Abstract

Economy, society and environment are three entwined pillars of sustainability. Many efforts converge already on ecological and economical aspects of sustainability and we are slowly (and hopefully) adapting to make a better use of our resources.
 
As foreseeing and knowledgeable use of physical resources is today the major priority of sustainable trends in production and distribution of physical goods, I tried to apply similar measures to the production and particularly to distribution of cultural goods in order to address social sustainability.
 
In this field of sustainability the materials that are produced and exchanged are not physical resources, but intangible information such as ideas, opinions and meanings. Therefore I tried to remodel the exchange of cultural resources through an optimized consumption of media content.
 
Among the priorities of social sustainability we can mention: promoting social interaction, fostering cultural pluralism, supporting cultural enrichment and rising education level. The underlying logic of our proposal is to spread ideas from one person to another, This transmission of memes would work on two axis, vertically opening a dialogue between popular culture and classical literature and connecting people from different cultures.
 
Conceived in this perspective, “Gem” is a social software (a web-based service), designed for media consumers, which merges benefits from participative media collections and semantic social network. The system relies on user-centered (prosumer-centered actually) connections between media excerpts.
 
 
If you wish to know more about the project, please contact me.

A minimal concrete noise piece played by an electro-robotic instrument ;) but also a little tribute to “Le Macchine Inutili” by Bruno Munari and to “Der lauf der dinge” by Fischli & Weiss.
 
Messing around with electronics toys, during a workshop held in Domus Academy by Massimo Banzi, I came up with an (almost) endless loop machine…

Patches are not documented but if you want to give a try you are welcome to download both versions (Noisiv 0.1 and Noisiv 0.2) and build on them under CC Licence. Here’s a little document with some features.. if you want to dive in feel free to ask me where to start and how to move around.

No is around is a concrete repetitive piece made out of noisy recordings. Here’s the (edited) recording of the concert which took place at 8.30am on a monday morning for the 9th Placard festival in Paris.
 
Download the track (Right click…)

Le Placard, Milano

Born in 1998, Placard is a headphone concert streaming festival, playing with concentration, intimacy, time warp, and teleportation. It functions under a mode of open program, open for headphone rooms to create performance spaces where performers are welcomed to perform. Both the space “owner” and the performers use the Placard website to inscribe and self organize the global program.

Ad Occhi Socchiusi

Our eyes half-closed, looking both inside and outside, our perception shifts to an audio-tactile dimension; favoring the awareness of the body, the presence of our selves and the wakefulness of being. Ad occhi socchiusi is an invitation to a certain feeling, to a certain perception of our-selves. Due to its aesthetic system, Ad occhi socchiusi is an experiment on cybernetics as a science of regulation and communication between living beings and machines.
 
The participant soon becomes an “interactor” simply sitting, resting and breathing. He learns to use his body as an instrument that produces the sound that he can hear. In public space the interactive experience is exclusively aural, but the full recording of it (audio and video) can be downloaded at home.
 
The experience leads from the chaotic state to the “birth” of a virtual entity that take over the user’s interaction in creating sounds. This process passes from disorder (chaos) to organized patterns (order), according to the rules of the Game of Life de John Conway. The crucial element in treating the information is the correlation of the cardiac, resonant and chromatic frequencies, according to their consonance or dissonance.
 
The system is retroactive and generative, and the notion of cycle is deep-rooted within it. This cycle is sensitive to the past: every audiovisual instance is the result of the system’s condition at the time of the experience as well as previous states.