Initial Ideas¶

Intro

This is the first idea i had for my final project, which eventually changed! Anyway, I like to keep it here because i think it represents the path I’ve been through the Master. If you’re lazy and you just want to skip to the last part, just go here: https://niente010.github.io/MDEF_website/project/jaleo

ooorganismooo¶

playground¶

ooorganismooo: manifesto¶

The goal of ooorganismooo is to encourage the research and development of independent technologies with the purpose of understanding and disseminating the study of ecology, in addition to addressing the climate crisis.

Some of the questions that led to the formation of ooorganismooo are:

why is it so easy to imagine huge resources being spent on implanting chips inside the human brain? why instead is it so absurd to think of investing the same amount of resources in studying our environment?
who decided that creating a metaverse was more important than trying to communicate with other organisms?
why do we give for granted that the price and risks we pay for technological advancements are worth it? who decided that this was the right way for humanity to “progress”?
do we really want to leave these responsibilities in the hands of companies whose only interest is to make a profit and maintain the power they hold?

Some questions ooorganismooo wants to investigate are:

is it possible to reduce the distance between the technologies we use and their ecological infrastructures? What differences in the design enhance this entangled relationship?
can we rethink technologies in such a way that instead of conflicting with our relationship with nature, they help us understand and respect it?
can we create tools with the purpose of having a more symbiotic relationship with other living species?
can we create new narratives to expose the ecological crisis in a way that stimulates a collective response to it?

ooorganismooo aims to be an interdisciplinary group where specialization gives way to the contamination of knowledge, spaces, and applications.

ooorganismooo believes in the narrative and aesthetic power of art and design to connect with scientific research to spread these scenarios and make more accessible, avoiding academic and corporate gatekeeping.

The strategies used by ooorganismooo include active listening, critical thinking and rapid prototyping, while the tools are open source, following a bottom-up strategy.

Before a technological revolution, ooorganismooo believes that the priority should be to offer a cultural revolution, listening to alternatives to today’s reality in order to solidify the foundations for an immediate future.

References

[previous work related to the topic] - https://github.com/niente010/GAIA - https://nicolobaldi.com/SPIRA - https://niente010.github.io/MDEF_website/term1/DesignStudio01/#pulse

the plan¶

ooorganismooo starts from first-person research of the participants. By mapping different environments operating in the field of art, design, science, and technology, the goal is to attract the attention of anyone interested in peeking out from their professional background to explore a collective confrontation on the selected themes. From there, the goal is to move from conversations to practicality, stimulating designs and speculations. It is important to practice of altering the context, in order to encourage dialogue and break out of respective filters: for example, it would be interesting to explore a rotation of the spatial context during the diverse activities.

update_05-05-24¶

I recently understood that an ecological vision does not necessarily means to a vision on ecology. It is a vision that does not pretend to fully understand every perspective on which the gaze rests, but rather one that allows to perceive the subject-object with fascination, curiosity and humility, with the intention of sharing this appreciation with others. This vision fits perfectly with the open-source, DIY ideology, which main purpose is to disseminate knowledge for a collective learning, rather than to make it property.

At the heart of the ecological vision is materiality, the medium of entry into the guts of the subject. Materiality is the first step towards proximity. Once inside, the experience then spreads to the plane of abstraction, releasing concepts, speculations and possible scenarios. This happened with GAIA, which core has been the prototyping process itself, as engaging as it was unique: priority was given to the interaction and the practical study of the material, and to its possible modifications. GAIA itself is a project of physical and material hacking, and a circuit bending process.

This brings us back to another key point of the ecological vision: care. In fact, this approach requires great attention to the subject-object, a relationship of intimacy, emphasised precisely by the tangibility of the process. Results arise from experimentation, whether organised in advance or not, and from dedicating time and resources to these relationships.

This experimentation leads to unexpected destinations, the path of which can only be understood by looking back. At this moment, looking back, i see the people, the spaces, the experiences that were created during this journey, and i see the thread that unites them.

deep shit

update_12-05-24¶

In the end, ooorganismoo, will not be what it was intended to be. It will, however, be something else. Something that was not programmed and defined by a manifesto or a plan.

ooorganismooo today represents my attempt to investigate the materiality of artefacts, somewhere between oblivious and naive discovery and technical understanding and proficiency. A combination of approaches that, although unstable, i believe is very powerful.

What i would like ooorganismooo to be for the end of the master’s degree is a collection of these discoveries that are seemingly unrelated but are in fact linked by the approach that led to their rebirth. They all represent the will to explore the inside of things in order to appreciate it, to learn from it, and possibly to alter it. This methodology has sometimes led to the exploration of themes such as the relationship between ecology and technology, in others to the sphere of sound, or rethinking the concepts of error, glitch and unpredictability.

The approach is alchemical, tangible, practical, curious, flexible. And it was from this approach that the network I was struggling so hard to create was born. Out of the blue I found myself within a spectrum of events, people, spaces that influenced my vision and without even realising it, the project itself. I found myself modifying computers, toys, video cameras, jamming together, meeting people and communities interested in hacking processes and the potential of sound.

For this reason, i believe that today ooorganismooo represents its vision through this research on the re-appropriation of the potential of artefacts, analysing and exploring them through an organic and ecological vision. The outcome is a collection of hybrid results that aspire to both a speculative and functional interpretation. The heart of the project lies in the process of discovery and reworking, redesigning the functions and architectures of these items, which are treated more as organisms with which to share care and attention than as defined passive tools, whose functions are beyond our reach.