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?
When combining different ideas together, new creations are born. There are a couple of examples from different talks at SXSW that belong to this remix culture.
Viral Remixes
Grant Hunter from Iris Worldwide talked about Urgent Genius in the panel - Real-Time Newsjacking & a Cold-Blooded Tweeter. Urgent Genius is a 48 hours competition that encourages real time creativity. The challenge is to use trends: stuff happening in the news, new music releases etc and “remix” them to create new videos that hopefully go viral. The video with most clicks wins. You’ll find loads of Thom Yorke remixes online that came out of this, like the Dancing Thom Yorke says NEVER to Justin Bieber
Creatives need to get to ACT MORE LIKE A NEWS SHOW. You catch the wave, adopt an editorial mindset, keep it fresh and spontaneous, while being genuine and relevant. Then saw the seeds.
Animation Remixes that go viral
Next Media Animation is a Taiwanese company based in Taipei that produces animations within hours from the moment a piece of news breaks.
The cinematic quality of the animation is less important. What matters is the particular sense of humour in the writing and the proximity to what’s happing in the world right now.
Next Media Animation on SXSW:
Art Remixes
Nova Jiang is an artist in residence at Eyebeam Art and Technology.
She believes that art is not something rational, but a free association of things, which means that everyone can make art.
The Creatomatic randomly brings together everyday objects to inspire people to create innovative artworks.
Imagine you have a pair of scissors and a compass at your disposal to create a new and possibly useful product. This is how someone created the GPS scissors – an invention that helps you cut a piece of paper in a straight line. Genius!
The remarkable thing about this project is that every participant got to use their own skills to produce their inventions. A furniture design student combined a candle and a cloud to create a wax chandelier that burns itself. Someone with a background in mechanical engineering designed a tea bag catapult plate.
The Arduino Controller invented by Massimo Bonzi and the contributions of Ben Fry and Casey Rivers at the MIT gave tech art it’s own production tools. So now artists do tech art with real tech art stuff.
Simona Lody, the curator of Share Festival Torino taked about the main tech art festivals in Europe:
Berlin – Transmediale - more focused on Activism and New Government
DEAF (Dutch Electronica Art Festival) - an open art lab
Spain – SONAR - which started from music then expanded into other related arts.
One of the most interesting artists mentioned in the talk is Paulo Cirio , an Italian artist who does installation art that torments Facebook, Amazon, and Google.
InFace to FacebookPaulo stole 1 million Facebook profiles and used face recognition technology to post them on a custom made dating website.
Amazon Noir is a media hack performance addressing the free access to education. Here Paulo stole digital books from Amazon and displayed them in PDF formats.
Ernesto Klar, the Share Prize winner, created a light installation where people bend a curtain of light by touching it.
Kuai Auson reactive sound installation features ants as DJs
Nova is one of the three artists who presented their work at SXSW in a panel called
I really liked Nova’s live comic book – The Ideogenetic Machine
The narrative of the book is based on current news and events, to which participants respond by acting and filling speech bubbles. The installation is algorithmically generated. The software keeps producing new images allowing an infinite number of unique stories to take place.
Jon Cohrs tackles social and political issues in his art. He’s interested in the relationship between culture and nature.
The Spice Trade Exhibition investigates the disconnection between contemporary food and its origins, challenging our perception of what is “natural” and “artificial” in relation to food.
Jon travelled with a friend in a canoe and camped along the Meadowlands of Northern New Jersey, a landscape hosting the highest percentage of artificial flavouring factories in the world. They’d set up a tent between the river and the smoky factories and fall asleep with the smell of chocolate in the air.
Alviso’s Medicinal All Sault is a site-specific project that raises awareness on the pharmaceuticals in the San Francisco Bay. Jon talked about the wastewater treatment plants that filter out most toxic contaminants, but not the pharmaceuticals that many of us flush down our toilets ( anything from antibiotics to antidepressants that are not completely absorbed by our bodies). He got to harvest these substances in the Bay and created ALL SALT – a new product he then advertised and sold online and ironically at organic street fairs.
OMG I’m on.TV challenges the content imposed by media conglomerates and refers to June 12th 2009 when American television changed from analog to digital. OMG TV is a pirate TV station - an analog VHF transmitter that broadcasts video content pre-programmed from the web sources.
The project went live for 45 days giving the chance to anyone with limited tech experience to remix videos and broadcast them.
Just like in Nova Jiang’s live comic book, this project works like a platform where infinite random narratives can happen.
It’s interesting how this project changed the role of television as a medium by transforming it into a live screensaver that broadcasts interconnected bits of stories.
And last but not least we have Kaho Abe who approaches art in a very playful way. She uses technology to build games that bring people together in the real world. Hit Me is a game where 2 players with cameras on their heads have to take snaps of the opponent by hitting a button on the their head. The game tests speed, agility and the ability to take good snapshots.
