ecopolis

Conferenze: 15 e 20 settembre 2008
Oratorio San Filippo Neri / MIAAO
Via Maria Vittoria 5, Torino

Mostra: inaugurazione venerdì 19 settembre h. 18:30
Aperta fino al 27 settembre
Ex-Chiesa Metodista
Via Lagrange 13, Torino

C.STEM 2008 – BREEDING OBJECTS offre, per la prima volta al pubblico italiano, una selezione di visionari progetti che anticipano i futuri sviluppi tecnologici del design.
Che cosa nasce dall’incontro tra design, progettazione software, strumenti di digital fabrication e l’esigenza di una sempre maggiore personalizzazione dei prodotti?

La mostra presenta oggetti progettati con processi altamente innovativi: abiti tessuti analizzando in tempo reale i flussi di news globali, sedie realizzate a partire dai fotogrammi di un’animazione 3d, ceramiche e gioielli sperimentali modellati online dagli utenti, contenitori di legno che riproducono porzioni di GoogleMaps, lampade disegnate combattendo contro un sacco da pugilato, stampanti tridimensionali in grado di replicare se stesse.

L’evento celebra nuove forme, nuove tecnologie e nuovi processi progettuali per offrire un esercizio di immaginazione che possa essere di stimolo al mondo delle imprese e alla design community.

C.STEM sviluppa uno scenario in cui la capacità dei designer di scrivere il proprio software diventa uno strumento progettuale fondamentale per mettere in comunicazione il potenziale delle tecnologie di digital fabrication (prototipazione radipa, taglio laser, lavorazioni a controllo numerico) con le esigenze di un mercato sempre più orientato alla produzione di massa personalizzata.
Le strategie computazionali applicate al design trasformano gli oggetti statici in processi dinamici e liquidi, capaci di adattarsi e di evolvere nel tempo.
Non più oggetti prodotti in serie sempre uguali ma famiglie di oggetti unici e irripetibili: infinite varianti generate tramite software a partire da un progetto/processo aperto interrogano il ruolo e il pensiero creativo dei designer post-industriali.

C.STEM 2008 – BREEDING OBJECTS è un evento che si articola in due settimane con la mostra presso il suggestivo spazio dell’ex-chiesa Metodista e due giornate di conferenze: un’occasione per approfondire il tema attraverso case studies e momenti di incontro con designer, artisti e architetti provenienti da tutto il mondo.

PARTECIPANTI
AEDS – Ammar Eloueini (Francia, Libano)
Ebru Kurbak & Mahir Yavuz (Turchia)
FLUID FORMS Stephen Williams (Austria, Nuova Zelanda)
The Rep Rap Project – Adrian Bowyer (UK)
Nervous System – Jessica Eve Rosenkrantz e Jesse Louis-Rosenberg, (USA)
MOS – Michael Meredith, (USA)
TheVeryMany, Marc Fornes (USA)
1 / 1 – Cait & C. E. B. Reas (USA)
ISOPT – Susanne Stauch (Germania)
Andrew Vande Moere (Australia)
Fabrizio Valpreda, Cristian Campagnaro (Italia)

Tthe 5th International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Robotics and Autonomous Systems (CIRAS 2008) will be 19th-22th june in Linz, Austria.

Computational intelligence (CI) has emerged as a research area in the early nineties. Its origin is a consequence of the dynamic development and wide application of technologies such as neuro-computing, fuzzy logic system and evolutionary computation. These technologies are complementary to one another and allow solution of new problems in the way to manifest features that are usually assumed to be signs of intelligent acting. CI can be regarded as a research endeavor that encompasses technologies such as evolutionary computation, neural computing and fuzzy logic systems. In this synergistic combination, each of them plays an important, well-defined, and unique role.

The present research direction in building intelligent Robotic Systems requires an integrated approach to problem solving in computing, science and engineering. The study and research on robotic systems warrant the need for bringing skills and knowledge from different disciples across. The real-world operational issues, system evolution, cooperation, modeling uncertainties, sensor fusion and intelligent control designs are a few of the interesting research directions.

Autonomous Systems are capable to act independently in dynamic and unpredictable environments. Autonomous Agents are the most interesting and important direction of research and development within computer science these days. Agent technologies are being used in diverse fields and domains.

CIRAS is intended to provide a common platform for knowledge dissemination among researchers working in CI, Robotics, Autonomous Systems and these areas.

Current TV is an Emmy award winning independent media company led by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and businessman Joel Hyatt.

The cable television network went on the air at midnight EDT (4:00 UTC) on the morning of August 1, 2005. A second network, operated in the United Kingdom and Ireland started its operation March 12, 2007 for Sky and Virgin Media subscribers.

Al Gore and Joel Hyatt, today are both in Rome. They will be introducing the latest release of Current.com network, operating in Italy and starting its operation May 8, 2008 for Sky subscribers and on line.

Current features “pods”, or short programs, of which a portion are created by viewers and users and Live Streaming.

**Competition deadline extended to 15 May 2008!!**

Are you an artist, designer, or creative with artistic verve? Then here’s an offer you won’t want to refuse.

Create an imaginative background design for Rhiz.eu homepage bringing out the site’s character to the full.
5 winners will each pocket €300 euro and have their designs emblazoned on the rhiz.eu homepage and on our printed promo material across Europe and beyond.

Details here: http://www.rhiz.eu/article-9871-en.html.

Start brainstorming now and upload your homepage background proposal for Rhiz.eu until 15 May 2008.

Don’t be shy, enter the competition and spread the word too!

Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci was born in San Frediano, low-class area of the city of Florence, on April 13, 1808, while the city is under Napoleon rule. His family is poor and, even if he is admitted to the Art School [Accademia di Belle Arti], he cannot end his studies as he needs to start working very young. He changes many jobs, from custom employee propman for the “Pergola” theater in Florence. Here he builds an acoustic telephone: that is a telephone in which sound is conducted inside tubes. In the “Pergola” he meets Ester Mochi, a costumer, which he will marry.

Antonio Meucci gets interested in animal and physiological electricity while he was young. He is active in politics too, and he gets into the revolutionary movements aimed at the Unification of Italy which took place in 1831. Being him a liberal and a repubblican he is be arrested and remains three months in jail, sharing the cell with Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi. He is then pushed to leave the Great Duchy of Tuscany and will finally sail to Cuba. He settles in Havana as propman for the Tacòn Theatre. While in Cuba, while he was trying to cure rheumatisms of a patient via elettotherapy he manages to hear more clearly than he expected the cry of his patient, from the neighbouring room, as the current arrives to him. Meucci’s words were “I thought I heard this sound more distinctly than natural. I then put this copper of my instrument to my ear, and heard the sound of his voice through the wire. This was my first impression, and the origin of my idea of the transmission of the human voice by electricity”. He continues his experiment untill, in 1850, he settles inj the United States, and in the city of New York.

In New Yorh Meucci establishes a candle factory. Here he mets Giuseppe Garibaldi, which will work with Meucci; the two shares a long lasting important friendship. The collaboration between these two famous italians is proved in the New York museum “Garibaldi – Meucci”.

In 1854, Meucci’s wife Ester gets a crippling rheumatical arthritis which will oblige her to bed for the rest of her life, which will occur in 1884. Meucci realizes then the first true telephone link connecting his lab, nearby his cottage, with his wife’s bedroom. In a note dated 1857 Meucci describes his telephone: “it consists in a vibrating diaphragm and in a magnet electrified by a wire wounded around it. When the diaphragm vibrates the magnet modifies the wire curren. These modifications, once they reach the other end of the wire, impresses similar vibrations to the receiving diaphragm, which reproduces the words.”

Meucci ideas are clear, but he lacks the economic means to sustain his research. The candle factory goes bankrupt and Meucci seeks funding with rich italians but without luck. Soon he lacks also mony for his own living and he will survive thanks to his friends’ help.

(Western Electric Model 1317)

Meucci holds on and, in 1871 establishes e company and files in for a paptent, he names his invention “telettrofono”. The “Telettrophone Company,” has, as main scope, as the contract states, that of “carrying on all the necessary experiments to realize the ‘Telettrofono,’ that is the transmission of words (human voice) along electrical wires, as invented by Antonio Meucci”. There is still a money problem: with his $20 Meucci cannot afford to pay the cost of a patent, which sums up to $250 for a complete patent. As an alternative he files in for a “temporary” patent, or caveat, which lasts one year and can be renewed, the cost for each year being $10 dollari. Meucci will be able to pay this sum only up to year 1873.

In this same period, carrying with him much documentation on his researches, Meucci resorts to the powerfull American District Telegraph Company in New York, asking permission to use their lines for his experiments. The Company does not foresee the implication of the project and dismisses Meucci, causing him yet another failure.

In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell files in for a patent for his telephone. The following years will be spent by Meucci in an endless trial to obtain recognition of the paternity of the invention. Meucci is sponsored by the Globe Company, which suits Bell Company.
The lawsuit ends on July 19, 1887 with a decision which, even if it recognizes som merits to Antonio Meucci, is positive for Bell. “Nothing shows – says the decision – that Meucci really obtained any practical results, besides that of conducting, mechanically, the word along a cable. He surely used a mechanical conductor and he supposed that, by electrifying the conductor, he could have obtained better results”. In a nutshell the sentence states that Meucci had invented the telephone, but not the electrical one.

Antonio Meucci dies, aged 81, on Octover 18, 1889, shortly before that the Globe Company appeals against the sentence. After long lawsuits the Supreme Court of the United States will archive the case.

For more than a century, except in Italy, Bell has been considered the inventor of the telephone. On June 11, 2002, the Congress of the United States finally recognized officially that Antonio Meucci is the original inventor of the electrical telephone.

http://meucci.ing.unifi.it/

Donal Norman presented his latest book, “The Design of Future Things” at Share Festival 2008, with – Bruce Sterling, writer, Luca De Biase, publishing director of Nova24- Sole24Ore magazine and Gino Bistagnino, university professor Politecnico di Torino. The book talks about a world where objects, agents of an operating macrosystem, are inter-connected within a pervasive network where relation is more important than function. Relation must be focused on sustainability as well, since a harmful element can infect the whole system.

Here you can see the VIDEO and read the text Bruce Sterling wroted about in the catalogue:
”
Every design requires sacrifice; you can’t possibly have a real-world object that is all things to all people. So — if you plan to saturate future objects with computer interactions — where are the constraints? What is the grain of the material?

It was from Donald Norman that I first learned that the limits of the human brain in handling bad design. We lack infinite amounts of intelligence and awareness to devote to a demanding world, just like we lack infinite physical strength or the machine-like ability to chug along without food and sleep. So it’s both senseless and dangerous to predict “smart objects” or “future objects” without factoring in humanity’s “cognitive loading” and “opportunity costs.”

What are “opportunity costs?” Every time we respond to a beep, buzz or click, some mechanical prompt demanding our interaction, we are sacrificing something else we might do. We don’t simply gain interactivity, we *lose* the opportunity for some other interaction that might be better-designed and more effective. We can be harassed into an itchy condition of “continuous partial attention” where our ability to take coherent action is constantly broken-up by tiny flea-bite emergencies.

Then there’s “technological excise,” technical activities we’re forced to perform before we’re actually allowed to get on with our work. We might want a larger type-face on a cellphone screen. How much wandering do we have to do through the jungles of format, with tiny buttons, before the letters on our screen get bigger?

Maybe we’d like to stuff a video into our weblog. With what commands, in what format? How do we discover “how to get it in there” — how do we discover how to discover that? Quite possibly, through frustrated trial and error, we’ll discover some painful, time-consuming work-around — and once we’ve trained ourselves how to do that, rather than suffer the “excise” of going back to the rule-book, we’ll try to save ourselves that painful mental labor by habitually doing it the wrong way, again and again. That opportunity cost is huge.

“Cognitive loading.” How many processes, how many objects, can we bear in our minds? It’s painful to be mentally conscious of some minor. boring task; we’ll try to automate it, habituate it, remove our attention from it. Many American states now make it illegal to drive while using a cellphone. Even walking while using a cellphone can look like an attack of drunkenness.

How do we achieve the cyberneticization of the everyday without polluting our mental environment?
”
Bruce Sterling

This is ”ambient information” — the newest concept in how to monitor everyday data. With Ambient the physical environment becomes an interface to digital information, rendered as subtle changes in form, movement, sound, color or light.

The Orb is a frosted-glass ball that glows different colors to display traffic congestion or any other Ambient information channel: weather, windspeed, pollen, traffic congestion, real time stock market trends. The Ambient Orb arrives preset to track the Dow Jones Industrial Average, glowing more green or red to indicate market movement up or down, or yellow when the market is calm. It can be customized to a set of free channels, such as market indices or weather in major cities.

http://www.ambientdevices.com/cat/platform.html

SmartCityEU is an art project which explores and develops new artistic interventions within urban spaces in European cities during a 2 year period in 2008 and 2009.

At the forefront of new practices, SmartCityEU operates an art rereading of urban space and offers a vision of a balanced and sustainable European city reoriented towards citizens.

SmartCityEU has been initiated by 4 major cultural institutions sharing a common interest in new art forms and new media: Dédale [FR], WRO [PL], Zoneattive [IT] and AltArt [RO].

The 4 operators have applied together to the European Commission’s Culture programme.

Moreover, SmartCityEU brings together numerous actors in the fields of art, urban development and new technologies such as Recyclart [BE], boDig [TR], Kibla [SI] and Videomedeja [SR]. SmartCityEU’s art programme (exhibitions, live art, performances, concerts) takes place in 8 European cities: Paris, Wroclaw, Rome, Cluj, Istanbul, Brussels, Maribor and Novi Sad.