My thesis defense PowerPoint from April 2009. I wrote a travel memoir and added short stories to compliment my own story--it was a great challenge and an awesome experience.
Cross Media design scenarios: smartphones and tablets, a workshop at ISIA Des...Salvatore Iaconesi
On March 21st 2011, Art is Open Source held a lesson on the theme:
"Cross Media design scenarios: smartphones and tablets"
The workshop engaged the problems, approaches, methodologies and processes that designers can use in imagining, designing and implementing cross media design products.
Some energies were used to describe really interesting scenarios that allow using cross media design to implement solutions that are useful not only for business, but also for society, the environment and the cultural ecosystem, promoting a more tolerant, multicultural, sustainable take on the world.
These are the slides that have been used in the workshop, complete with a full end-to-end example of the creation of a location based application for iPhone/iPad.
You can find all the info here at Art is Open Source:
http://wp.me/pnaKK-kI
There is also a ZIP archive of the full XCODE project used in class:
http://www.artisopensource.net/isia.zip
Platforms used:
XCODE with iPhone SDK 4.3 http://developer.apple.com
Phonegap http://www.phonegap.com/
jQuery http://www.jquery.com
Google Maps API v3 http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/
Ubiquitous Commons workshop at transmediale 2015, Capture AllSalvatore Iaconesi
Here are the slides from the workshop, with a framing of the concept of Ubiquitous Commons, a series of examples and links, and an update about how the development of the toolkits (legal, technological, philosophical, aesthetic) are going, together with some source code and prototypes.
More info can also be gathered here:
human-ecosystems.com/home/ubiquitous-commons-the-slides-from-the-workshop-at-transmediale-festival-in-berlin
REFF workshops - introduction: a fake cultural institutionSalvatore Iaconesi
REFF project created a fake institution enacting real policies for arts, creativity and freedoms of expression.
Networks, technologies and critical methodologies can synchretically come together to create opportunities for the autonomous, free reinvention of reality, using fake, remix, mashup, recontextualization, reenactment as tools for creating additional layers of reality promoting freedoms and possibilities.
These presentations are used in REFF workshops performed by Art is Open Source and FakePress.
Please check out the presentation's notes for the texts accompanying the presentations.
They have been created in occasion of the REFF exhibition in London created with Furtherfield.
more info on:
http://www.artisopensource.net
http://www.fakepress.it
http://www.romaeuropa.org
info on the exhibit in Furtherfield London (opening on Feb. 25th 2011):
http://www.furtherfield.org/exhibitions/reff-remix-world-reinvent-reality
info on the global situation of the REFF project:
http://reff.romaeuropa.org
Using real-time social networks to produce usable knowledgeSalvatore Iaconesi
How can we use social networks to gather real-time knowledge ad information?
How can we use it for urban planning, culture, economy, business and also in emergency situations?
Presented at Information Visualization 2012 in Montpellier, France
more info at:
http://bit.ly/OxPAhH
My thesis defense PowerPoint from April 2009. I wrote a travel memoir and added short stories to compliment my own story--it was a great challenge and an awesome experience.
Cross Media design scenarios: smartphones and tablets, a workshop at ISIA Des...Salvatore Iaconesi
On March 21st 2011, Art is Open Source held a lesson on the theme:
"Cross Media design scenarios: smartphones and tablets"
The workshop engaged the problems, approaches, methodologies and processes that designers can use in imagining, designing and implementing cross media design products.
Some energies were used to describe really interesting scenarios that allow using cross media design to implement solutions that are useful not only for business, but also for society, the environment and the cultural ecosystem, promoting a more tolerant, multicultural, sustainable take on the world.
These are the slides that have been used in the workshop, complete with a full end-to-end example of the creation of a location based application for iPhone/iPad.
You can find all the info here at Art is Open Source:
http://wp.me/pnaKK-kI
There is also a ZIP archive of the full XCODE project used in class:
http://www.artisopensource.net/isia.zip
Platforms used:
XCODE with iPhone SDK 4.3 http://developer.apple.com
Phonegap http://www.phonegap.com/
jQuery http://www.jquery.com
Google Maps API v3 http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/
Ubiquitous Commons workshop at transmediale 2015, Capture AllSalvatore Iaconesi
Here are the slides from the workshop, with a framing of the concept of Ubiquitous Commons, a series of examples and links, and an update about how the development of the toolkits (legal, technological, philosophical, aesthetic) are going, together with some source code and prototypes.
More info can also be gathered here:
human-ecosystems.com/home/ubiquitous-commons-the-slides-from-the-workshop-at-transmediale-festival-in-berlin
REFF workshops - introduction: a fake cultural institutionSalvatore Iaconesi
REFF project created a fake institution enacting real policies for arts, creativity and freedoms of expression.
Networks, technologies and critical methodologies can synchretically come together to create opportunities for the autonomous, free reinvention of reality, using fake, remix, mashup, recontextualization, reenactment as tools for creating additional layers of reality promoting freedoms and possibilities.
These presentations are used in REFF workshops performed by Art is Open Source and FakePress.
Please check out the presentation's notes for the texts accompanying the presentations.
They have been created in occasion of the REFF exhibition in London created with Furtherfield.
more info on:
http://www.artisopensource.net
http://www.fakepress.it
http://www.romaeuropa.org
info on the exhibit in Furtherfield London (opening on Feb. 25th 2011):
http://www.furtherfield.org/exhibitions/reff-remix-world-reinvent-reality
info on the global situation of the REFF project:
http://reff.romaeuropa.org
Using real-time social networks to produce usable knowledgeSalvatore Iaconesi
How can we use social networks to gather real-time knowledge ad information?
How can we use it for urban planning, culture, economy, business and also in emergency situations?
Presented at Information Visualization 2012 in Montpellier, France
more info at:
http://bit.ly/OxPAhH
Sixth lecture for my students in English 192, "Science Fiction," summer 2013 at UC Santa Barbara.
Course website: http://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/m13/
DxF2009, Utrecht: "All the time in the world"Matt Jones
Given at Design By Fire 2009, Utrecht http://www.designbyfire.nl/2009/
Talk description:
"People, places, time. The triumvirate of factors at play in mobile, social, locative services might be familiar at the surface level to designers and developers.
Our relationships to each other, the cities and places we inhabit and navigate have been transformed in the last few years by the technology, products and services that we have designed — but what about that last one of the three — time?
Using examples from the development of Dopplr.com and other services — alongside historical and science-fictional perspectives — Matt will explore what we might call neochronometry and illustrate some directions we could take as interaction designers to treat time as a material."
Bruce SterlingSlipstream 2 Slipstream was a literary term that.docxhartrobert670
Bruce Sterling
Slipstream 2
Slipstream was a literary term that needed to be coined, but the phenomenon doesn’t actually exist. Back in the 1980s, I noticed that there were a lot of books being written and published that had fantastic elements, or nonrealistic elements, or (and maybe this is the best term) antirealistic elements. They had none of the recognition symbols of genre science fiction or genre fantasy.
They didn’t play to the sf fan base. They were not at all associated with the Great John Campbellian Tradition. They had no puns in them. They weren’t aimed for a Hugo sweep or a Nebula. They were written by people who were outside of the genre and perhaps only vaguely aware of its traditions. But clearly the standard, literary, “realistic narrative” had soured on these people.
So, the first step in studying this was to go out and do a little fieldwork. I asked friends of mine to help me compile a list of works that might fit under this circumstance. I vacuumed up everything on the literary landscape that was most loosely attached. Then I wrote a critical article about it, in which I presented the evidence. I said, “Look how much there is,” and “What are we to make of this?”
So, “slipstream” was a catchall term that I made up, along with my friend Richard Dorsett, who is a bibliophile and rare book collector, and who now lives in Boston where he is quite the literateur. So, I published the article in Science Fiction Eye, and the term did in fact see considerable use. But, in my opinion, slipstream has never come to real fruition, and perhaps it will never come to fruition.
I don’t think that slipstream is a “genre” yet, and it certainly has never become a publishing category, a marketing category.
If slipstream had done what I imagined it doing when I wrote that article, there would in fact be wire racks at the Borders and Barnes & Noble that said slipstream on them. You’d be able to go in there and buy these fantastic, antirealistic novels of a postmodern sensibility, and they would have their own awards, and their own little fanzines, and conventions where groups of writers would get together and say, “Well, I’m more antirealistic than you.” There would be a certain amount of solidarity within the genre; they would have a generic sensibility. But they clearly don’t. Trying to get slipstream writers together is like herding cats. I don’t think they have a temperament with which they can unite.
John Kessel is a very dear friend of mine, someone with whom I’ve had very fertile discussions. We’re both professional science fiction writers, with, yes, strong sidelines in academia and journalism, but nevertheless we’re primarily sf writers. He and I disagree violently on the most fundamental tenets of our genre, but we have a common ground in which we can at least agree on definitions and actually get somewhere with our disputes.
Slipstream has never managed to ac ...
Tales for Jung Folk: Original Fairytales for Persons of All Ages Dramatizing C.G. Jung's Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious by Richard Roberts (1990)
Innovation and Trangression: exploring Third Spaces and Excess SpacesSalvatore Iaconesi
lesson about the relationship between transgression and innovation at the Alta Scuola Politecnica in 2016
more info and text of the presentation at
https://www.artisopensource.net/2016/06/27/the-transgressive-spaces-of-innovation/
a presentation about the Third Infoscape, presented at DIS2017 in Edinburgh, http://dis2017.org/
Download the presentation here for the version with full presenter notes:
http://artisopensource.net/DIS2017_ThirdInfoscape_SI.pptx
Cosa è successo e quali sono i prossimi passi delle Erbe Indisciplinate, il workshop della Cura con RuralHub e la Casa delle Erbe.
maggiori informazioni qui:
http://la-cura.it/2016/04/22/report-da-erbe-indisciplinate/
La Cura, Erbe Indisciplinate, presentazione di benvenuto, frameSalvatore Iaconesi
La presentazione di Erbe Indisciplinate, il Sabato, per dare il benvenuto e stabilire il frame del workshop.
Maggiori informazioni qui:
http://la-cura.it/2016/04/22/report-da-erbe-indisciplinate/
Human Ecosystems and the Ubiquitous Commons at the STARTS program meetingSalvatore Iaconesi
Slides from the event:
On December 1st and 2nd 2015, at the European Parliament and Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, in Brussels, Belgium, Human Ecosystems and Ubiquitous Commons will take part “Innovation at the intersection of Arts, Sciences and Technology” event, organized by the STARTS program.
We will present the Human Ecosystems and the Ubiquitous Commons cases as the opportunity for creating value and inclusive, radical innovation through the collaboration between sciences, technologies and the arts, creating impacts for society, administrations and businesses.
more info at:
http://www.ubiquitouscommons.org/ubiquitous-commons-and-human-ecosystems-at-the-starts-program-in-brussels/
this is the presentation for the Ubiquitous Commons held at the NetFutures 2015 event in Brussels, during the CAPS concertation meeting.
more information here:
http://www.ubiquitouscommons.org/ubiquitous-commons-at-netfutures-2015/
here:
http://www.ubiquitouscommons.org/
and here:
http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/news/collective-awareness-platforms-sustainability-and-social-innovation-caps-consultation-meeting
Our session at the Brand Management and Communication Master at IED Milan, focused on Imaginary Brands, and the role of troublemakers in the creative industry
Il territorio si trasforma in un info-scape, una nuova geografia composta dalla realtà fisica, dai dati e dalle informazioni, dalle espressioni delle persone, e dalle relazioni che si instaurano tra persone, luoghi, oggetti e situazioni.
Cosa è e come è fatto un museo ubiquo?
Un museo diffuso sul territorio, in cui dati, informazioni, espressioni, emozioni, saperi ed esperienze si ricombinano fluidamente per rendere leggibile una nuova mappa: relazionale, informazionale, comunicazionale, performativa.
Art is Open Source at Visualize: materials and links
Some links and resources explored at the Visualize talk and workshop in Lecce, Italy, June 2014
more info here:
http://www.artisopensource.net/network/artisopensource/2014/04/17/micro-histories-of-cities-and-ubiquitous-commons-at-visualize-in-lecce/
The Incautious Porn presentation held at SSN2014 in Barcelona.
From the Abstract:
"We have radically changed our perception of what is public and what is private.
While using social networks, search engines and websites determining who has access to our information, our personal details, our habits and preferences is often complex or not easily accessible.
Each person's information is sold hundreds of times each day, while surfing websites and social media sites, with information passing from one provider to the other in ways that are subtle and non-transparent: data collected on one site may be used on other sited to sell us advertisements or to investigate on our lives.
On top of that, most people tend to interpret social media sites as new forms of public spaces, and it is fundamental for service providers' strategies that this perception is maintained, to promote our full disclosure, allowing them to collect even more data about ourselves.
We used the project Incautious Porn to investigate on this scenario, to explore the shifting and blurring of the boundaries of what we perceive as our privacy and as our private and public spaces.
Incautious Porn uses the operations of a fake company systematically invading our privacy (even to the point of performing simulated forms of blackmail) to collect enormous amounts of information which we have used to analyze this scenario.
In Incautious Porn art acts both as a sensor on the transformation of human societies and as a tool for analyzing its effects.
The effects of the Incautious Porn project and communication campaign have been massive, bringing it to the attention of a large, global, audience and, thus, allowing the research team to benefit from a large data set.
Furthermore, the actions of the blackmailing fake-company have been led using an ethical approach: no money was taken from people, and all their personal data has been preserved, also using the initiative as a testing lab for novel privacy and security preservation techniques, and as a campaign for awareness about the transformation of people's perception of contemporary private/public spaces."
more info at: http://www.artisopensource.net/projects/incautious-porn.html
More Related Content
Similar to Near Future Design: the performance of infinite futures
Sixth lecture for my students in English 192, "Science Fiction," summer 2013 at UC Santa Barbara.
Course website: http://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/m13/
DxF2009, Utrecht: "All the time in the world"Matt Jones
Given at Design By Fire 2009, Utrecht http://www.designbyfire.nl/2009/
Talk description:
"People, places, time. The triumvirate of factors at play in mobile, social, locative services might be familiar at the surface level to designers and developers.
Our relationships to each other, the cities and places we inhabit and navigate have been transformed in the last few years by the technology, products and services that we have designed — but what about that last one of the three — time?
Using examples from the development of Dopplr.com and other services — alongside historical and science-fictional perspectives — Matt will explore what we might call neochronometry and illustrate some directions we could take as interaction designers to treat time as a material."
Bruce SterlingSlipstream 2 Slipstream was a literary term that.docxhartrobert670
Bruce Sterling
Slipstream 2
Slipstream was a literary term that needed to be coined, but the phenomenon doesn’t actually exist. Back in the 1980s, I noticed that there were a lot of books being written and published that had fantastic elements, or nonrealistic elements, or (and maybe this is the best term) antirealistic elements. They had none of the recognition symbols of genre science fiction or genre fantasy.
They didn’t play to the sf fan base. They were not at all associated with the Great John Campbellian Tradition. They had no puns in them. They weren’t aimed for a Hugo sweep or a Nebula. They were written by people who were outside of the genre and perhaps only vaguely aware of its traditions. But clearly the standard, literary, “realistic narrative” had soured on these people.
So, the first step in studying this was to go out and do a little fieldwork. I asked friends of mine to help me compile a list of works that might fit under this circumstance. I vacuumed up everything on the literary landscape that was most loosely attached. Then I wrote a critical article about it, in which I presented the evidence. I said, “Look how much there is,” and “What are we to make of this?”
So, “slipstream” was a catchall term that I made up, along with my friend Richard Dorsett, who is a bibliophile and rare book collector, and who now lives in Boston where he is quite the literateur. So, I published the article in Science Fiction Eye, and the term did in fact see considerable use. But, in my opinion, slipstream has never come to real fruition, and perhaps it will never come to fruition.
I don’t think that slipstream is a “genre” yet, and it certainly has never become a publishing category, a marketing category.
If slipstream had done what I imagined it doing when I wrote that article, there would in fact be wire racks at the Borders and Barnes & Noble that said slipstream on them. You’d be able to go in there and buy these fantastic, antirealistic novels of a postmodern sensibility, and they would have their own awards, and their own little fanzines, and conventions where groups of writers would get together and say, “Well, I’m more antirealistic than you.” There would be a certain amount of solidarity within the genre; they would have a generic sensibility. But they clearly don’t. Trying to get slipstream writers together is like herding cats. I don’t think they have a temperament with which they can unite.
John Kessel is a very dear friend of mine, someone with whom I’ve had very fertile discussions. We’re both professional science fiction writers, with, yes, strong sidelines in academia and journalism, but nevertheless we’re primarily sf writers. He and I disagree violently on the most fundamental tenets of our genre, but we have a common ground in which we can at least agree on definitions and actually get somewhere with our disputes.
Slipstream has never managed to ac ...
Tales for Jung Folk: Original Fairytales for Persons of All Ages Dramatizing C.G. Jung's Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious by Richard Roberts (1990)
Innovation and Trangression: exploring Third Spaces and Excess SpacesSalvatore Iaconesi
lesson about the relationship between transgression and innovation at the Alta Scuola Politecnica in 2016
more info and text of the presentation at
https://www.artisopensource.net/2016/06/27/the-transgressive-spaces-of-innovation/
a presentation about the Third Infoscape, presented at DIS2017 in Edinburgh, http://dis2017.org/
Download the presentation here for the version with full presenter notes:
http://artisopensource.net/DIS2017_ThirdInfoscape_SI.pptx
Cosa è successo e quali sono i prossimi passi delle Erbe Indisciplinate, il workshop della Cura con RuralHub e la Casa delle Erbe.
maggiori informazioni qui:
http://la-cura.it/2016/04/22/report-da-erbe-indisciplinate/
La Cura, Erbe Indisciplinate, presentazione di benvenuto, frameSalvatore Iaconesi
La presentazione di Erbe Indisciplinate, il Sabato, per dare il benvenuto e stabilire il frame del workshop.
Maggiori informazioni qui:
http://la-cura.it/2016/04/22/report-da-erbe-indisciplinate/
Human Ecosystems and the Ubiquitous Commons at the STARTS program meetingSalvatore Iaconesi
Slides from the event:
On December 1st and 2nd 2015, at the European Parliament and Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, in Brussels, Belgium, Human Ecosystems and Ubiquitous Commons will take part “Innovation at the intersection of Arts, Sciences and Technology” event, organized by the STARTS program.
We will present the Human Ecosystems and the Ubiquitous Commons cases as the opportunity for creating value and inclusive, radical innovation through the collaboration between sciences, technologies and the arts, creating impacts for society, administrations and businesses.
more info at:
http://www.ubiquitouscommons.org/ubiquitous-commons-and-human-ecosystems-at-the-starts-program-in-brussels/
this is the presentation for the Ubiquitous Commons held at the NetFutures 2015 event in Brussels, during the CAPS concertation meeting.
more information here:
http://www.ubiquitouscommons.org/ubiquitous-commons-at-netfutures-2015/
here:
http://www.ubiquitouscommons.org/
and here:
http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/news/collective-awareness-platforms-sustainability-and-social-innovation-caps-consultation-meeting
Our session at the Brand Management and Communication Master at IED Milan, focused on Imaginary Brands, and the role of troublemakers in the creative industry
Il territorio si trasforma in un info-scape, una nuova geografia composta dalla realtà fisica, dai dati e dalle informazioni, dalle espressioni delle persone, e dalle relazioni che si instaurano tra persone, luoghi, oggetti e situazioni.
Cosa è e come è fatto un museo ubiquo?
Un museo diffuso sul territorio, in cui dati, informazioni, espressioni, emozioni, saperi ed esperienze si ricombinano fluidamente per rendere leggibile una nuova mappa: relazionale, informazionale, comunicazionale, performativa.
Art is Open Source at Visualize: materials and links
Some links and resources explored at the Visualize talk and workshop in Lecce, Italy, June 2014
more info here:
http://www.artisopensource.net/network/artisopensource/2014/04/17/micro-histories-of-cities-and-ubiquitous-commons-at-visualize-in-lecce/
The Incautious Porn presentation held at SSN2014 in Barcelona.
From the Abstract:
"We have radically changed our perception of what is public and what is private.
While using social networks, search engines and websites determining who has access to our information, our personal details, our habits and preferences is often complex or not easily accessible.
Each person's information is sold hundreds of times each day, while surfing websites and social media sites, with information passing from one provider to the other in ways that are subtle and non-transparent: data collected on one site may be used on other sited to sell us advertisements or to investigate on our lives.
On top of that, most people tend to interpret social media sites as new forms of public spaces, and it is fundamental for service providers' strategies that this perception is maintained, to promote our full disclosure, allowing them to collect even more data about ourselves.
We used the project Incautious Porn to investigate on this scenario, to explore the shifting and blurring of the boundaries of what we perceive as our privacy and as our private and public spaces.
Incautious Porn uses the operations of a fake company systematically invading our privacy (even to the point of performing simulated forms of blackmail) to collect enormous amounts of information which we have used to analyze this scenario.
In Incautious Porn art acts both as a sensor on the transformation of human societies and as a tool for analyzing its effects.
The effects of the Incautious Porn project and communication campaign have been massive, bringing it to the attention of a large, global, audience and, thus, allowing the research team to benefit from a large data set.
Furthermore, the actions of the blackmailing fake-company have been led using an ethical approach: no money was taken from people, and all their personal data has been preserved, also using the initiative as a testing lab for novel privacy and security preservation techniques, and as a campaign for awareness about the transformation of people's perception of contemporary private/public spaces."
more info at: http://www.artisopensource.net/projects/incautious-porn.html
Human Ecosystems - the relational ecosystems of cities for a new definition o...Salvatore Iaconesi
The Human Ecosystems project aims to define the concept of Ubiquitous Commons: the new public spaces in which we live in every day become a new common for the whole city to use, to communicate, collaborate, imagine and desire.
This is a concept we developed for the Helsinki City Library competition.
A near future concept for a library, in which innovative fruition, participation, collaboration and production models are engaged, and in which the library becomes an ubiquitous space for the production of knowledge.
EC(m1) the Cultural Ecosystem of Rome, at Cultur+
the cultural ecosystem of the city of Rome, usable by administrations, operators and citizens to explore the relations established through cultural activities in the city.
It has been presented at Porta Futuro, in Rome, during the Cultur+ event with the first municipality of the city of Rome.
What is the topography of the Innovation Ecosystem in Italy? Who are its main influencers? Who are the hubs? How does information circulate inside it? What are its influences from abroad?
How can we map the Innovation Ecosystem in real-time, using social networks?
AOS will be at the Internet Festival 2013 in Pisa to present the Italian Real-time Ecosystem of Innovation.
The project is part of the Human Ecosystems Project, for which we presented the Cultural Ecosystem of the City of Rome just a few days ago.
The Innovation Ecosystem captures from social networks the real-time data about how people discuss the various topics and modalities of Innovation, and uses Natural Language Analysis, Geo-coding, Network Analysis and Machine Learning techniques and technologies to infer the times, places and relations of Innovation.
These are the slides from the workshop we held at the Internet Festival.
More info here:
http://www.artisopensource.net/2013/10/04/innovation-ecosystems-internet-festival/
The Human Ecosystems project:
http://www.artisopensource.net/projects/human-ecosystems.html
created for the Remediating the Social conference in Edinburgh, the presentation narrates our efforts in researching innovative, peer-to-peer creative practices, and the story of the Open Source Cure as an example of our approach.
www.artisopensource.net
Hadj Ounis's most notable work is his sculpture titled "Metamorphosis." This piece showcases Ounis's mastery of form and texture, as he seamlessly combines metal and wood to create a dynamic and visually striking composition. The juxtaposition of the two materials creates a sense of tension and harmony, inviting viewers to contemplate the relationship between nature and industry.
This document announces the winners of the 2024 Youth Poster Contest organized by MATFORCE. It lists the grand prize and age category winners for grades K-6, 7-12, and individual age groups from 5 years old to 18 years old.
Brushstrokes of Inspiration: Four Major Influences in Victor Gilbert’s Artist...KendraJohnson54
Throughout his career, Victor Gilbert was influenced heavily by various factors, the most notable being his upbringing and the artistic movements of his time. A rich tapestry of inspirations appears in Gilbert’s work, ranging from their own experiences to the art movements of that period.
4. –Jorge Luis Borges
“The people who write novels have to take the infinite reality and
make it finite, give it an order. A novel has a beginning and an
end: for this it is a finite world. The tale, instead, is the only infinite
literary genre. A good tale is a story which does not have a
beginning and end. To describe the infinite, you sketch a trace of
it, which is also infinite. A tale is a trace of infinite.”
7. –Jorge Luis Borges
“The Library of Babel is an hallucinatory universe composed by a spatially infinite library
made from hexagonal halls, which chaotically collects all of the possible books of 410
pages, in which are all the possible permutations and combinations of letters and numbers.
!
In the library, all the possible books of 410 pages are present. Therefore it is present the
Book of Truth, all of its variants including its opposite, and human beings do not have any
way to distinguish one from the other:
!
« Starting from this incontrovertible premises, he dediced that the Library is total, and that its
shelves record all the possible combinations of the 25 alphabetical signs, all that we can
express, in all languages. Everything: the detailed story of the future, the autobiagraphies of
the archangels, the truthful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false
catalogues, the demonstration of the falsity of all these catalogues, the demonstration of the
falsity of the true catalogue [...] the translation of each book in all languages, the
interpolation of each book in all of the other ones. »”
10. –Orson Welles
“Once, a friend of a friend showed Picasso a Picasso. "No, it is
fake", answered the painter. The same friend got hold of another
presumed Picasso, and Picasso said that also this was a fake.
The friend took another one, but this was fake as well, said
Picasso. "But, Pablo", said the friend, "I have seen you paint this
with my own eyes." "I can paint a fake Picasso just like anybody
else", replied Picasso.”
13. –Jean Baudrillard
“Go and organize a fake hold up. Be sure to check that your weapons are
harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no life is in danger
(otherwise you risk committing an offence). Demand ransom, and arrange it so
that the operation creates the greatest commotion possible. In brief, stay close to
the “truth”, so as to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulation. But
you won’t succeed: the web of art)ficial signs will be inextricably mixed up with
real elements (a police officer will really shoot on sight; a bank customer will faint
and die of a heart attack; they will really turn the phoney ransom over to you). In
brief, you will unwittingly find yourself immediately in the real, one of whose
functions is precisely to devour every attempt at simulation, to reduce everything
to some reality: that’s exactly how the established order is, well before institutions
and justice come into play.”
16. –J.G. Ballard
“Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an
almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th
century.”
22. –Antonio Caronia
“TIt is not a random fact that futurology is developing in an historical moment such as the present one, in which
we are witnessing a radical mutation of our planet.
Wether we call it "post-industrial society", "information society", "technotronic age", "superindustrial society" or
"third wave", the progressive emergence of a new reality is clear: the situation of the planet is changing, in the
ways in which we work, in our lifestyles, in the social and political conflicts, in economy and love, in the
institutions and in the codes of behaviour.
Understanding this mutation is essential to direct it, to deal with the emergencies and with the effective risks of
catastrophe (environmental, social, economic) which will not address themselves. The work on the
understanding and forecasting of the future seems essential to adequately confront with all of these issues. At
the condition which this work does not generate a caste of super-technicians who assume for themselves the
right to decide – alone or together with the bureaucracies which govern us – everyone's destiny.
On the direction of this destiny the last word pertains to the people: there must be no doubt about this.”