Perugia, 13 April 2005
Gianfranco Cialini is a retired 60 year-old man who lives in a village of 1000 souls, called “Sant’Arcangelo sul Trasimeno”, in Perugia, Italy.
Actually there are 999 souls, as one of them, me, has recently moved to U.K.
One day, while he was tidying up the Library in the University of Perugia, he discovered something amazing, something that no one else has spotted before, something that you need a good eye and great intuition to discern from all the other thousands of books: 50 Hebrew Manuscripts.
That day, April 13th 2005, Gianfranco Cialini “simply” found some dialogues between the Vatican and Israel, six double folios from a beautiful Hebrew Bible and some copies of a book destroyed by the Church during the Inquisition.
When the print came out, the value of the manuscripts collapsed the book market and typographers started to buy manuscripts at kilos and reuse them to create book covers. So on that day, the belief that such historic thoughts were lost, was revisited.
Gianfranco has made a lot of discoveries in his career but whats more, a few years earlier he found the first Italian musical score dating back to the year 1300 and Italian history of music was rewritten. In particular, the birth of the musical style Ars Nova Italiana was pushed back several years. Quite a lucky guy!
London, 13 April 3013
Gianfranco Xialiny XBF is 60 years old and he can also be 43 years in his Facebook timeline.
He is retired but through the Xmironex process he looks like his 20 year-old nephew for few hours a day. It allows him to work and continue his pursuing passions all his life.
He lives in a small building of 1000 residents, called London in the city of Liverpool.
One sunny, snowy and also rainy day with temperatures between 43 and 48 degrees, Gianfranc Xialiny XBF while tiding up the invisible screen at the British Library, found a unusual microchip, hidden between hundreds of other microchips.
That day, April 13th 3113, something amazing was discovered, something that has never seen before, something that you need a good UVA eye to spot. Gianfranc Xialiny XBF spotted the first form of Arcade Game applied in Finance, forgotten and lost between thousand and thousands of data. At the beginning was difficult to read, part of the binary code went lost but through persevering researches he got it!
That day his life changed: He has since been recognised by the Digital Preservation Society (born by the merger of Microsoft with Google), and discovery contributed to the rewriting of the story of gamification.
Digital preservation pioneers such as Jerry McDonough or David Kirsh, who lived in the region of USA 1000 years ago and spent their life in the preservation of digital worlds, would have been proud of him.
Since the beginning of the Internet, researchers, scientists and their avatars have been interested in the conservation and preservation of digital data such as audio or movie content, keen to conserve our stories, preserve our traces.
Well, it is true that if some data of some silly politicians was lost it might not be the end of the day.
London, 18 April 3012
It’s 12.54, and I am writing on the Lean Mean fighting machine blog.
I had a weird dream last tonight that the city of London was squeezed in a building and bankers where playing Donkey Kong in the basement to lift a country out of crisis. But no one had any memory of it.
Since then I am plagued by a continuous thought:
What will the children of my children’s children’s children find at the Brick Lane Vintage market about me in 3012? Would they buy my vintage Facebook profile picture of?
What about the guy in Memento? Will he be continuously rearranging his social media profile on his digital skin according to the information he scans while surfing the net in 3012?
Tough questions. Hard to give you an answer and I am not the right person. The only thing I know is that I will think twice before I bring my G4 iPhone to the charity shop when I’ll be 99 years old.
Pts. … Google… I am pleased with this article. Can you make me a backup on a stone please?
"Make sure you save that picture so Annie will see it when she’ll grow up”! Can we consider it a form of preservation?
(The parchment found by G. Cialini)
When Julius von Bismark was a kid, he probably never "just put his fingers on his nose" but instead was creating real time sculptures using experimental materials to share with the classroom community. He probably never drew just a stick man but the human simple structure for future mapping interactions.
Julius von Bismark is an interactive Artist and this week at the age of 28 received a desk at Cern, in Geneva, Switzerland.
Julius von Bismark is a genius but, just like every genius is paranoid: he is afraid that his inventions can end up in wrong hands. The spy? The communist? The fascists? The terrorists? The Martians? The Others? No! The Advertising. Really? Yes.
In 2008 he won the Ars Electronica Grand Prix Award with the Image Fulgurator: a real world hack of other’s people photos. The camera is synchronized with other people’s flashes and projects an image to the pointed pictures. The other users will discover the hidden message later on their cameras. In this video Julius shows the potentials of the Image Fulgurator projecting a white dove on Mao Zedong's portrait. Scary, powerful.
I am sure everyone who ended up on this blog, especially these days, has a high sense of responsibility and knows the difference between creating a new concept and stealing Julius idea.
Mr Von Bismark, keep creating and inspiring all of us with this amazing stuff. And never shave your beard.
This September I went to the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, an annual event featuring projects that mix “provocative art, technology and intellectual thinking” as they call it. At the end of 3 full days, I feel I’m sorted for the next 3 years. My journey to Linz was actually a time travel experience.
The theme this year was "ORIGIN - How It All Begins” in collaboration with the Cern Center to show the research about the origin of the world.
It explains why the moment we question ourselves where are we came from, it’s when we’re actually going forward.
An excellent example is one of the Android-Theatre project by Hiroshi Ishiguro who worked on one of the most challenging dreams of our time: the idea of recreating a robot that looks exactly like a human.
I have always been fascinated by Science Fiction movies like I, Robot and Gattacar novels like “Do robots dream electric sheep? Or music videos like “All is full of love” by Bjork with that love-sex sequence between two robots, so I was really excited entering the oldest and tallest Gothic church in Austria to attend “Sayonara”(Goodbye).
After climbing almost 200 steps in a spiral staircase, I arrived in a semi dark room where two actors were facing each other on stage seated in their chairs. I knew that one of them was a robot but I couldn’t immediately figure out who was who.
Is it the blond girl seated on the right or the Asian woman on the left?
I knew that the audience was doing the same puzzle game as me. I looked at their skins, their mouths and their hands… confronting each other and making bets in my mind. I pointed all my invisible money on the blond sleepy girl. As soon as they started to speak I realized that the Asian girl had a robotic voice, you could feel that it was not coming from “inside” her. Even
I thought my “mind game” was solved, but then a new one began when they started a conversation about dreams, feelings and future. The piece actually explores the relationship between a dying girl and her android companion.
When the piece ended the Asian Woman remained on stage and we all got closer to have a better look, like people in the 1800’s going to see a freak show at the circus. It’s just that this time we had digital cameras to immortalise the moment.
I can shyly say I felt like if I was going to visit a corpse. I have never experienced so many feeling at the same time during a play. Fascinated, attracted and repulsed at the same time. Also, I was in a church, symbol of a religious explanation to our existence and now I was brought to think in term of redefining the human existence related to a robot. What does it mean to be human? What truth is? Whow!
I left the place completely amazed and without having a lot of time to digest it all, I decided to add some more ingredients to the big information soup I was dealing with and went to have a look at one of the winners of Prix Ars “May the Horse Live in me, 2011 / Art OrientéObjet (FR) ” where a woman decided to mix her blood with the horse’s plasma… …but that’s another story.
From “I, Robot”.
Detective del Spooner to Sonny:
Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a... canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?
We could add: Can a robot act? Can a robot make you cry? What about your toaster?
