I’m sorry I have not written very much in the past two months but I’ve been busy with a new job and moving to another city…meanwhile, I’m working for a new version of the site, 1.1, to launch when I will publish my new little book that will summarize my thesis and one year of blogging.

In the meantime, I’d like to suggest you an event which will take place in Turin, 11-16 March: Toshare Festival.

The theme for the 2008 edition, which will dominate the contents of the conferences, round tables, workshops and performances, is the new materiality of digital arts. In the 90s the net art phenomenon addressed a need to reach beyond its own limits, drawing immateriality into the equation and threatening the real. Nowadays, society relates to technologies in a natural way by allowing the immaterial to become real. By exploring new, intelligent interaction between man and machine, this relationship has been completely integrated into everyday life. In the new millennium man and machine interact on the same level, shaping and changing the surrounding environment as they see fit. The Piemonte Share Festival is an international cultural event that probes the vast panorama of new technologies and investigates their applications in art and design.

Because of recent advances in digital fabrication technology, manufacturing is becoming a digital art and culture enterprise. The exciting advent of 3d printing, rapid prototyping, and rapid manufacturing is of profound importance to SHARE, for it bring the power to create physical objects to the techno-artist’s lab-bench, studio and atelier. It means that digital artists, whose work was once mostly virtual, can create in the actual.

I’m going to be there on saturday March 15th, if you plan to go there and want to meet me just leave a comment here or write me at this e-mail address..

SATURDAY March 15th 2008
Accademia Albertina, Via Accademia 6 – Torino

11:00 a.m.
King Kong Microplex, via Po 21 – Torino
Aha-Pre Camp
The biggest Italian community regarding digital art (http://www.ecn.org/aha) created as a part of AHA networking project – Activism-Hacking-Artivism (http://barcamp.org/aha), that meet to organize a possible future Italian ahaCamp, concerning hacktivism and art activism. The pre/ahaCamp, at the Share Festival in Turin is the first collective meeting for the members of the mailing-list.

02:00 p.m.
A Manifesto for Networked Objects
Now objects are on-line too – blogjects , blogging objects. Once “things” are connected to the Internet, they immediately become part of the relational system, thus improving and boosting the connections in the social network, and they finally define a new relationship between presence and mobility in the physical world. With a pervading Internet network objects are now “citizens” of our space, with the possibility to communicate and interact with them.
- Julian Bleecker, university professor University of Southern California

03:00 p.m.
Manufacturing Digital Art
In the 90s digital art was referring to immateriality, now the society has a more natural relationship with technologies, thus letting what is immaterial to become real, and experimenting new interaction processes between man and machine, that has completely become part of everyday life in the meantime. Manufacturing is also referring to digital art, where such equipment as Arduino and the explosive advent of 3D printers and devices for digital manufacturing led to integrate what is digital into what is real.
- Massimo Banzi, Arduino co-founder
- Fabio Franchino and Giorgio Olivero, artists

04:30 p.m.
Manufacturing Future Designs
Donal Norman presents his latest book, “Design del futuro”, 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.
- Donald Norman, Director of the Institute for Cognitive Science
- Bruce Sterling, writer
- Luca De Biase, publishing director of Nova24- Sole24Ore magazine
- Gino Bistagnino, university professor Politecnico di Torino

See you soon!

Tags: Innovation, Italy, Sharing, Technology