura ed età post-digitale. Una riflessione sul tema "del futuro del lavoro e della vita algoritmica".
[ENG] The twenty-seven edition of transmediale15 took place into the cutting edge of culture in the post-digital age. A reflection on "the future of algorithmic work and life".
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.
Exhibiting Elsewhere
When funding is not linked to a specific exhibition space – and traditional exhibition spaces can represent a noticeable part of a production budget – the incentive to work in a traditional white cube disappears.
Giornalisti? ‘Cani da carne’ in salsa high-tech / Journalists? ‘Meat dog’ with high-tech sauce
[ITA] Cambiano i tempi ma David Cronenberg, regista etichettato come il Barone del Sangue, non si smentisce. [ENG] The time is changed but David Cronenberg, the director too labeled as the Baron of Blood, makes no exceptions.
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.
What does it take… Notes on Ars Electronica 2014
What does it take to change? Creativity, catalysts, craving, community, control? The letter "c" seems to incorporate many or most parameters for technical, social, and artistic development, no other letter could have provided a better thematic structure for the festival's multiple ways of finding answers or asking new questions about change.
C… what it takes to change? Una visione postcritica su/A postcriticism vision about Ars Electronica 2014
[ITA] Che cosa ci vuole per cambiare? La mission di Ars Electronica di quest'anno è stata quella di trovare qualche risposta a una nuova fase di cambiamento.
[ENG] What it takes to change? The mission of Ars Electronica was to discover what leads change and to call for answers from different directions and disciplines.
McLuhan’s “Understanding Media” is 50
In 1964 the Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan published his seminal book "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man", that gave a new sap to the media studies introducing new perspectives. He suggested that “the medium is the message”, namely that the media affect the society in which they play a role.
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.
Subtle Technologies 2014. Open Culture in Art and Science – A reportage
It is that time of the year: Subtle Technologies Festival is back for a week-long ride to explore Open Culture in Art and Science. The theme this year is particularly timely: DIY-bio labs, hacker spaces and hacklabs, maker spaces etc… are popping up everywhere, new forms of sharing ranging from tools, to skills, to networks of solidarity to eliminate debt, to avoid eviction, or just to share a meal together are no longer rare.
After the afterglow (Transmediale14). For an undisciplined research
[ITA] Quest’anno i riflettori di transmediale14 sono stati puntati sui dispositivi di sorveglianza: privacy, Big Data e ubiquitous computing. [ENG] This year the spotlights of transmediale14 were focused on monitoring devices: privacy, ubiquitos computing and big data.
Thesis on the Interface-Database Dichotomy
The present article proposes to think the interface-database dichotomy regarding new media cultural objects in terms of the relationship between story 1 and story 2. With this aim, two different but possibly complementary approaches to this relationship will be considered. Therefore, the proposed reading of the interface-database relationship could be synthesized as follows. [...] Story 1) Interface (narrative)-synchronic-syntagm in relation to Story 2) Database-diachronic-paradigm.
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.
Homo nudus atque apertus: the maps of Doris Graf
[ITA] Homo nudus atque apertus è un progetto di Doris Graf che unisce l'interesse per il linguaggio dei pittogrammi e quello per la trasformazione dell’identità in rete, a causa dei social network e della potenziale limitazione della libertà personale.
[ENG] Homo nudus atque apertus is a project by Doris Graf that combines the language of the pictograms and the identity transformation in the web, because of the social networks and of the potential restriction of personal freedom.
Total recall: The (re-) evolution of memory?
[ITA] Ars Electronica Festival in questa edizione del 2013 si apre al passato, almeno, in un certo senso. Al centro dell’attenzione di artisti, pensatori, esperti, critici d’arte, infatti, il concetto di memoria, in tutte le sue declinazioni.
[ENG] Ars Electronica Festival in this 2013 edition is, in a certain sense, opened to the past. Artists, thinkers, experts, art critics, so as all the visitors were, indeed, invited to focus their attention on the concept of ‘memory’, in all its declinatio...
The Big Picture – New Concepts for a New World
[ITA] Alcuni dicono che la crisi che stiamo vivendo può essere vista come qualcosa di positivo, come un'opportunità per cambiare in meglio il mondo in cui viviamo, per produrre qualcosa di nuovo.
[ENG] Some say that the crisis we are going through can be seen as something positive, as an opportunity to change the world we are living in for the better, to produce something new.
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?