[NetBehaviour] salvatore iaconesi
Helen Varley Jamieson
helen at creative-catalyst.com
Mon Aug 8 12:11:33 CEST 2022
grazie roberta xx
On 02.08.22 18:41, roberta buiani via NetBehaviour wrote:
> Hi all,
> coming out of my lurking mode. I usually don’t post. I tend to be
> super slow and quite shy about almost anything I write, but
> Salvatore’s departure has really shaken me and sometimes I find that
> writing helps a bit.
> I am pasting below the in-memoriam note I just sent to Leonardo. this
> is my perspective as a fellow Italian who worked several times with
> him and Oriana from a distance, but developed a solid friendship that
> I cherished for many years.
> last time I talked to him was in March. little did I know it would be
> the last time.
>
> peace.
> Roberta
>
> -----------
>
> Writing to celebrate the life and work of Salvatore Iaconesi is not
> easy. It is not easy because his body of work is so extensive and
> diverse that one would never have enough space to fit it in a few
> pages; it is not easy because it extends over, it is entangled, and it
> is shared with a formidable network of collaborators and friends,
> which he and his life and artistic partner Oriana patiently and
> passionately built for many years. But it is especially not easy
> because his departure is hard to accept. It has been a slow departure,
> during which he planted many seeds for future work and activities,
> made new friends, established new collaborations. “Salvatore Iaconesi
> is alive” announces the website of HER: She Loves DATA, the cultural
> research centre he and Oriana had founded in 2013. Still, it is
> difficult to accept that his body, and his wit are no longer with us.
>
> Salvatore Iaconesi’s work was eclectic, ranging from projects
> supporting remix and opensource culture, to experiments with AI and
> hybrid marriages between human and non-human, community data mining
> and data sharing, collective performances, pedagogical initiatives,
> and much more. No matter where and by whom his projects were carried
> on, they were all conceived in the spirit of community participation
> and co-creation involving many actors, human and non-human; they could
> be remixed and expanded, recombined and played with.
>
> I met Salvatore in 2010 at the SHARE festival in Torino. The editorial
> project he and Oriana presented gave me a taste of the spirit that
> characterized their future projects: a drive to reveal the narrow
> minded, exploitative and extractivist rules imposed by institutions
> and those who retain power, and a desire to rectify these rules by
> mobilizing a network of individuals and communities with whom to
> re-think and find solutions for these rules. REFF (RomaEuropa Fake
> Factory) became a fake cultural institution and an editorial project
> in response to the exploitative rules imposed by the institutions
> promoting a funding contest. Hopeful applicants had to agree to
> transfer any ownership of their work to the funding agency. The latter
> could then re-use, remix and republish said work. However, no project
> already containing remake, mashups, and remix would be admitted. The
> response was an edited book collecting essays, artworks, and editorial
> experiments that exposed this rather hypocritical and contradictory
> position and enacted the very practices that had been forbidden by the
> contest.
>
> When I first invited Salvatore and Oriana to Toronto in 2014, they had
> been launching a data visualization project titled Human Ecosystems
> (HE) in Rome (Italy) and Sao Paulo (Brazil). The project encouraged
> members of the public to reflect on and visualize the city’s human
> geographies and affective flows, by capturing information from social
> networks. Instead of just collecting data from users and artfully
> laying them on a map, the goal here was to achieve a new and more
> reflexive understanding of the ways in which different cultures
> express opinions, emotions and affect. Most importantly, it sought to
> reveal how cities’ relational ecosystems are formed and which roles
> different people assume in their communities (influencers, hubs,
> experts, amplifiers, bridges among different communities etc...). This
> was made to empower the public to view data as relational agents
> rather than discrete bits ready to be collected to create more
> surveillance. Together, during a few (and very snowy) days, we worked
> with students at the Transmedia Lab (York University) and the members
> of the public at ArtSci Salon, our art and science collective, to
> build an affective map of the city. Even the very skeptical City of
> Toronto’s Open Data team was willing to listen.
>
> Freeing data from the grip of institutional and corporate power, from
> their extractivist agendas, from their techno-solutionist patina of
> fake neutrality was at the core of Salvatore and Oriana’s work. The
> main mission of their cultural research centre is to use data and
> computation to create new realities that would think past using,
> exploiting, and depleting data and instead rethink the configuration
> of, and the relationships being established in the neighborhood, the
> city and the environment.
>
> The reappropriation, repurposing, and re-vitalizing of data had
> profound political significance for Salvatore. They also resonated
> personally. In 2012, following his diagnose of brain cancer, he found
> himself trapped in the same situation he was rallying against with his
> art. Now a patient, he was stripped from his individuality, and found
> himself caught in a medical system intent to measure, visualize, and
> examine his condition only, one not seeing him as a whole person: “the
> patient is a strange being … entirely made of data: blood exams,
> images of body parts, lab values, diagnoses”. He describes his
> experience with the medical system as a ritual: “your body,
> personality, and social connections disappear, and are replaced by
> data and images”. In the medical ritual Iaconesi was caught in,
> everything is obsessively quantified and passed through body scans,
> software, and digital models. He had suddenly become a bundle of data,
> over which he seemed to have no control. But even that resulting
> disembodied entity had been taken away from him. In fact, to add
> insult to injury, all data collected from his body had been stored in
> a proprietary format impossible to share.
>
> La Cura became a long-term life journey that extended well beyond
> medical treatment or medical data sharing. His rebellion against the
> reductive constraints imposed by the medical technologies, and against
> an inflexible and impersonal medical system, materialized into the
> release of his medical data online. He turned to the community at
> large to seek help, solidarity and comfort. His request was drawn by a
> need to open up “cancer’s “source code” as a biopolitical rite of
> healing, aimed at redefining concepts such as “disease” and “cure” “…
> to re-appropriate the condition of being ill, and to foster a society
> that recognizes disease as a complex experience — one felt by social
> bodies as much as individual bodies”.
>
> His story far exceeds issues of information gathering and
> dissemination; issues of disease and control. This act of sharing was
> not meant to disseminate information with the purpose of receiving
> more. It was not meant to acquire knowledge to be used for his
> exclusive benefit. His act of sharing opened to a precarious and
> indeterminate space. By turning to a community made up of close
> friends and complete strangers, he welcomed and eventually recovered
> human and affective elements that had been lost in the extreme
> operation of reduction he was enduring during his experience within
> the medical system.
>
> Maria de la Bellacasa explains that caring is “everything that we do
> to maintain, continue and repair our world, so that we can live in it
> as well as possible”. Caring also means becoming aware that “studying
> and representing things have world-making effects”. It is a way of
> thinking and speaking beyond what we assume to be some social and
> “politically” useful research. La Cura evolved into many other
> projects, all initiated with the same spirit of caring, using data
> creatively and for social causes: “the cure does not exist if not in
> society”.
>
> Last time I had the pleasure to collaborate with Salvatore, and last
> time I heard his voice was in March 2022, during an interdisciplinary
> series of talks, workshops and events that I co-created with my
> colleague Elena Basile titled: “Who Cares? Sustaining relations of
> health beyond the time of crisis”. We invited Salvatore and Oriana and
> their team to facilitate a Data Meditation, because we knew that their
> approach to data to evoke self-reflexivity, empathy and mutual
> sharing, instead of impersonal and mechanical interaction would break
> the cycle of apathy that had characterized so many conferences and
> talks (including the one about health care!) during the pandemic.
> During one of the roundtables, coincidentally scheduled exactly 2
> years after the beginning of many lockdowns around the world,
> Salvatore shared his extraordinary experience of being in a hospital
> just before Italy shut down: “The Hospital was shutting down.
> Surgeries were stopped, people were being sent back home. But the
> pandemic was hitting full strength in the realm of information and
> data too. People were massively exposed to horrible things about the
> pandemic, completely and carelessly fed with information about people
> who were sick, dead and dying, with no care for their fragilities…The
> use of data and information at the time was truly violent and
> careless. It was a very violent experience. We decided that we should
> do something about it. That’s when we started developing these new
> rituals where these data and information are not forces that divide
> people but unite people and bring them together. That’s the origin of
> what we call Nuovo Abitare” .
>
> The “Nuovo Abitare” resonated greatly with our desire to bring
> together a community of users, artists, scientists and caregivers to
> reflect beyond the cruelty of a tired health care system and its
> triage based culture. Importantly, it gave us hope that this new
> concept could one day be adopted by many.
>
> I want to remember Salvatore Iaconesi with these words, because I
> think they not only encapsulate the profound sense of justice and care
> that drove his work, but also his optimism and hopeful thinking, in
> the face of the violence imparted by and conveyed through data, in
> spite of collapse due to climate change, wars, political unrest,
> medical emergencies etc..
>
> It is certainly not a chance that the logo that stands out on the site
> of HER: She Loves Data is a heart. A heart which will grow larger
> thanks to the way his thinking and his generosity touched and inspired
> many of us. Even though his body is no more, his legacy is here to stay.
>
>
>
>> On Aug 2, 2022, at 11:59 AM, Alan Sondheim via NetBehaviour
>> <netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Everyone,
>>
>> I was hoping someone would say something; I didn't know him, but from
>> his work at Furtherfield, I felt his thinking resonated with my own
>> the strongest in the show.
>> There was no bio for him in the back; was that his desire?
>>
>> Best, Alan, and Marc, I hope you're doing well. At the moment
>> speechless, too much pain everywhere. And thank you everyone for this
>> list and Furtherfield -
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 2, 2022 at 4:21 AM Helen Varley Jamieson
>> <helen at creative-catalyst.com> wrote:
>>
>> last week my copy of "frankenstein reanimated" arrived & i
>> immediately turned to page 175 and read patrick lichty's
>> interview with salvatore, about "la cura", the collaborative
>> artistic project to open source a cure for the brain cancer that
>> he had just been diagnosed with (the interview was made in 2012).
>>
>> salvatore died a couple of weeks ago, on 18 july. has this sad
>> news already come through on netbehaviour? maybe i missed it ...
>> i am remembering salvatore's smile and laugh, his warmth and
>> generosity; and the cyberformance that myself, francesco
>> buonaiuto and miljana perić created for "la cura" (which was only
>> performed once, for salvatore & oriana, in 2012 or 13 & now
>> exists only as fragments on my hard drive).
>>
>> r.i.p. salvatore - i am glad to have known you!
>>
>> h <3
>>
>> --
>>
>> helen varley jamieson
>>
>> helen at creative-catalyst.com
>> http://www.creative-catalyst.com
>> http://www.upstage.org.nz
>> https://mobilise-demobilise.eu
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> NetBehaviour mailing list
>> NetBehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org
>> https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> /=====================================================/
>> /directory http://www.alansondheim.org tel 347-383-8552
>> //email sondheim ut panix.com <http://panix.com/>, sondheim ut
>> gmail.com <http://gmail.com/>/
>> /=====================================================/
>> _______________________________________________
>> NetBehaviour mailing list
>> NetBehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org
>> https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> NetBehaviour mailing list
> NetBehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org
> https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
--
helen varley jamieson
helen at creative-catalyst.com
http://www.creative-catalyst.com
http://www.upstage.org.nz
https://mobilise-demobilise.eu
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.netbehaviour.org/pipermail/netbehaviour/attachments/20220808/a921e5af/attachment.htm>
More information about the NetBehaviour
mailing list