In other words


[...] Metaphors are maps that preserve relationships.
They help you understand one thing by borrowing your understanding of another. They let you understand something huge by understanding something small; something you can’t touch by something you can.
The better your maps, the deeper variety of things you can understand with what you already know. The deeper variety of things you know, the more your maps can teach you how the world is actually the same.
By walking more territory and bettering your maps, you can find constant insight into whatever you care about most.
These maps—your metaphors—help light the universe’s simple, unseen rules.
Maps comes with a warning: “The map”, they say, “is not the territory”. The menu is not the meal. The representation is not the thing it represents; some parts must be minimized to make others more visible.
Maps clarify by obscuring.
A metaphor—as a map—is like a set of many arranged bulbs in a dark forest: the trees flush with light hide those in shadow. There is no way to see that isn’t also blind.
But moving between many maps and metaphors changes your perspective, moves the bulbs and their arrangement: lighting this way then that. Slowly—and sometimes all at once—you see patterns in what you can’t.
Truth is a process; more verb than noun. [...]

excerpt from Aza Raskin wtf site


Two cats jumping on a Claude Monet painting

Tewxt2Image: Two cats jumping on a Claude Monet painting

Metaphors, maps, territories.


I stole Aza Raskin words, since they describe exactly the method I use since my first approach in classical studies: it's a method to approach phenomena, to name things.
Mapping the largest of contemporary territories, the web, I discovered Aza and the video he made for "Submarines", a song written by Zia Cora. He did it using only OpenAI.
I decided to download and install some code, figure out how to make it work on a stupid MacBookPro that doesn't let you switch to GPU to analyze big data. As a musician and IT consultant, I had already stumbled upon similar systems, aimed at generating and / or tagging music. Creating images from a text was really something else. The program elaborates a textual prompt (es "two cats jump on a Monet painting") and after some cycles of refinement, it comes out with an image. Something quite close to a new idea or concept, of what we have called, until now, image perception.

I works as Innovation consultant, digital archives expert, project manager and IT consultant. I deal with Information Technology, Art and Communication, Artificial Intelligence, Programming. As a plus, I play saxophone. A special focus on change management deriving from technological innovation in social and corporate sphere. 
I work on and with Art, a research that follow, or precede, me during my all life.

Chronicles

In 1985, a month before the Macintosh division closed its doors, for a lucky shot, I was living in San Francisco, studying with a master of metaphors, saxophonist Joe Henderson.

A little less by chance, since I was visiting Mauro Cuomo, who worked closely with Steve Jobs, I found one of the first Macintosh computers, graphical interface (it was not cheap, I swear) and mouse included. At that time, in the city of the Golden Gate and the largest Chinatown in the world, the atmosphere was electric; people enjoyed a sincere individual freedom that led anyone to relate to anyone, anywhere. It would be belittling to say that it was a legacy of the peaceful revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. It was something inherent in the choice to live there, including the Big One.

Years later, I would have confirmed this impression by Karen and David Crommie, when Simona and I were guests in their Victorian home in Haight & Ashbury. The people of San Francisco, at least up to a given historical moment, wanted to live and behave just as I had known them, regardless of any political or generational affiliation.

In 1984 Steve Jobs had recently bought the mouse patent from Doug Engelbart, the mouse inventor, when electronic calculators still occupied entire rooms to make calculations that a good laptop can do today. This Doug Engelbart presentation (1968), revised today, is a manifesto of beauty. In our day, Engelbart's vision of a world made better by computers has been forced to be revised. The documentary "The Social Dilemma" explains this quite well: algorithms are mostly used for purposes that do not concern the improvement of the human condition but the economic interest of a few. This is certainly not new. The good news is that technologies are less and less owned by someone and, thanks also to the new metaphors generated by the blockchain, increasingly decentralized.

WHAT DOES DEEP LEARNING MEAN?

In simple terms, deep learning is an add-on used to equip computers with human brain-like software architectures called artificial neural networks.

A Boat
in a Sea Storm



The way VQGAN works give us a tip to better understand how we humans see things, one more hypothesis about perception.
If while looking at a pic representing a white camel drinking in a pond, we were asked to describe what we see in the photo, how would we answer?
Some would say "a drinking camel", someone else "a white camel" or just "a camel".
This suggests the idea that our way of defining images is through "discrete" representations: camel, white, drink. Our visual reasoning is symbolic? Maybe, because we attribute meanings through "discrete" representations.
This symbolic approach allows us to understand the relationships between different words or symbols.
VQGAN is able to learn the visual parts of an image and their reciprocal relationships. On the right, you can see the video made with by prompting many different sentences on a San Francisco City trip.

I realized projects for Private Companies, Public Establishment, Associations and Museums, combining technology, art, music and artificial intelligence.

Three problems to solve

Paleolithic emotions

Personal relationships, social relationships, use of social networks: the inability to manage the deepest emotions leads people to be victims of technological devices. How can the relationship be reversed by ensuring that human beings make use of technological devices and not the opposite?

Disruption

The law of disruption is moving from being an initially technological element to a social problem. How can we compensate for the excessive power of subjects like Elonio Musketer if advanced technology is expensive and national governments often do not fund research?

Divine technologies

Humanity has advanced technologies that most of the time in daily life are invisible. Letting the knowledge of the technologies we use every day be the preserve of a few is bad business.

SOME WORKS OF MINE

Sound Installations

MAXXI Roma, NEAR, Sudden Sound Landscapes,
photography exhibition by Rino Barillari
"The King of Paparazzi".
Festival del Cinema di Roma 2018.
Draft on Academia.edu
Innovation through art/ifact



MUCIV, Museo delle Arti e Tradizioni,
BOCCAPORTI, History of Soundtracks.
Gruppo Editoriale Bixio
Roma, 2020. 
bixio.it


MAM Vittoria Colonna
"Interstizi Abitati"
Music Installations and Performances.
Pescara, Ital, 2019.
by Bart3Nununu







Music

LʼIronia e la musica
Music Composition Contest
1,2,3 minutes tracks only.
Francavilla, 2003, Italy.
Here some Giorgio Gargani scattered notes:
on Irony 1
on Irony 2
on Irony 3
a letter
graphic design (Orecchio Acerbo Editore)


Oggidiane, Invito a parlar d'altro
Auditorium Flaiano, Contemporary Music and Philosophy.
Pescara, 2001 Italy.
Giorgio Gargani speech (audio).


Fondazione Pastificio Cerere
Tactus Fugit Composing Sound
for Simona Marino, with Alessio Santoni.
Roma, 2013.
more info





Social Art / App

Cantiere di Voci Urbane, BACILLI
Headline for Cavour Art Festival.
Terni, 2010, Italy 
Draft on Academia.edu


Haveasync Project
WebApp for Music Sync.
Roma, 2007.
haveasync.com

Cinevox Record
"Abbiamo messo in scatola i brani vincenti”
An hidden homage to Piero Manzoni.
Roma 2006.
box 1
box 2
box 3
box 4
cinevox.it

Future Ducks, Fontana di Cascella.
An Iconic rubber ducks performance. 
Pescara, Italy, 2021. 
ducks.echi.it






"Cos'è questa baldoria termodinamica?" Kurt Vonnegut

Emerging Land / In Emergenza


The audio that propagates from the "sound mouths" of the Emerging Land Installation mixes the songs of the Humpback whales with the noise of nuclear explosions until reaching the Manifesto IN EMERGENZA composed of a chorus of mechanical voices which, inspired by Samuel Beckett, tries to lead in a dimension of overcoming the Anthropocene concept, establishing more profitable relationships with our Planet and all sentient and non-sentient beings who inhabit it. 

BlancaSnow

Click to see the video
BlancaGan

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