plc personal website

I just received a copy of this book, Pós-Humanismo: as relações entre o humano e a técnica na época das redes, edited by Massimo Di Felice (Universidade de São Paulo) and Mario Pireddu (Università di Roma “La Sapienza”), with an essay of mine, “A inteligência do corpo: a sua evolução e a sua hereditariedade. Tecnologias do vivente”. The book is a collection of essays by Alberto Abruzzese, Pier Luigi Capucci, Antonio Caronia, Derrick De Kerckhove, Massimo Di Felice, Roberto Espósito, Roberto Marchesini, Ciro Marcondes Filho, Mario Perniola, Mario Pireddu, Gilbertto Prado, Lúcia Santaella and André Stangl. Here some more information.

Roberta Buiani attended in Riga two joint events: "Textures," the sixth European meeting of the society for literature, science and the arts, as well as Art + Communication, the 12th International Festival of New Media Culture Riga, June 15 - 20. The events  culminated in the major exhibition "Transbiotics. Temporal Stability Points". Roberta's wide, intense and inspired reportage is in Noema's n.blog, with reviews, comments, interviews, images and videos.

Photo by Didzis Grodzs

From Roberta's first post:

The summer joint session (CAiiA & M-Node) of the Planetary Collegium PhD, I am a supervisor of. The Planetary Collegium is an international platform for research in art, technology and consciousness, with its hub based in the University of Plymouth and with linked centers ("nodes") in Zurich (Z-Node) and Milan (M-Node). The Planetary Collegium's president is Roy Ascott. It consists of artists, theoreticians and scholars who meet online, and periodically face-to-face in many parts of the world, to develop their research in the practice and theory of new media art. This summer session took place in Plymouth, and was hosted by the University of Plymouth, in July 9-18. Ten intense days of full immersion into the candidates' researches, with updates and tutorials, working with a lot of lovely and inspiring people :-)

The paper I presented at the International Conference “Consciousness Reframed 10 – experiencing [design] – behaving [media]" (Munich, MHMK, University of Applied Sciences, November 19 – 21, 2009) has been translated into Spanish and published in the tintank website. The original paper in English, "Simulation as a Global Resource", is published in Noema.

Questo saggio – "La 'Terza Vita'. Ipotesi sulla molteplicità del vivente" – è stato pubblicato nel dicembre 2009 sulla rivista online Scienza & Filosofia.it, n.2, 2009 (qui per accedere direttamente al testo). Si tratta della traduzione in italiano del paper "From life to life. The multiplicity of the living" (qui una versione online su Noema), che ho presentato alla conferenza internazionale "Consciousness Reframed 9 - New Realities: Being Syncretic", Vienna, Universität Für Angewandte Kunst (3 - 5 luglio 2008) e che è stato pubblicato nel volume degli atti [R. Ascott, G. Bast, W. Fiel. M. Jahrmann, R. Schnell (eds.), New Realities: Being Syncretic, Wien, Springer-Verlag, 2008].

Dal testo:

...........

For 3 days in June at the 13th annual Subtle Technologies Festival, an exciting line up of scientists, artists and designers will journey from around the world to share ideas, science and artworks that explore this year’s theme – Sustainability. This year too (like in 2007, 2008 and 2009) Roberta Buiani from Toronto will be attending the Subtle Technologies Festival's events in Noema's n.blog, with reportages, reviews, interviews, images, videos... Stay tuned!

From Roberta Buiani's first post:

Subtle Technologies Festival this year will be antirely dedicated to the theme of "Sustainability".
While the topics it proposed have always been timely and very relevant, this edition seems to have tackled probably one of the few  possible discourses we could think of in these days.

I'm proud to announce that Gianna Maria Gatti's book L'Erbario Tecnologico (Bologna, Clueb, 2005) has been translated into English (The Technological Herbarium, Berlin, Avinus Press, 2010). A translation into German is underway. Gianna Maria was one of my best alumni and I was the supervisor of her thesis. This book is basically her graduation thesis, and it was originally published in Italian in 2005, inside the book series <mediaversi>, I'm the director of.

We published some excerpts of the book in Noema:

E' nato tutto qualche mese fa, da una mail che ho ricevuto. Ne scrivo solo ora perché recentemente ho partecipato a un evento, Viralvideo Falstival, dedicato ai video virali, dove ne ho parlato. Tutto è partito da una mail molto breve che è arrivata il 2 febbraio scorso da una mia amica, contenente solo un link. Che punta a un filmato nel quale viene utilizzata una mia immagine tratta da Facebook, che mi rappresenta, lo ammetto, in un momento, diciamo così, poco istituzionale prima della partecipazione a una installazione/performance nella mostra "sk-interfaces" (di cui ho scritto in un post precedente), organizzata in Lussemburgo da Jens Hauser. [English text here]

E' uscito un paio di settimane fa per i tipi di Mimesis il libro Filosofie di Avatar, a cura di Antonio Caronia e Antonio Tursi, che racoglie riflessioni a più voci - non tutte concordanti - sull'ormai celeberrimo film. Il volume raccogli interventi di Alberto Abruzzese, Massimo Canevacci, Massimiliano Cappuccio, Pier Luigi Capucci, Giuseppe Frazzetto, Gino Frezza, Derrick de Kerckhove, Giuseppe O. Longo, Michel Maffesoli, Franco Marineo, Mario Pireddu, Alberto L. Siani, Luisa Valeriani, Slavoj Zizek.

Di seguiro la quarta di copertina e l'introduzione.

It seems the topic of the relations between arts and neuroesthetics is earning a good success. I was invited to a public meeting on this topic in Udine, inside a four days series of events (from May 6 to 9) named “Vicino/Lontano. Identita? e differenze al tempo dei conflitti” (Near/Far. Identities and differences in the time of conflicts). The meeting – with a huge amount of people attending to the event – was moderated by Stefano Coletto, an art critic, and it was organized by the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation in Venice. The other participant to the meeting was Nicola Canessa, a psychologist with a PhD in neurosciences.

Neuroesthetics and art

On April 22 I participated to one of the four meetings on the technological imaginary conceived and curated by Laura Gemini at the University of Urbino. I proposed the topic of robotics, and my intervention was titled: "Towards a 'third life'? Robotics between media imaginery and technological singularity". The other meetings were about the steampunk imaginary, by Antonio Caronia, the main symbolic figures in the technologies and the sciences (scientist, robot, cyborg, avatar), by Giovanni Boccia Artieri, and the imaginary of the videogames, by Luca Rossi.

As a teacher of Interaction 3D II at the SUPSI (University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland) in Lugano I was involved - with other two courses, Animation and Graphics - in the "Gesti vocali" project. This project, conceived by Giorgio Bernasconi (who unfortunately prematurely died some weeks before the project's public representation) and made in collaboration among the SUPSI, the local Dimitri School of Theatre and the Academy of Music of the Italian Switzerland, put on scene A-Ronne (1971), a piece composed by Luciano Berio on a poetry by Edoardo Sanguineti and Glossolalie 61 (1961), a composition for four actors and four percussionists composed by Dieter Schnebel. Two very difficult and not so properly "easy listening" pieces of contemporary music, which required a lot of work and a public expert in the contemporary music.

Ho recentemente rivisto Avatar, il film di Cameron, perché dovevo scrivere un saggio che sarà pubblicato in un libro a più voci. Il volume uscirà probabilmente entro maggio, ma voglio brevemente raccontare anche qui qualche idea che mi è venuta. Avatar non esce dal dominio cinematografico, non è nulla di più o di meno di un film. Ma è un film che mette in scena dei mondi inventati ma plausibili nell’immaginario, che è l’espressione attualmente più completa del cinema e delle sue istanze.

From January 20 to February 10 I'm involved in a discussion about Simulation in the mailing list YASMIN, that I moderate with Jennifer Kanary Nikolova. YASMIN is a network of artists, scientists, engineers, theoreticians and institutions promoting communication and collaboration in art, science and technology around the Mediterranean Rim.

Discussion at:
http://estia.media.uoa.gr/mailman/listinfo/yasmin_discussions

or follow on the blog:
http://yasminlist.blogspot.com/

Moderators: Pier Luigi Capucci and Jennifer Kanary Nikolov(a)
Invited Discussants: Louis Bec, Karin Bervoets, Wafa Bourkhis, Roberta Buiani, Derrick de Kerckhove, Michele Emmer, Laura Gemini, Derek Hales, Margarete Jahrmann, Ignazio Licata, Giuseppe O. Longo, Cristina Trivellin, Natasha Vita-More