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

a visual reportage from the “Freedom not Fear” event in Rome.

angel_f

SuperAvatar

here is a report on ArtsBlog

here is the story on NeRVi

NoemaLabs published some info

here are the pictures:

Angel_F and SuperAvatar are scared.

The lives of the young artificial intelligence and of the  avatar who escaped from virtual worlds have been endangered  more than once by the control, that is constantly perpetrated on people’s information, habits and identities.

Forms of surveillance that are progressively and obsessively  expanding through continuous control of our lives (and not  only of the ones of our beloved digital beings). Along the streets, in supermarkets, in public spaces, and even in our homes, through telephones and internet connectivity.  An enormous amount of resources are wasted to control people’s  lives in multiple ways: from cameras to armed forces, passing  through data retention systems spying on people’s personal  information.

Angel_F e SuperAvatar are feeling annoyed, alarmed and outraged by all of that and, therefore, decided to publicly show their dissent, together with their human friends.

The two digital beings will join the “Freedom not Fear“  event, and they will attend the conference that will take  place at the “Provincia di Roma” building on saturday,  starting at 9:30am.

Who: Angel_F and SuperAvatar
When: Saturday, October 11th 2008, from 9:30am to 13:30am
Where: “Freedom not Fear”, palazzo Valentini (Palazzo della  Provincia di Roma, via IV Novembre n. 119/a, Roma

_________________________________________________________________

“Freedom not Fear“: International action day for democracy, free speech, human rights, civil liberties; against censorship, mass-surveillance, mass-data retention.

http://wiki.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/Fnf08

Angel_F is the young artificial intelligence son of Derrick  de Kerckhove and the Biodoll.
It was born on February 2007. Since it started interacting with humans’ physical world it has been deeply interested about the international dialogue on digital rights. After a peculiar case of censorship, little Angel_F managed to attend the UN’s Internet  Governance Forum held in Rio de Janeiro all by itself.

Angel_F is a project by xDxD.vs.xDxD and penelope.di.pixel
http://www.artisopensource.net/2007/12/10/angel_f/

Fatherboard - the SuperAvatar - is an avatar that escaped  from virtual worlds when its owner’s computer exploded in  a short circuit.  It looks like a cyborg, but it isn’t, as its body is built from the hardware parts of the computer from where it materialized.
Its relations with human beings are contradictory and intermittent: the SuperAvatar is a fugitive living a constant conflict with institutional control, either the virtual and the real ones!

Fatherboard is a project by Luigi Pagliarini
http://www.artificialia.com/Fatherboard/

OneAvatar connects your body to your Avatar in virtual worlds.
You and your Avatar will be finally one, sharing the same experiences even at physical level.
You get hurt, you Avatar gets hurt.
Your Avatar dies, you die.

OneAvatar

Virtual Worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft address people’s perceptions and sensorial domains in specific ways. By using (living) these worlds users experience emotions, sensations and perceptions to which they are used to or of completely new kind. Both types are “new” in the fact that they are created in the users by means of technological devices and digital communications related practices. This is a major trend of contemporary technology. Bridges across information, architectures, prcesses and the body are constantly being created at sensorial or even physical levels. Interactive systems, wearable technologies, prosthetics, technologies that are embedded into objects and locations, domotics, robots, artificial intelligences. All of these things go towards eliminating the possible dualities intercurring between what is organic and inorganic, of what is body and what is architecture, what is thought or memory and what is external information flow, what is a physical product and what is an immaterial service.

This is a very complex subject for discussion, and it represents the full 360 degrees of background that sits behind and at the base of “OneAvatar”.

The project starts off from taking into account these new sensorialities and then brings them to an extreme to highlight frictions, possibilities and, most of all, new spaces for dialogue.

We are all, more or less, influenced by the emotional and processual practices connected to the use of networks and, specifically, by virtual worlds. Checking for new emails every 10 seconds; clicking on the “StumbleUpon” button to randomly see a new website for 3 seconds, then passing to the next one; the way in which we scan texts instead of reading them; the use of search engines; the ways in which we identify people on the internet; the way in which we read news and blogs and information. These are all things that are similar to other things that we experienced in “life_without_the_internet”, but this resemblance is truly a partial one, as they can be characterized in ways that are dramatically different, and studied specifically. So much that they are being called “new tactilities”, “digital senses”, “augmented sensoriality” etcetera.

This is obviously true with regards to Virtual Worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft. When we go to places, chat, interact, buy, visit, dance, have sex in these worlds we have experiences that we define by using names that are pertinent to the analog world, but that are totally different.

Two clear differences lay in the areas of the perception of the physical body and on the notion of identity.

We cannot get physically hurt in Second Life or on World of Warcraft, nor can we physically feel the sensations that we feel when we touch something/someone, when we lift things, move things, when we are hit, caressed, when there is wind or direct sunlight, when we dive int the water or when we fall down from the skateboard or get a papercut. These missing degrees of sensoriality are one of the main distinctive characteristics of the way we experience Virtual Worlds and centrally define such experiences and the ways in which we perceive them. The fact that it is not possible to get hurt and, eventually, die in a Virtual World creates a physical and perceptive distance from that experience, shaping social relations, interactions, world use, economics. This missing body, this sense of being freed from the responsibility of having a body that can get hurt, fall sick, break, die, suffer from pollution, bring a whole plethora of concepts to low levels of attention.

The ways in whch we define our identities in digital and virtual worlds enhances this scenario. To be able to freely define our identity represents a form of freedom, that is for sure, but it also “disconnects” us from the Avatar that we impersonate. Experience becomes real (as it can bear real efefcts that are relational, economic, political…) but theatrical, fictional. It is narrative, more than it is real.

OneAvatar doesn’t have a moral/ethical approach to these issues. The project is aimed at establishing real connections running between the virtual worlds and the physical body, to examine the possibilities arising from these practices.

In the first production of OneAvatar, part of the NeRVi (Neo Realismo Virtuale) theories, a video shows a person during a session in the Second Life virtual world. The person wears a set of electrodes that are connected to the USB port of hs laptop. The device is controlled by a software that uses the libsecondlife software libraries to intercept and interpret the status of his avatar’s virtual body, trasforming it into stimulations of the physical body.

When the user jumps off with his avatar beyond the edge of a tall building in the virtual world without turning on the “fly” mode, the software interprets this great fall as a traumatic event, and sends a high voltage shock to the player, that is, to all effects, electrocuted.

While this is a fictional setup, as the actual device only uses low voltage stimulations, such as the ones found in sport-related appliances and massage machinery, it creates a shocking representation of what could easily become reality: a deep connection running between analog and virtual bodies. With all of its positive and negative sides.

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

Famous people come back to life in the Online Virtual World of Second life, in the form of autonomous avatars conducted by artificial intelligence.

A research on identity and on how people relate in the virtual environments that we find online and offline.

Karl Marx, Coco Chanel and Franz Kafka come back to life as autonomous avatars on Second Life. An artificial intelligence software uses their texts and interviews to generate the way they talk to other avatars, giving them a “soul” that is inherited from the mind expression of the famous characters. Their movement in the virtual world, their actions and interactions with other avatars, and their gestures and movements are completely autonomous, making them a digital form of life.

check them out at

> website

> Youtube videos

> PDF Presentation

also seen at:

> Wikipedia

> Played in Italy

> the Grid Live

> Art of the Net

> Weblog Art

> Massively