Social Murmurs (image above, video below) by Kyle Philips is a socially-aware portable bench surface built using Processing and Arduino:

Social Murmurs from Kyle Phillips on Vimeo.

The Workshop

“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” — Lord Kelvin

Through Design we can turn an invisible activity of energy consumption into a process that can be experienced, thereby potentially altering awareness and leading to a change in behaviour.

Following this line of thought, the Visual Voltage exhibition presents a set of objects specially designed to help visitors reflect on how they consume energy.

To deepen the discussion about this topic, the Stockholm-based Interactive Institute, together with Berlin-based design-research firm IxDS, will be hosting a one-and-a-half day workshop addressing professional designers and product manager.

The goal of this workshop is to discuss, share and invent design strategies for raising awareness about energy-efficiency, without imposing the “gloomy feeling of guilt” (Régine Debatty); and for changing our consuming behaviour without making us feel like energy-saving martyrs.

The Visual Voltage Workshop is an extension to the Visual Voltage Exhibtion.

Common Sense: what if every mobile device had an air quality Sensor?

[ home page ]

We are developing mobile sensing technologies that help communities gather and analyze environmental data. We hope that this hardware and software will empower everyday citizens to learn more about their environment and influence environmental regulations and policy.

We have developed various research prototypes, which are being used in studies such as a deployment on street sweepers in San Francisco and a deployment of a handheld device in West Oakland. Right now we are focusing our efforts on air quality sensing. Our hope is that our research prototypes will demonstrate the utility of embedding environmental sensors in commercial commodity devices such as mobile phones.

The Common Sense Team:

Paul M. Aoki (Intel Labs Berkeley)
Prabal Dutta (U.C. Berkeley Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences)
Rob Ennals (Intel Labs Berkeley)
R.J. Honicky (Nokia Research Center)
Neil Kumar (U.C. Berkeley Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences)
Alan Mainwaring (Intel Labs Berkeley)
Chris Myers (Isopod Design)
Eric Paulos (Carnegie Mellon University)
Ali Rahimi (Intel Labs Berkeley)
Nima Reyhani (U.C. Berkeley Department of Statistics)
Sushmita Subramanian (Intel Corporation)
Wesley Willett (U.C. Berkeley Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences)
Allison Woodruff (Intel Labs Berkeley)
Rui Xiao (Intel Labs Berkeley)

Back again. After the overview on Frontiers of Interaction V in the previous article we’ll present our contribution to the event.

Fake Press. Ubiquitous Publishing.

Ubiquitous publishing and Ubiquitous Anthropology. The next-step in publishing practices and platforms, united with a research on the possibilities offered by location based technologies and by novel approaches to knowledge dissemination, communication and expression. We (Luca Simeone and Salvatore Iaconesi) presented our research at Frontiers of Interaction V in Rome (June 2009), together with the first two applications and an open call.

Everything starts off from the idea of a contemporary evolution of publishing practices. Technologies, the possibility to create platforms to enable relation, expression and emotion and the availability of tools to share, disseminate and interact on knowledge and cultural productions, are all factors that made us feel the fundamental importance of designing new concepts and practices.

The scenarios described by location-based media, by the possibility to mix and cross the borders across different media, and the infinite spaces created by augmented reality were the influences that shaped our research.

We investigated on how technologies and new forms of interactions with other people and with places, time, architectures and objects would change the ways in which information can be created, communicated, shared and distributed. From an anthropological point of view we asked ourselves where would faces and voices emerge from, the self-expressions and representations of people and of their identities. And we also questioned the destinations for these informations, observing the fluid, mutating scenarios that surround us, with wireless, localized, immaterial, augmented layers of reality stratifying on top of the merely-physical one, creating totally new worlds in which information can become part of bodies, of architectures, of spaces, walls, trees, objects.

Displays, interstices, coordinates, tags And gestures, natural interfaces and moving, walking. Using the body to move through space as in an action of reading. We were truly intrigued by the transofrmation of space, by its augmentation with new narratives, new possibilities for the expression of the multiple voices and points of view that constitute the world.

So we designed our very own interpretaton for the idea of Ubiquitous Publishing. Cross-device, cross-medial, multi-author, emergent narratives.

The first idea was iSee, an application that allows for the creation of narratives on logos and brands. The application allows people to use their mobile phones to extract information directly from logo images: take a picture of your favourite detergent and, if the logo is already part of the collaborative database, you can get information from it.

Logo identifies brand, identifies company.

We suggested some possibilities, showing informations on social responsibility, on environmental policies, on the pollution rates connected to product manufacturing. Products come alive and communicate, in a simple, accessible form of augmented reality in which information is embedded into objects.

The second idea was Ubiquitous Anthropology.

A location-based platform allows for the positioning of the expressions, emotions and perspectives of multiple voices. These can be accessed through mobile technologies directly from the geographical locations, allowing people to experience and come in contact with other’s points of view and ideas.

In this form the world itself becomes “readable”. Reading by crossing spaces and architectures.

Reading other people’s texts, watching the images and videos they captured with their cameras, observing their evolution through time an through relations with other people.

The first application shown on this theme, was created by positioning onto the territory the results of a foundamental research by professor Massimo Canevacci and several students and researchers, who travelled many times to Mato Grosso, Brasil, and performed researches on the Bororo. Videos and images created by the Bororo were positioned onto the geography, thus creating a layer of interpretation of land, events and relations that is not covered in any way by classical media, and that allow us to “read” directly on the territory how the members of these populations interpret their land, the other populations they interact and relate with, their culture.

The system has provided as a incredibly useful tool to communicate these population’s political instances. The Bororo are not represented in Brasil’s institutions, allowing for unlimited exploitation of their lands and people. The possibilities offered by the platforms allowed us to write Bororo’s political instances, their desires and expectations, directly in the “places of power” of Brasil’s government. In Brasilia, several institutional buildings have been tagged with the videos and texts of their political demands, thus creating the only form of institutional presence that is currently allowed and accessible for them. In the idea that giving people the control on media and on their own expression and communication is possibly the only viable way to freedom and auto-determination.

The two examples constitute real applications that will be made available and downloadable online on the FakePress website in just a few days from the date of creation of this post. They are currently being enhanced to form functioning frameworks that can be used for these and other projects.

Some of the application’s content is already available on FakePress, and the full applications for web and iPhone will be available for download in a couple of days.

We are curently promoting the call for participation to the project, stimulating the discussion on the next products to publish with Fake Press.

So, if you have a book, research or other content you are going to publish, and you want so explore with us the possibilities to publish it in these ways, don’t hesitate to contact us.

- below a surreal interview I had to suffer from at the end of the show -

S1/S2 at the AHACamping, SALE Docks

This:

s1_s2_doc_v1

is the PDF of the research Salvatore Iaconesi & Oriana Persico presented at the AHACamping: S1/S2 a peer to peer (p2p) social network built on a parallel internet, implementing a true relational ecosystem assessing the issues in terms of privacy, control, user exploitation currently found in classic social networks such as Facebook, Youtube and the others like them.

You can find a first, fast report in the rest of the post, below.

Special focus was put on the critical approaches to social networking.

We (xDxD.vs.xDxD and penelope.di.pixel) presented S1/S2, the first phase of an experimental project featuring a social network built on the Netsukuku network: a meshed network that redefines the classical internet protocol stack to create a new network that is piggy-backed on the internet. This technique allows users to escape the control operated by service providers and by governments, as the parallel network is peer to peer and encrypted, and it is separated from the providers’ areas of control.

Or, to say the least, Netsukuku makes monitoring users a real tough job (practically impossible).

S1/S2 is a social network that is being implemented on the Netsukuku network. It has been presented at the AHACamping for a specific case study dealing with the possibility to implement a collaborative History of the Arts, but it really is a more generalized project.

S1/S2 approaches two main issues:

- infrastructural squatting

- the relational ecosystem

By infrastructural squatting we designate all those techniques through which an internet user can use the physical connectivity in ways that guarantee users autonomy, privacy and self-determination in terms of the posibility to define who can what/when/where a person can do something on the network, and in terms of being able to decide who can observe our informations, our relations, our interests and, in the end, our lives. Netsukuku has been chosen as the base platform to perform infrastructural squatting.

By relational ecosystem we describe the lives of the users on the S1/S2 environment. Everything is oriented to create the tools to enable people to freely define their own identities and to establish relationships, processes, services, information and content exchange. S1/S2 deeply differs from classic social networks: there is no “profile”, no authentication, no centralized service. There actually is no website, as S1/S2 is designed as a set of tools through which people can define their own data, store it on their computers or servers, and connect and communicate with others by using a peer to peer network built on Netsukuku. Identities are self-defined (even for everything that concerns the structure of data), as is content. Both can interact and be integrated, creating structures and relationships described by networks of identities, concepts, multimedia, informations, communication channels.

S1/S2 also introduces the concept of networked welfare, defining the tools through which the network can collaboratively enact processes whose aim is to create services that can be used by the collectivity, with specific concern for the weaker components of the ecosystem: content persistence, high availability and reliability, communication facilities, distributed, co-hosted stored facilities, virtualized systems to serve specific purposes and internet gateways that will allow for publication of people-selected contents on the “regular” web.

S1/S2 is currently under development, and our estimates indicate that there will be a first usable release of the environment in about 3 months.

We are currently looking for support. If the you find the concepts behind S1/S2 and Netsukuku interesting, and if you feel like contributing in any way you can (develop, execute beta installations and tests, explore the nexts steps…) you are truly welcome to do so, and you can contact me at:

xdxd.vs.xdxd [at] gmail [dot] com

Here is the document (only in italian for now: check back in a week or so for the english version) presented at the AHACamping for a case study of an S1/S2 application: a social network created to support a collaborative Art History.

s1_s2_doc_v1

The event was took place at the SALE Docks and it featured talks and performances on art, hacking, activism and critical theories on technology and on the ways in which they are transforming our lives in the contemporary era.

Here are some pictures

Here is a review on ArtsBlog

people using DpSdC

ABSTRACT

Degradazione per Sovrapposizione di Corpi (DpSdC) investigates on interaction mechanisms created using low cost DIY technologies, aiming at the creation of emotional environments that can be used to break the users’ inhibitory barriers to narratively access dialogue on socio-political issues.

Categories and Subject Descriptors:

J.4.3 [Computer Applications]: Social and Behavioral Sciences – Psychology, Sociology.

General Terms:

Algorithms, Performance, Design, Economics, Experimentation, Human Factors, Legal Aspects.

Keywords:

interaction, emotion, design, copyright, perception, inhibition.

Links:

the report from (re)Actor3 with some videos

the original version of the installation

INTRODUCTION

In DpSdC common household gestures become extraordinary ones. DpSdC is an experiment in interaction design using an emotional approach to technology to break the inhibitory barriers commonly found in the visitors of an exhibit. Classical arts and media left their mark on the fruition processes of contents and experiences: visitors embrace passive roles and limit themselves to visually browsing what they see shown in the museum, festival, or movie theater. This passive condition propagates to everyday life, where the audiences of the information flows (be them on television or on the internet) only partially grasp the possibilities for interaction. Socially, interaction with information and with experiences means the possibility for critical mindsets to form in the users’ perception. Contemporary technologies offer the possibilities for these forms of social activeness to develop and to be truly accessible. Yet streams of inhibitory and practical barriers have to be bypassed to let these possibilities be broadly available. This is true for all the parties involved. The developers of technologies must gain the technical competences needed to create effective products. The skills involved are not only to be found in the technical knowledge needed to create hardware and software, but also the ones needed to research on the neuro-psychological levels of user interaction, on product design, on the economic and production models that the new technologies enact. Also, technologies can be expensive, and the alternative, more accessible techniques, often embracing “Do It Yourself” production paradigms, can only be learned by social interaction of some kind with other developers, building communities and communication channels based on open source practices and free licensing schemes.
The users of technologies are often faced to systems/interfaces/artifacts that they don’t technically or conceptually understand, or that they find boring or only partially engaging, or that don’t confront with issues that they perceive as relevant or, even, interesting. Or, on the other side, they are sometimes simply used to having passive experiences with contents and information. DpSdC is an experiment trying to assess all of these issues. A low-cost, low-technology, recycling, DIY approach is used to create an interactive environment that uses common, well-known household gestures to create a fun, entertaining, engaging tool that is used to establish a dialogue on the international debates on the issues related to copyright and intellectual property.
DpSdC has been shown for the first time at the Live Performers Meeting 2008 in Rome, where it was used by hundreds of visitors, with amazing results.
Technique
Visitors can approach the installation from all sides.
The floor of the space is filled with an overhead projection, coming from a standard Personal Computer running a custom software. A standard, low-quality, webcam connected to the PC looks at the installation floor. The camera’s optics have been prepared by removing the infrared (IR) filter, and replacing it with a small square of black photographic film, effectively turning the webcam into a basic, low-cost, IR-sensible device. The scene is lighted by the standard light provided by the projection, by the rest of the environment’s lighting, and by a custom-built IR light source, created by assembling the printed circuit boards (pcb) of 5 recycled television remote controls, hooked to a simple on/off switch and to a power source created by using a series of 9V batteries and a couple of simple electronic components (resistors, capacities, an inductor).

Cleaning up art history

As visitors approach the installation’s floor they are presented with various common household tools: a broom, an ironing board, a feather duster, a vacuum cleaner. Visitors could freely grab any one of these tools to perform the simple gestures we all performed once in every while to tidy up our homes.
The gestures of sweeping the floor, of ironing a t-shirt, of dusting a piece of furniture, were immediately and reactively captured by the installation’s software – constituted by a truly simple set of motion capture algorithms – and mapped to curves and strokes of varying pressure and width on the projection.
The calculated strokes were rendered on the projection by cutting up pixels from the digital images of the paintings coming from the last 300 years of Art History. A stroke with the broom would mean, for example, the “magical” appearance of an equal stroke of a painting by Andy Warhol or by Salvador Dali, as if removing the dust from the floor revealed the paintings underneath. Continuous interaction created a progressive overlay process, revealing the parts of the (about) 1500 paintings included in the installation, creating visual remixes that the users created, in delight, by brooming the floor, ironing, dusting and vacuuming.
Emotions and aesthetics

The first exhibition of DpSdC was in a very specialized setting: an international VJ meeting. People walking around the event space expected to see very “standard” presences: MIDI controllers, laptops, projectors, knobs, DJs, VJs. Arriving at the installation space, and confronted with a broom and with a vacuum cleaner, various expressions emerged from their faces, showing curiosity, interest, laughter and, sometimes, diffidence. The question clearly appearing along their facial traits was: “What the hell is this?”.

the installation

The installation was anything but neutral. The presence of household objects that were immediately recognizable within a setup that had definite aural components created different  kinds of approaches: people asking for explanations; other people asking if they could “touch it”; some other people asking what the “objective” was. Everyone eventually grabbed the broom or the feather duster and started dusting the floor and the furniture.
As soon as this happened the change in attitude was immediate. The simple gestures became extraordinary: the way in which well-known material actions acted on the immaterial plane created by the installation was fascinating, and had a light psychedelic feel to it.
The interaction was captivating and people stayed at the installation for dozens of minutes, eventually returning, hours (or even days), later bringing their friends with them to show the “magical” installation.
The installation was designed so that the technological elements disappeared from perception. The resulting environment featured a minimalistic representation of a house, with two recycled TV sets taken out from their case, with the circuits exposed, a small cabinet with the feather duster on top, and the projected floor with the broom and the vacuum cleaner. No technology was visually present to distract the visitors from the household setting. The projection and interaction were, thus, perceived as additional, immaterial, levels of a physical reality to which they were accustomed. The familiarity and “friendliness” of the aesthetics immediately lowered inhibitions: once they started interacting, people just kept on going, even starting to experiment with lighters, or by rolling their bodies on the installation floor to see what effects it would produce.

Copyright

When asking for information visitors were greeted with the explanations about the basic mechanisms making the installation work, and with the description of the conceptual themes of the installation, regarding the use of interaction design and of emotional approaches to technologies to discuss issues related to copyright and to intellectual property.
The installation allowed to create content by using in creative ways existing contents, bringing them to new forms of life and value through collaborative, accessible practices. This approach was explained as being the metaphor for what is currently happening in the global re-definition of the concepts of intellectual property, of knowledge, of creativity and of legality.
The avant-gardes of the XX century artistically materialized the contexts produced by the industrial revolutions, as described in Walter Benjamin’s theories: art has radically changed, becoming an entity that is characterized both by aura and by reproducibility. The post-industrial revolution brought this change to exponential levels of growth, with the emergence of the communicational metropolis to point out a definitively new concept of production and merchandise.The “remix” has become a formal artistic and creative tool. William Burroughs’ cut up, pop art, conceptual art, situationism, street art, net art, advertising, contemporary literature, performative arts, video-art, DJ-ing, VJ-ing have extensively approached the concepts of re-elaboration, of de-structuralization/re-structuralization, of the “false” and of the “reproduced”, of the augmented and of the degraded, transforming them into practices that are at the foundation of contemporary arts.
Stepping away from arts, and entering into more general contexts, digital technologies have created entire new methodologies that are globally used in cultural production and content fruition: streaming, peer to peer networks, virtual realities, hyperlinking, multimedia processing are all techniques that are used to create content. Many (most) of the times by simply creating new structures, elaborations and connections with existing content. This power, provided by digital technologies in contexts that are social and, potentially, universally accessible, is of fundamental importance for the cultural practices of the contemporary era: knowledge sharing, collaborative processes, free circulation of information and contents are the keys that will enable future philosophical and economic models. Even more, these practices are the only ones that are recognizing the true essence of content, information and production in the contemporary era, providing feasible business models that are rewarding and sustainable, and democratic practices that bring the population to face the need for critical approaches to information and knowledge, and to embrace usable tools to appropriate these spaces and practices.

DpSdC proposed all of these concepts through a simple, interactive experience. By collaboratively interacting on pre-existing (and, in some cases, copyrighted) contents, using widely available, autonomously obtainable, simply enactable technologies they could create beautiful compositions and democratically share a living space together with the other participants.
People had fun and learned many things about fine arts: some people were clearly more acknowledged to the history of arts than others, and could guess a Pollock from a Botticelli with just a few strokes of the broom, revealing even small handfuls of pixels in the global composition of remixed paintings. This proved to be a very interesting collaborative educational experience (”oh! that’s a Hopper!”) in which the “game” was effectively (and autonomously) being used as a tool for knowledge sharing.
People were actually gratified by the beauty of the creations they could achieve by remixing with such a simple technique the paintings of Picasso or by De Chirico. They immediately recognized the importance and value of the original content, but they clearly identified the collaborative compositions as “new” products, as different in essence and in their definition of value itself: an entity created by interaction and communication, by an immaterial level of reality, and “meant” to be shared and communicated.

Conclusions

Exhibiting DpSdC has been a wonderfully rewarding experience. The installation was extremely successful in implementing a simple mechanism with infinite dialectic possibilities. Two unexpected, and welcomed, results have proven to be quite interesting among the others exposed in the previous sections: the educational perspectives emerged during the interactions and the opportunities to expand the collaborative processes at the base of the creation/implementation of such technologies.
On the educational side the exhibition at the LPM 2008 created the will to define an experimental project to be executed with children of all ages in which the “game” dimension will be expanded to create learning processes that are based on interaction, collaboration and sensorial perceptive levels. On the production side, people clearly felt the value of the DIY methodology: The availability of technologies that are structurable and enactable by individuals and by communities with few financial resources was immediately perceived as a tool that was truly democratic and of fundamental importance. These considerations have produced the ideas to expand on these areas of activity towards the creation of something that, now, is taking the form of an experimental laboratory in which consumer electronics and widely available technologies are (conceptually and physically) disassembled and reassembled in new ways, in a process of “social reverse-engineering” of technology.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We wish to thank all of the people that made the first exhibition of Degradazione per Sovrapposizione di Corpi possible: the staff and organization crew of Live Performers Meeting 20082, Flyer Communications3, DelirioUniversale.com4, PhagOff5, all of the artists at DegradArte6, Nova1007 of the “il Sole 24 Ore” and Art is Open Source.

The 3D modeling in Torrent Raiders was done by Corey Jackson, who currently makes all kinds of pixel magic happen at Faketown.

Contact: Aaron Meyers | admeyers [at] usc [dot] edu

—-

Torrent Raiders: Imagining Aesthetics for a Politicized Protocol

[1,3] Electronic Frontier Foundation. “RIAA v. The People: Two Years Later.” EFF.org. 3 November 2005. 19 February 2007
<http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/RIAAatTWO_FINAL.pdf>

[2] Baldas, Tresa. “Music piracy defendants fighting back.” The National Law Journal. 10 October 2005. ALM Media, Inc. 19 February 2007
<http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1128675912177>

[4,6,8] Manovich, Lev. “The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art.” Manovich.net 2002. 19 February 2007
<http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/data_art.doc>

[5] Holmes, Brian. “Counter Cartographies.” Else/Where: Mapping – New Carotgraphies of Networks and Territories. Eds. Janet Abrams and Peter Hall. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Design Institute, 2006. 20-28.

[7] Brucker-Cohen, Jonah. “Police State: Protect, Serve, Subvert”. Coin-Operated.com. 19 Februay 2007
<http://www.coin-operated.com/projects/policestate>

2 part article on DigiCult Magazine by xdxd.vs.xdxd and penelope.di.pixel

It deals with identity, body, artificial intelligence, avatars, cyborgs, and digital ecosystems.

It’s the first article in which they spoke about NeoRealismo Virtuale [NeRVi]

feel a bit less alone by reading the article at DigiCult magazine:

> Part 1

> Part 2

Art is Open Source and NeRVi present Angel_F project in Mexico City at the Computer Art Congress 2.

The international meeting researches on the evolution of digital practices as they affect arts and society.

I presented there the Angel_F project, together with penelope.di.pixel.

check out the informations about CAC2 at

> CAC2 website

> Laboratoire Paragraphe

> Tecnológico de Monterrey