Angel_F has a new blog, and a wikipedia entry:

Angel_F on Wikipedia

the child AI is also now on Facebook: you can chat with it, and contribute to its growth and evolution.

Angel_F on Facebook

REFF logo, RomaEuropa FakeFactory

RomaEuropa Web Factory’s second edition is about to start up.

REFF attended the press conference held at the Opificio Telecom in Rome, on Wednsday September 16h 2009, to check out the informations that were being diffused on the web about the innovations of this year’s edition of the Fondazione Romaeuropa’s networked competition.

While watching the press conference, it seemed as if we were looking in the mirror. Because RomaEuropa WebFactory 2009/2010 edition is actually indistinguishable from last year’s RomaEuropa FakeFactory!

• Open licenses.
  
• The works are remixes of existing ones.
  
• Democratic voting.
  
• Experts and academics evaluating the submitted works through their reviews

All of these things are going to be included in this year’s RomaEuropa WebFactory, whose structure, thus, becomes indistinguishable from the FakeFactory!

And there’s more.

Beatpick. Beatpick is part of REFF, and they are the main partner form the music section (100Samples). Beatpick has been called to manage RomaEuropa WebFactory’s music section for this year’s competition.

Summing up: same rules, open lincenses adoption, same practices, and even our main music partner handling the music section.

We think that this is a great victory.

RomaEuropa WebFactory adopted all of the instances suggested by REFF’s critique. And we’re happy about it.

And we even got proper credit for the effectiveness of our action: REFF was mentioned multiple times during the press conference as the main factor bringing on this year’s change.

It’s not over, yet.

REFF project goes on by producing about 3 minor events by the end of the year, with one to present the publication that includes the academic productions of our scientific committee.

And then, in 2010, we’ll have an enormous initiative. But we’ll leave it as a little suspence for the next few days.

Stay Tuned!

The DULP is an international meeting focused on innovative approaches to learning and education practices: Design Inspired Learning, Ubiquitous Learning, Liquid Learning Places, Person in Place Centered Design. Mobile technologies, cultural ecosystems, design applied to learning and culture will be among the main subjects for discussion among the many international researchers that will contribute to the event.

We will present two projects of our FakePress cross-media publishing house:

ubiquitous anthropology

Ubiquitous Anthropology, using mobile applications with a location based approach to create a narrative environment through which anthropologists will be able to represent the multiplicity of voices that are present in their ethnographic observations, thus building interactive, polyphonic, multiauthor narratives;

saperi p2p

Saperi p2p is a mobile-enabled digital ecosystem that allows for ubiquitous collaboration among research projects. Usable through web and iPhone, it allows for the creation of research teams (or education, or professional, or any other kind…) that can collaborate cross-medially: places, times, contents, communication… the p2p system allows for a realtime connection between the participants. It is like a hyperlocal social network that can be used to create a digital context for collaborative groups. Groups can be connected, forming operative, p2p onthologies that allow for knowledge sharing and multidisciplinary approaches to culture and science.

Salvatore Iaconesi and Luca Simeone will present the projects for FakePress, and will provide a demo platform throuh which you will be able to try the systems out.

the new ToShare website

You can check it out here on http://www.toshare.it
We’re particularly happy both because it was a joint effort between Art is Open Source and because it is yet another beautiful collaboration that we’re bringing up with them.

The website has been in design for quite a while, as we planned for the creation of quite a complex setup. What we had in mind was to create a platform in which people could contribute to the contents of the website by enabling a re-blogging environment.

The ToShare team is currently getting people involved in the areas of design, new technologies, contemporary arts, circuit bending, robotics, and more. If you think you have something interesting to say, and can expose it through a RSS feed from your blog or website, write them a line or two explaining what you’re up to and chances are that you could join in the platform.

More info on the ToShare website.

And, if you don’t already know about it, get ready for Market Forces, the 2009 edition of the ToShare Festival. Guest curator Andy Cameron joins the Share team to explore the contemporary world through complexity and crisis. And we’ll have something to say about that, too. But we’ll leave it as a surprise, for the near future.

In the meanwhile, we leave you with just a hint on what we’ll be collaborating on together with the Share Festival team: Squatting Supermarkets.

Stay tuned.

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.