plc personal website

I participated to the International Research Conference, in the Planetary Collegium’s Consciousness Reframed Series, "Technoetic Telos: Art, Myth and Media", April 30 - May 2, 2012, hosted at the Ionion Center for the Arts and Culture in the beautiful landscape of the Island of Kefalonia, Greece. I presented a paper on holography, both for historical reasons (this technology celebrated some relevant anniversaries in 2012 and in the last two years) and for the interest that holography – as a model, as a simulation and as a language of representation – raises in the artistic realm, in the communication realm (especially for its uniqueness) and in the science realm (in particular in the theories about the universe).

[Photo by Diane C Derr]

An important M-Node seminar on Foucault, "Michel Foucault: per una genealogia del soggetto / Michel Foucault: for a genealogy of the subject", by Antonio Caronia and Amos Bianchi. The seminar, in 14 theoretical weekly lessons from November 2011 till the end of February 2012, was for the M-Node PhD researchers and for the students of the 2nd level Degree Course in Film & New Media - Visual Arts (NABA). Anyway all the lesson were transmitted in video in realtime and recorded, and can be seen here (in Italian only, by now).

I wrote the text of the exhibition by the Finnish artist Anja Puntari Art can save us (probably), that is taking place in Udine from April 4 to May 19, 2012, in the Ultra gallery of the non profit Association "Arte Ex Dono". According to Anja, the exhibition Art can save us (probably) "studies in a period of global economical crisis the relationship between collective ownership, property rights and authorship, directing the spotlight on co-creation processes and on diverse monetary and exchange systems."

I'm proud to announce that Gianna Maria Gatti's book L'Erbario Tecnologico (Bologna, Clueb, 2005) has been translated into German (Das Technologische Herbarium, Berlin, Avinus Press, 2012), after being translated into English (The Technological Herbarium, Berlin, Avinus Press, 2010). 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.

This is the cover of the English edition instead:

And the original Italian edition:

Un nanointervista per l'ID Lab, il Laboratorio interdisciplinare per l’Identità dell’Accademia di Belle Arti di Urbino, realizzata da alcuni studenti.
D. Che cosa significa per te identità?
Identità... identità significa riconoscere e essere riconosciuti. Essere riconosciuti perché si è in qualche modo, siamo identità, si è in qualche modo unici; e riconoscere, essere capaci di riconoscere l’unicità, quello che è diverso.

In May 2011 Derrick de Kerckhove asked me for a contribute to a video collection on some McLuhan's selected statements (as you may remember in 2011 the 100th anniversary of McLuhan's birth was celebrated). My video intervention, just a few minutes long, would have been showed during some public events together with other short videos referred to McLuhan's sentences.

The Winner of the 2011 World Universities Forum Award for Best Practice in Higher Education is the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Integrative Arts (CAiiA) – Planetary Collegium. Founded and directed by Roy Ascott, the CAiiA – Planetary Collegium is a PhD research program located primarily in the School of Art and Media at Plymouth University (UK), with nodes at the NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti), M-Node, Milan and Hochschule fuer Gestaltung und Kunst, Z-Node, Zurich. As a supervisor of the M-Node I'm very glad of this award to the work of the Planetary Collegium and to Roy Ascott in particular.

From the "On the University" website:

On November 18 and 19, the conference "Always Already New 2011: Deep Involvement of Education" will take place at the NABA, Aula Spazio Elastico, Amaranto Building, Via Carlo Darwin 20, Milan. The conference is organized by the Planetary Collegium, M-Node & NABA Media Design & New Media Art and NoemaLab, and concerns the relations among education and technologies, focused on art in particular. This year is the the centenary of McLuhan's birth, the great Canadian educator, literary critic, scholar and media theorist. His ideas of about communication, media, technologies and art will have a central role in the general topic of the conference. I'll manage the two panels of the event.

Sarah Ciracì, Elettronica-Mente, vetronile, copper, paint, 2008 (courtesy of the artist)

On November 5, as the president of the Jury of Milano in Digitale IV, I presented the winners of the contest. “Milano in Digitale” is a yearly prize promoted by the Milan based Fondazione D’Ars Oscar Signorini and it is devoted to the young artists working with the technologies. The Jury I chaired, whose members were Loretta Borrelli, Manuel Buscemi, Martina Coletti, Viola Lilith Russi, Davide Totaro, Valentina Tovaglia and Cristina Trivellin, selected as a winner the project GUSHO - Reactive Protective Dress, by Cora Bellotto and Laura Malinverni.

GUSHO - Reactive Protective Dress, by Cora Bellotto and Laura Malinverni

My speech on the Internet of Things that I delivered in the panel “The Internet of Things & Open Data: New forms of organizations and governance?” at the Open World Forum (Paris, September 22-24, 2011), that was published in Noema has been republished in the Internet of Things Council website (although without the slides). Many thanks to Rob van Kranenburg, who organized the events in Paris, for the interest in my text (unfortunately he could not attend to the presentations and the workshop because of a sudden family problem).

I was  invited to participate to a panel entitled “The Internet of Things & Open Data: New forms of organizations and governance?” and to the following workshop at the Open World Forum in Paris, on September 23. The Open World Forum defines itself as "the global summit meeting bringing together decision-makers, communities and developers to cross-fertilize open technological, economic and social initiatives, in order to build the digital future." The Internet of Things (IoT) is indeed a very interesting topic that will probably change our life, that is announced like a sort of revolution, hence a discussion about its openness is crucial. However I think there are other issues that worth discussing which in perspective seem at leat as important as the hardware/softare openness.

The "corpuscoli" are the sensory organs responsible of the tactile as well as of the pressure, temperature and pain sensations. Imaginary Corpuscoli is the installation of the young italian artist Virginia Carlocchia, which simulates the sense of touch allowing the user to tactilely interact in remote. I presented her work at the Studio D’Ars in Milan on September 20 in a very succesful evening. The event was organized by MeltingPot, an organization that promotes the training and the experimentation in the new media art field - more in general in the realm of the art-sciences-technologies interrelations - and that produces the art projects of young artists.

On September 16 I presented the paper "Simulation beyond perspective. The discourse of holography as a tool for imagery, art, media studies and science" at ISEA 2011, Istanbul, a beautiful city I enjoyed with my friends and colleagues. I wrote many articles on holography at the end of the 80's and in the beginning of the 90's, and my first book Realtà del virtuale (Clueb, 1993) has a chapter about holography. I decided to get back to this "global" technology because of its many implications in science, communication and art today. Moreover, I think worth (re)introducing a reflection on this technique in an era where the "3D issues" seems revamping in the media, and avoid the confusion among the many imaging techniques in the 3D field and holography. Finally, I think we could also use holography as a tool for understanding and learning some more about our everyday flat media imagery panorama.