Posts Tagged ‘art is open source’
UBIQUITOUS POMPEI: THE FINAL EVENT FOR THE DIGITAL CITY CREATED BY STUDENTS
Ubiquitous Pompei, published on Art is Open Source
On December 14th, in the city of Pompei, we celebrated the final step in this phase of the Ubiquitous Pompei project, created through a series of workshops performed together with high school students who were invited to imagine the digital future of their city.
All together for the presentation of Ubiquitous Pompei
This has been an incredible experience for us. The possibility to work in tight contact with young students and to become enablers for their awareness of the possibilities offered by technologies and networks has been an amazing opportunity.
We were able to explore with the students the concepts of new forms of citizenship, innovative forms of participation and collaboration, novel ways of deciding and evaluating public policies, engaging ways of narrating the stories of the places in which they live, getting people, companies and administrations involved.
Vice-Mayor Claudio Alfano and the students
The workshops were used to introduce students to the opportunities and scenarios offered by ubiquitous technologies such asaugmented reality, location based media and services, and QRCodes and other digital tagging techniques. On top of that, students and educators were introduced to the MACME and NeoReality technologies, to be used in the process of imagining and creating the prototypes used to describe the digital future of the City of Pompei.
The technologies have been provided to students, educators and public administrators through an open platform. It can be found here (click to open PompeiAR, the tech platform used to create Ubiquitous Pompei).
Art is Open Source and FakePress Publishing will maintain the platform open and accessible to students/educators/administrators to allow them to continue in their journey through technological innovation: continuous experiments will be performed (and so don’t be surprised if, sometimes, test content pops up on the linked website: it means that students are actually working on it, experimenting on their city’s future) and, possibly, be transformed into real-life scenarios.
Giampiero Gramaglia and Derrick de Kerckhove at the event
The event on December 14th has been a wonderful experience and a chance to finally get together with all involved actors to evaluate the results of our efforts.
During the event, a commission composed by Derrick de Kerckhove, Giampiero Gramaglia, Claudio Alfano, Maria Pia Rossignaud and Antonio Irlando experienced the presentations of the projects created by the students, introduced by Oriana Persico and then presented directly by the young innovators. After the presentations the commission evaluated the prototypes produced during the project and assigned an award of distinction to the project which implemented an ubiquitous book dedicated to the ancient “social networks” found in Pompei’s ruins, where people inscribed graffiti messages about their daily life and full of useful information; An augmented reality application allows you to read these graffiti by framing them in your smartphone and, thus, to translate them from latin into your own language, to discover the lives of ancient Pompeians and engage an experiment in atemporality by being able to comment the ancient graffiti and open up a dialogue across time.
All students were awarded a certificate of participation to the project.
We definitely wish to thank the Public Administration of the City of Pompei – and especially Claudio Alfano, the Vice-Mayor of the City of Pompei and Town Councillor for Technological Innovation, and Mayor Claudio D’Alessio – for embracing with such energetic enthusiasm the vision proposed through this project, and by making us feel so welcome and appreciated in our efforts to discover, together with students and educators, the positive opportunities which the digital future can bring closer to us, and helping us to develop our cities, relations, jobs and environments.
And we sincerely wish to thank the students and professors at the Liceo Socio-pedagogico E. Pascal and the Istituto Bartolo Longo, the two schools which joined us in this wonderful experience: you have been so nice to have dedicated us some of your time and energies, and so wonderful to have perfectly understood the sincerity with which we propose our ideas and skills.
And, of course, we wish to thank MediaDuemila and Associazione Amici di Media Duemila, for creating the “McLuhan Incontra Pompei” project and, thus, making this all possible, and prof. Derrick de Kerckhove for leading our visions.
HERE you can find information about the MACME technology used in the project.
HERE you can find information about the NeoReality technology used in the project.
The Ubiquitous Pompei project, as well as the concepts produced by the students, are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Ubiquitous Pompei, Art is Open Source, MediaDuemila and the students of Pompei
Maciunas, Fluxus manifesto
FLUXUS was a variable group of artists working in what has vastly been called Neo-Dada and visual arts, but really worked intermedially across visual arts, design, video, music, performance and architecture.
Vastly inspired by the work of John Cage and, in a way, organized by George Maciunas, FLUXUS was a natively networked movement of artists that were already working and collaborating along the same lines, internationally.
The term “intermedia” was coined by fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe what, during the 60s, was a really innovative approach in which arts started moving across materials, practices, technologies and genres, defining entirely new ones or even incredibly significative hybrids.
FLUXUS artists worked with found materials with a DIY (Do It Yourself) approach, often establishing profund collaboration practices or experimenting the ideas of randomness and the recombination of everyday objects and events into artistic expressions.
Various kinds of materials and technologies were used to enact this approach, including the first video experiments by Nam June Paik and John Cage’s musical creations built using appliances, everyday objects, and things coming from offices or ordinary houses. The diffused tendency operated by fluxus artists was to both “open” the artistic process and to layer artistic visions onto the flow (fluxus) of ordinary life.
The DIY approach is typical of the first objective. Here, artistic gestures and approaches were disclosed, and the methodologies and techniques were described as something that could be accessible to people, for comprehension and reenactment. Even on the strategies of price: while “ordinary” artists produced very limited numbers of highly expensive works, fluxus artists (for example Maciunas himself) produced their works as if they were to be mass produced and made available at very low costs. Art was open, interactive, accessible and collaborative, as the person experiencing the artwork was required to intervene and act, or even suggested to replicate and diffuse gestures in other contexts.
As for the second approach, FLUXUS’ assemblage and recombination of everyday objects and practices transformed the imaginaries connected to ordinary daily life, creating through aesthetics, experiences and interactions, additional dimensions in which any object or space could be perceived. Objects acquired the magical aura of art by simple recontextualizations or juxtapositions, as sounds, visions and other sensorial experiences aggregated through performance and interaction.
Art flowed with daily life as one single environment with multiple possibilities opening up for world codification and experience.
This disruptive approach to art and life was crystallized across a series for practices.
The production of the so called Fluxus Boxes was one of them.
Fluxus boxes were a peculiar form of expression in which the artist gathered a series of objects, cards, materials and components and assembled them in boxes, suitcases or other containers. The assemblage was created with multiple purposes in mind: creating suggestions and tangible poetics by juxtaposing things was something that the cinematographic montage had learned since the beginning of the century, and it was also explored by musicians such as Cage, where the sounds of known objects acted on levels that are simultaneously physical, symbolic and referring to memory and cultures.
Fluxus Boxes
Fluxus boxes were intended as non linear narratives to be handled, touched, performed, disseminated, destroyed, reassembled, counted and reconfigured.
Just as cinema montage and music had learned, the orchestration of symbols, visions and other sensorial components was able to create novel scenarios. Interactivity and tangibility created a state of continuous recombination, multiplying interpretation and cognitively activating people, who became part of the artwork while handling, imagining and communicating. The connection with the ordinary flow of life created new dimensions in the world: stratified, recombinant and engaging.
In occasion of the 50 years of FLUXUS we have decided to research on this wonderful form of expression, both for the innovation it has provided in the arts and for its connection with many of the mutation processes that are going on with contemporary humanity and their ability to experience media, communicate and interact.
At the event Mercoledì da NABA series of events, on December 15th 2010, we will hold a workshop/performance in which we will build a Fluxus Box using Augmented Reality and other cross-medial techniques and technologies.
The ojective will be to research on the Fluxus Box approach, and to appy it at a “meta” level. The objects contained in the box will be tools through which the experience of multiple Fluxus Boxes will be holdable, remixable, juxtaposable, recombinable, enacting a meta-performance encompassing possibly infinite remixed reenactments of Fluxus performances, experiences and events.
The box we will produced will be donated to the NABA, and the custom software that will be created for the occasion will be released under a GPL2 licensing scheme, so that it will be usable by artists, students and practitioners worldwide, in a further level of the performance.
more info at:
http://www.artisopensource.net
Robot Festival 2010, Bologna, Italy
Augmented Reality can create opportunities for critical reinvention of the world.
Squatting Supermarkets uses augmented reality to break open the codes of commercial communication on the products we use every day. By taking a picture with your mobile phone to the logo of a product, individuas can contribute to a global, disseminated relational discourse on ecology, sustainablity and social responsibility issues of the things we eat, wear and use every day.
The logo gets recognized with computer vision techniques and is used as a fiducial marker that can be used by the Squatting Supermarkets application to create a discussion space onto which people can write their thoughts and interact with other individuals and groups.
An interpretative layer on top of reality where we can express ourselves, bypassing communication control strategies enacted by corporations and governments. Augmented Reality as a new space for self-expression.
FakePress and Art is Open Source present:
Squatting Supermarkets @ RObot Festival 2010
from 15th to 18th September
Bologna, Italy
click here for more info about RobotFest 2010
click here for more info about Squatting Supermarkets
click here for even more info about Squatting Supermarkets
please link back to: http://www.artisopensource.net/2010/09/09/squatting-supermarkets-robot-festival-bologna/
IAR2010
From: http://www.artisopensource.net/2010/06/24/aos-and-fakepress-present-critical-ar-ensemble-at-iar2010/
Art is Open Source and FakePress participated to IAR2010, the first italian event totally dedicated to the themes of Augmented Reality, organized by the folks at JoinPad at the Milan headquarters of the Hub.
AOS @ IAR2010
from http://www.artisopensource.net/2010/06/24/aos-and-fakepress-present-critical-ar-ensemble-at-iar2010/
The event was truly interesting as it covered a wide range of themes and approaches. I must say that I am quite interested in the efforts that marketing is putting on Augmented Reality (AR). It reminds me a lot of the hype that had developed a couple of years ago on proximity marketing and bluetooth.
While the idea of being able to interact with “users” according to their position and to the possibility of delivering contextualized, relevant content just-in-place and just-in-time is quite fascinating and attractive, lots of issues arised in practical applications of proximity marketing: the availability and compatibility of devices, user habits, usability, accessibility, the quality of content to be delivered, invasiveness, responsiveness, interactivity.
the crowd at the HUB Milan
With AR we have gone way beyond those problems, but something’s still missing and, on the other side, people haven’t yet figured out exactly what they want from AR, and how they want it.
Good things first: IAR2010 has been a wonderful experience. Before and during the setup and at the afterparty we had the chance to chat with some really wonderful and creative people who are developing ideas and projects that have AR components in perspectives that encompass wide range of interests and matters.
Mauro Rubin @ IAR2010
Using the presentations as a reference, the first that comes up to mind is Simone Cortesi of OpenStreetMap. With OSM a radical approach is being persued, focused on the creation of a stack of tools collaboratively building a software and content platform and, on the content side, to truly implement a distributed operative environmet which enables for a real stratification of information on the “real” world. Projects such as OSM are truly interesting in that they actually enable people to do something that people are doing since the dawn of times: add meaning and information to the world around them. OSM allows you doing it on a global scale by providing the geographic foundation and by allowing you to freely build on it.
This is a focal point, and it’s the main reason behind me not being *very* excited about the marketing aspects of AR.
With AR we are dealing with a possible paradigm shift: the possibility to making digital, multimedia information accessible directly from the analog physical world.
This is a breathtaking possibility that has been matched, recently, only by the researches on digital and generative fabrication. While this latter model describes a complete reinvention of manufacturing processes (post-post-industry: you bring manufacturing plants at home, you work on opensourced models that you can use/modify and 3d-print) rethinking from the base the ideas of patents, distribution, storage, sustainability, ecology, AR completely (potentially) reinvents the idea of communication, bringing the power of creating information, meaning, symbols, codes and interactions directly to the people, directly in the places/times they walk, live, work, have fun.
This possibility potentially confronts the current hyerarchies and models of communication and information, further enhancing the ones that are currently available through the internet. AR potentially brings the possibility to generate, disseminate and distribute content and information to the people in the physical world, far from their monitors, far from “I Like” buttons and “tweet this” badges.
This is why we named ur contribution to IAR2010 Critical AR Ensemble.
Critical Art Ensemble was a group creating “molecular interventions and semiotic shocks that collectively could diminish the rising intensity of authoritarian culture”. Their work on media and experimentations on the borders and frontiers of technology, biotechnology and extreme practices is something that we feel very significative in contemporary times.
We borrowed their name, turining it into Critical AR Ensemble, to suggest how Augmented Reality can be thought of as a new space in which to create such “interventions and semiotic shocks”. With AR we imagine a world in which codes can be broken down, infliltrated, reinvented, directly from the people, directly from streets, bodies, objects, times and places, reinventing public spaces, private ones, relations, and communications.
There are technical and conceptual issues to be assessed in all this.
Technically, AR is still very cumbersome: devices, displays, percision, computer vision… everything is not what we would like to have. Too slow, too limited, too reliant on markers.
Conceptually, AR is being mostly used as a next-step advertisment or as a next-step yellow pages. Which is something, but something that resembles using a nuke to kill a fly.
One thing must be said in favor of marketing practices experimenting with AR: they are fast! There’s a dozen new experiments each day: markers on magazines, on cards, on totems, on cars, on tshirts, everywhere. With this progression going on we will soon have critical masses of know-how that will possibly form a foundation for further researchers.
But the most interesting things going on in AR are quite far from marketing. Social networks, art, architecture, sustainability, ecology, disabilities, multi-cultural practices, alternative business models, activism. People reinventing socialization; aesthetics; the spaces we walk through; the places in which we spend our time; the effects of our actions on the world; the possibility to inform ourselves on the products and services we use; the accessibility of the world for people who are not able to hear or see; the possibility to open up dialogues among multiple cultures and to make them interact and coexist; the possibility to create really new business models; the posibility to criticize, express ourselves, promote our autonomies, claim our share of the world.
These are areas in which AR is being researched on with incredible results, and the ones that I personally am most excited about.
Together with FakePress we are approaching these areas of intervention from the point of view of a next-step publishing house.
FakePress next step publishing
What will a publishing house that is aware of these possibilities look like?
We actually don’t know, yet, just as anyone else in these times and conditions. But we’re experimenting on our educated guesses.
“Publishing” will be (and already is) a key term in the near future. Global scale meltin-pots, remixing, mashing-ups, bashing, distracting, assembling, disassembling, fabbing, performing, wearing, touching, retouching. Messing it all up and bringing it back to a state of calm for the next two seconds and then starting up once again with the mashup. A continuous fluid unstable state of remix. Incredibly creative. But also very far from the word “strategy” as we know it. Different skills, methodologies, ambitions and, most of all, imaginaries are required.
Wrapping up: IAR2010 was a wonderful experience. We saw some innovative experiments, some a-bit-less-innovative ones, but focused on the high levels of quality and accessibility designed for the masses, some decent technical solutions, some really interesting theoretical approaches, some great visions, some incredible efforts and, most of all, a wonderful level of curiosity, a definite will to listen to all the available perspectives and a remarkable dedication to being open and accessible, with the clear objective of creating interconnections and collaborations.
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:
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
http://www.artisopensource.net/2010/05/03/squatting-supermarkets-isee-at-la-sapienza-university-in-rome/
Squatting Supermarkets at La Sapienza in Rome
FakePress, Art is Open Source and The Hub Roma
in collaboration with
the “Multimedia Technologies and Communications Experimentations” course at the “Ludovico Quaroni” Faculty of Architecture at Rome’s University “La Sapienza”, Industrial Design Department
and
are happy to invite you to the lecture:
Squatting Supermarkets/iSee
Artistic fundamentals, eco-sustainability, market: from Shoptivism to the Active Consumer.
Who: Oriana Persico and Cary Hendrickson (AOS/FakePress), Dario Carrera and Ivan Fadini (The Hub Roma/Faculty of Economics, Tor Vergata), Ilaria Bassi, Vanessa D’Acquisto, Piergiorgio Malfa, Vittoria Mauro (research group at the “Management of Non Profit Organizations” course, Tor Vergata), Salvatore Iaconesi (visiting professor)
What: lecture/workshop
Where: Faculty of Architecture “Ludovico Quaroni”, via E.Gianturco 2 (Rome) – room G 11 [ MAP ]
When: May 4th, 2010 – from 9am to 12pm
A radical version of a marketplace, a point of sale in augmented reality, Squatting Supermarkets tells the tale of the evolution of our daily realities, entering the live and pulsating heart of consumism. Looking at products on the shelves, choosing, paying, debts, persuasion and seduction, relations with logos, messages and other people. Buying is an experience that fills our daily lives, built through images, suggestions and strategies that are so complex that they systematically evade the perception of the final user. Technologies can be used to create new spaces for action/communication, and to overlay them onto our ordinary reality, thus creating new action/communication spaces, allowing new possibilities for interaction and fruition: ubiquitous, accessible, emergent and polyphonic, emotional and relational. Squatting Supermarkets narrates this possibility: an augmented reality space that is technologically layered to everyday life, an interstitial marketplace living in squat on the physical and immaterial infrastructures.
Presented for the first time at the Piemonte Share Festival in 2009, Squatting Supermarkets has two souls: a site-specific installation and an innovative technology, iSee. The installation reproduces an interactive supermarket in which the widespread interconnection network defining products’ histories and stories can become explicit and accessible. The techniques of traceability and control are transformed into their ecosystemic, narrative and poetic versions: information is not only for corporations anymore. By overlaying and integrating codes coming from barcodes, tags, RFIDs, credit cads, financial tranactions.
Grabbing a product becomes an immersive experience with its story, and the possibility of writing a part of it: moving hands, drawing gestures, exposing our points of view and our emotions. Products animate, becoming a space for expression, a network of relations, a domain for possibility and opportunity. Distributed storytelling practices in which the hidden stories of producers and consumers come in contact. The access door to these domains are the logos. iSee, the technological heart of the installation is a mobile application based on image recognition and computer vision techniques.
Framing the product on the camera, an image processing algorithm identifies the logo, allowing the user to access an additional set of information coming from a plurality of sources. Narrative galaxies (open, emergent, multi-author) connected to p2p thematic social networks layered over products.
Logos become wikis, open communication infrastructures, distributed social networks, p2p ecosystems.
The Project is based on the analisys of the contemporary technological/economic context. On one side, environmentalism and eco-sustainability are issues that are acknowledged as being among the globally most important drivers in piloting the shopping choices of large parts of the population. On the other side, statistics demonstrate that progressively large numbers of individuals search for information on social networks befre purchasing commodities and services, and that the users of last-generation mobile devices are steadily growing by the numbers.
In all this, enterprises start feeling the need to confront a globally interconnected communication and relation system, emergent, polyphonic, in which the acquisition and the maintenance of a “good reputation” goes through complex social and cultural dynamics that are progressively more chaotic. The “Company” is not the sole center of communication and of the shaping of its corporate identity.
On may 4th 2010, from 9am to 12pm, FakePress’ interaction design lab will analyze the possibilities for expression and interaction enabled by the shopping based narratives offered by Squatting Supermarkets under an artistic/performative point of view and by iSee under the perspectives of technology and infrastructures.
Oriana Persico will confront the themes related to the installation, introducing the artistic statement,
Cary Hendrickson will focus on the themes of eco-susteinability, social responsibility and on the governance of related processes;
The research group of the “Management of Non profit Organizations” course at the Tor Vergata University coordinated by Dario Carrera and Ivan Fadini will expose the first results coming from the research titled “Active Consumer: from Movements to Shopping Based Publishing“.
How are consumers sensible to the environment and to critical consumism? How do they relate to the opinions generated on social media and on brand reputation created through User Generated Content? How widespread are smartphones? How many individuals would be willing to use a mobile application such as iSee? Who could finance it? What are the possible business models?
The theoretical and artistic premises, the analisys on eco-sustainability and the market scenarios will be used by the students of the course at the Faculty of Architecture to create a series of project works focused on the evolutions of the iSee platform and on the creation of a site specific installation to be implemented in a public commercial space, integrating multiple skills and points of view and, most of all, creating multidisciplinary and inter-university collaboration paths among students and faculties to achieve common goals.
The project works will be presented together with the research during the Open Day at the end of the course.
Entrance to the lecture is free and open to all.
Additional information
Squatting Supermarkets/iSee is a co-production by FakePress/Art is Open Source. Special project at the Piemonte Share Festival 2009, winner of the “Zero Impact Technlogy” prize offered by the Environment Park in Turin. Squatting Supermarkets/iSee is part of the SMIR project under the artistic direction of The Sharing:
http://www.fakepress.it/FP/?p=523
http://www.fakepress.it/FP/?p=47
http://www.smirproject.eu/ (site available next week)
Site
http://www.artisopensource.net
http://www.hubroma.net/
please use the Facebook Event to stay updated:
Art is Open Source and FakePress just released Knowners a link sharing plugin for WordPress.
Knowners screenshot
Knowners is a WordPress plugin developed by FakePress and Art is Open Source to setup an effective link publishing website.
The plugin is still in beta, but it already offers interesting possibilities.
It is thought as a large scale widget, usable inside your WordPress websites to setup a link sharing area on your web page.
You can publish links, categorize them with tags, automatically create relationships and taxonomies.
a screenshot of Knowners
This plugin is in its 1.0 version. It still has limited functionality. We are working on it. We would love to hear from you, with your suggestions on the features you would like to have.
Please check back soon for updates: we are releasing a new version in just a bit, with an enhanced link editing scheme (the current one is quite limited).
[ Download the Knowners plugin here ]
We’re set!
Squatting Supermarkets is all installed and it is about to start.
There will be a continuous interaction with the people at the Share Festival, both friends and visitors, and all the technical and curatorial crew.
Shoptivism Logo
It will be part documentary, part interviews, part performance, and it will take the shape of a web TV called Shoptivism
Flickr Photos
interstices 