domenica 4 luglio 2010

ARCHITECHNOBRAIN




Abstract: Architechnobrain is an interactive bio-sensing installation. Imaginary sketches recombine elements of an indecip
herable design composing a complex architecture, similar to the “city of the mind”.

Keywords: Interactive Multimedia Design, Mind Architectures, Brain’s Activity, BCI, Generative audio-video contents, Invisible Cities, Technobrain.


Architechnobrain creates imaginary thin cities composing random architectures based on mind’s activity in a virtual audio-visual environment.
The audience dresses a friendly device similar to common headphones. This brain computer interface connected via bluetooth with the computer will interact with the brain’s activity of the user measured in levels of attention and meditation. Thus composing in real time the 3D environment of sketched virtual spaces (in the following pictures) and an electronic sound environment generated by the intensity of the mind’s activity of the audience.
Architechnobrain is the experimental research on hacking technologies crossing the widest range of media to find the evolutionary path which will bring towards technological singularity.


Technical description:
The interactive system is composed by Neurosky Mindset (Brain Computer Interface) connected via bluetooth to the computer. Two artisanal softwares made by APIs are used to generate the interactive audio-visual environment.


sabato 3 luglio 2010

TICK ~ Telecom Italia Culture Killer

In 2005, the italian technological pride IDII, Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, got to close because the Telecom Italia ownership decided not to renew the founding.
IDII was the graduate school researching and prototyping in the field of Interaction Design, operating in the town of Ivrea, in Italy.
The Master program in Interaction Design operated from 2001 being involved in many projects that later became base-structures for the development of interactive multimedia art and interaction design.
The caliber and the carry of IDII's research signed a relevant revolution in the field of digital and electronic media and devices. Wiring and Arduino, the micro-controllers used nowadays by a wide number of people and artists and designers through all over the world were prototyped properly in Ivrea.
Processing, the graphic software prototyping environment (project started at MIT of Boston), that today is developing in a gorgeous web community sharing tons of code, was developed in the IDII.
Other interesting projects came out from IDII are, for instance, CICCIO or the Curiously Inflated Computer Controlled Interactive Object and the Interaction Design Primer design manual.
A so interesting center for digital and electronic culture was properly killed by Telecom Italia that invest money on later discovered dirty business in the Stock Exchange.
Erase a so wide potential of culture means to erase the future innovation of a Country. Thanks to a nefarious conduct of the political entourage both-sided, acting most of times through the shadows of corruption and personal interests, Italian Government cuts the feed and the financing of Culture, tracking the soil for a cultural desert which will be more and more difficult to transform back in a "flowered field".
There's still an "oasis" on the web where is possible to appreciate the "beauty" of a project such as IDII: http://interactionivrea.org/it/index.asp
To watch that website crystallized on a 2006 capture, with no "life" anymore, represents a waste of energies and "virtualities" that maybe will not be recovered for ever.
Interaction Design Institute Ivrea alumni have set up, after the experience in Ivrea, the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, an excellence center for research in new media technologies, obviously well founded by the Danish Ministry of Culture and other private companies.
Italian Ministry of Culture instead decided , less then one month ago, the cut to Culture financing giving the blame to the international economical crisis.
Different ways of thinking and acting.
This document would be the wish for the re-found Culture in Italy, the only way to solve then all the other social problems this Country is meeting under a literally anti-democratic government.