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@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
<he...@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
he...@creative-catalyst.com
http://www.creative-catalyst.com
http://www.upstage.org.nz
https://mobilise-demobilise.eu
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he...@creative-catalyst.com
http://www.creative-catalyst.com
http://www.upstage.org.nz
https://mobilise-demobilise.eu
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