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delicious poetry
I once again reactivated the delicious poetry piece. It hasn’t been working in a while because delicious.com’s website had changed its web page structure, but now it’s back up.
You can see it by clicking this [ LINK ] (WARNING: it may hang your browser!)
delicious poetry grabs internet’s faourite links in realtime and uses their contents to visually build a chaotic poem. An everchanging complex composition built on people’s wishes, desires, tastes and emotions.
delicious poetry
Generative art has been known to research on multiple subjects: from reconsidering the role of artists and authors, to researching into the structures of language, to the analysis of natural phenomena, to deep diving into code, chaos and complexity, up to the uplifting experiences brought on by discovering noise and randomness as primary creative energies.
delicious poetry grabs handfuls of enjoyment from all of this, and adds to it a little joke i constantly try to play to internet service providers and to search engines. A small, playful critique to the mechanisms they use to scan the web to provide us with the things we constantly are looking for. And, obviously, a small critique to the trust that we tend to put on them, as well.
In fact, something funny happened in the past with delicious poetry. The generative poems composed by the work produce pages that are a dynamic assemblage of the things that internet users deem as being interesting at a certain time. This is why search engines and content aggregators seem to find these chaotic poems so interesting, finding them completely filled with the “hot” keywords of the moment. So much that they tent to spider, cache, index, rate and categorize them.
delicious poetry
The first time I released delicious poetry I was actually amazed. A few days after it started out, it began to generate thousands of human and not-human visits per second! And aggregators started to categorize it under the most incredible topics, ranging from pornography to gadgets to cars… and on.
I guess there are hundreds of automatic mechanisms people use to fool search engines. And this has helped me to take interest on more than one issue related to search angines and to the accessibility of web content: the invisible web, the Dark Internet.
On one side, the tons of useless results that we get when we search for stuff on the web. On the other side, the fact that “Internet” does not mean “automatically accessible”, for reasons that go beyond the power of single individuals, and referring to the fact that search engines do not index a lot of things, or that censorhip exists, and more like that. (note: entire web search engines are dedicated to the deep web. DeepDyve and DeepPeep, to name two).
Even web statistics and analytics are affected by delicious poetry, getting referral codes, analytics codes and statistics application hooks used in ways that are different than the ones they were intended for, hijacking entre websites’ access statistics.
I naturally meant no harm or damage in doing this, but knowing that it is possible to fake, to mock-up, to reinvent what we know about the web, its accessibility, its control, is just plain interesting in itself.
tram #8 rome, before the earthquake
December 19th, 2008
O, an emotional bluetooth gadget
“O” is finally ready.
A bluetooth gadget with an emotional approach. It can be used to communicate with your friends, lovers and relatives with a gesture of your hand.
Squeeze it. Watch it vibrate and light up. Know that they love you 
barcodes come to life
the Life of Things lets you peek into the secret lives of products and objects by transforming their barcodes into generative digital lifeforms.
done with Processing
there also is a small library i wrote to integrate in processing sketches the ZXING barcode decoding library.
See the little gadget here:
http://www.artisopensource.net/productslife/index.php
download the library and documentation here:
http://www.artisopensource.net/2008/11/22/oneavatar-more-pictures-from-milano-in-digitale/
just a quick update, ad the wonderful organizers of the Milano in Digitale event just sent me the official pictures. Which, of course, are way better than mine, as I’m a lousy photographer.
OneAvatar installation
You get to see more of the OneAvatar performance. If you want to read more about the OneAvatar project read here.
by the way, thanks to everyone that contacted me about the performance and the project, your comments have been really interesting and useful. We will have a couple of surprises coming up in the next few months, as the OneAvatar will probabily become a product that you will find in the stores, next to the Playstation3 or the XBoX. Critical performative consumism? 
keep in touch!
Here they are, with little old me getting electrified in much higher visual quality
November 8th, 2008
while in Mexico we did quite a few things.
possibly the most difficult one was the creation of an architectural installation called rel:attiva presenza.
rel:attiva presenza in Mexico City
the installation constituted a practical example of the theories we exposed at this congress and it was created in the beautiful cloister of the Italian Cultural Institute in Mexico City, in the colonia Coyoacan.
The concept behind the installation was a contextualization of an architectural intervention we designed by the same name, transforming a public square into an interactive location for mixed-media urban dialogue.
The installation show/performance took place together with the inauguration of the exhibit “El viaje en la mirada: dibujos italianos de dos arquitectos mexicanos” from which some drawings were taken and virtually re-interpreted for the installation’s components.
The installation was built using the openframeworks programming libraries, and it featured 2 network synchronized computers handling the sides of the visuals and the spatialized sound.
A narrative was created by juxtaposing 7 scenes projected on a cylindrical artefact hanging on top of teh cloister’s fountain.
Each of the 7 stages featured a methodology for layering virtual and physical domaind of reality.
The sounds from other spaces/times that were recreated in spatialized form in the environment.
The images from various locations of Mexico that were morphed into each other together with their localized sounds, to form new, virtual places.
The drawings exhibited, taht were used to create narrative voyages that superimposed the palces that inpired teh drawings with fantastic, non-existing ones.
Virtual architectures that were projected onto real ones, creating hybrids.
Interaction was assured by means of teh environental sound and by a simple cloister-wide motion capture system that used people’s movement to generate sounds and parameter values for the various algorithms involved in the software.
A special thanks must be given to the people at the Italian Cultural Institute, especially to Franco Avicolli, the institute’s cultural expert and responsible for inter-universities relationships, appointed by Italy’s Ministry for Foreign Relations, and to his assistant Valeria Ricci Apiròz: their enthusiasm was probably the most enabling technology that we used for this installation.
An enormous “thank you” goes to the Institute and to its director, prof. Marco Bellingeri, and to Felice Scauso, the Italian Embassador in Mexico, who gave us an incredibly warm hospitality.
check out the review on ArtsBlog
November 8th, 2008
just back from Mexico where me and penelope.di.pixel performed quite a few activities: a congress on the revitalization of the historical centers, a panel on virtual, participative and interactive architectures and on innovation, and an installation performance called rel:attiva presenza.
architettura rel:attiva in Mexico City
The Seventh International Meeting on the Revitalization of the Historical Centers (27-28-29th of October 2008) was organized by the INAH in collaboration with the Spanish Cultural Center in Mexico, with the Italian Cultural Institute in Mexico and with the Italian and Spanish embassies.
This year’s edition of the congress focused on the theme “today’s architecture as mediator of the historical and contemporary city“.
Many illustrous and international participants attended the meeting: Guillermo Vázquez de Consuegra (Spain), Teodoro González de León (Mexico), Felipe Leal (Mexico), Mario Coyula (Cuba), Maria Elisa Costa (Brasil), Augusto Quijano (Mexico), and an incredibly significative Carlo Aymonino, a central figure of Italy’s and international’s architectonic neorealism, providing for an incredible set of professional competences and personal histories.
We were infiltrates, just as usual, and were the only not-architects making a presentation.
The congress took place at the beautiful Franz Mayer Museum, with its incredible cloister, showing the evident signs of 1985’s earthquake.
What emerged from these intense 3 days of discussion was a really live debate on the conception of the city.
While most architects had no problems in conceptualizing a definition of architecture that includes the concepts of form and function, the impact of a our “little” semantic shift proved out to be quite a surprise, provoking deep interest and deep oppositions. It sure didn’t leave people unresponsive.
Our architettura rel:attiva discussed the point of view of the hybridization of practices and of disciplines, of the integration of the immaterial domains of reality brought on by the digital technologies and cultures, on collaborative practices applied to urban design and intervention, and on a general conception of a live metropolis, built from concrete and steel just as it is built on people, relationships, emotion and an active, collaborative way of life.
What we proposed, thus, was the idea of an architecture that was not only about the shapes of buildings and about their historical values, but also about the possibility for them to become tools, mediators and enablers of new social, anthropological, economic, relational, sensorial and emotional practices enabled in the contemporary era by digital technologies.
We talked about an anthropological, communicational, interactive, relational architecture. Which, for most of the classically architects was a shock.
In most cases the immaterial and virtual domains of reality enabled by technology are perceived just as tools to reconstruct and re-enact historical artifacts, to virtually rebuild, for example, the Roman Forum of the Templo Mayor in Mexico city so that people can walk through them and see/hear the “things of the past”.
Which is, by the way, a perfectly honest and interesting thing to do but it leaves out all of the other possibilities in terms of social, business and relational models that could be enabled by the metropolis itself if spaces integrated technologies to create a truly ecosystemic environment in which interaction possibilities could turn into instruments for politics, culture, inspiration and expression.
architettura_rel_attiva_definitiva
THIS is the PDF of the architettura rel:attiva theories. It is only in italian for now: we will translate it into English, Spanish and French in a bit, stay tuned.
check out the rewiew on artsblog.
here below are some pictures from the event. Stay tuned for the report of the installation of the rel:attiva presenza, coming up next.
