Facce: a digital poster for the exhibition

The opening of the exhibition "Facce. I molti volti della storia umana" will soon take place in Padua (14th February 2015), so I started to work also on dissemination tools, trying to focus on new media potentialities.

While the real communication experts will take care of the traditional promotion (posters, handbills, etc...), I would like to use the opportunity to test different methods.

Basically I am just developing a digital poster, which should be an reminder of the exhibition (with some essential informations) and, at the same time, an interactive showcase for the photos that the people sent us (and will send us) for our crowdsourcing campaign regarding the pareidolia phenomenon.
I think that the best way to realize this idea is to compile an app for Android, so that it will be accessible to many different smartphones. I designed the app to contain a WebViewer, linked to an address in our server, in which I uploaded an interactive gallery of images.
My first step has been a fast search in internet to find all the tools I was needing to develop my app, of course checking the licenses and choosing the open source software (an the simplest ones, being a newcomer in such field).
As first I focused on the gallery and I chose an MIT licensed  jQuery tool (jssor), with which I build this slideshow:

Than I looked for a software to develop my app and (thanks to +Michele Mazzurana) I came across another MIT licensed software, MIT App Inventor. This software has two main advances: it is based a GUI (very simple) and it does not require an emulator to test the work (if you have an Android device, you can directly connect it with your project).
Here is a screenshot of the direct link between the software and the mobile:

Direct link between MIT App Inventor and the mobile

If you want to test the app, you can download it here. Please notice that to visualize the gallery you will need an internet connection, so (depending on your contract) your provider could put additional costs (no problem if you have a flat rate or if you use free wifi access).
I hope this post was useful, have a nice day!

PS
If you have pictures regarding the pareidolia effect, you can upload them on the FaceBook page of the exhibiotn "Facce" (do not forget to write the author, the title and the license, for the credits). Day by day the pictures will be uploaded in the gallery of the app.

FACCE, a crowsourcing campaign to build a real open source exhibition

Hi all,

like I wrote in this post, we are working to organize an open source exhibition in Padua for October 2014. In our intentions the concept "open" will be applied to different aspects of the event:

1.  The scientific work will be performed using just Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) and, when possible, the exhibition will be staged with open hardware devices
2. All the produced material (3D models, images, software, hardware) will be released with open licenses (CC-BY)
3. When necessary, part of the budget will be collected with specific crowdfunding campaigns, connected with minor projects
4. We will try to obtian some material for the exhibition with crowdsourcing campaigns, asking people to release the material with open licenses

Today I'd like to explain the 4th point and start one of this crowd-sourcing campaign, which will be also a social experiment to see the potentiality of this medium for cultural aims.

One of the session of the exhibition will be dedicated to pareidolia, which is a "... psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant..." (quote Wikipedia). Obviously we are interested in this matter as it is also related with faces, being this figure one of the most common subject which people sees in different contexts. In this regard Leonardo da Vinci, thinking to pareidolia a device for painters, wrote: "if you look at any walls spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and various groups of hills. You will also be able to see divers combats and figures in quick movement, and strange expressions of faces, and outlandish costumes, and an infinite number of things which you can then reduce into separate and well conceived forms" (1). Of curse pareidolia in not only a matter for artists and also normal people are able to see "beyond the image" (from greek παρά είδωλον). Here below you can see one of the most famous picture in this sense, the "Face on Mars" which the NASA spacecraft Viking I took on the red planet surface.

Photo from the Viking I spacecraft (Public Domain)

As you see pareidolia is a phenomenon which involves different aspect of human life, form art, in which is often used intentionally like in the paints of Giuseppe Arcimboldo...

L'ortolano o Ortaggi in una ciotola G. Arcimboldo (Public Domain)

 ... to psychology, where some of the images of the Rorschach test are perceived by patients as human faces (2)

the seventh blot of the Rorschach inkblot test (Public Domain)

... to  religion, like in this XIX century picture, in which some people sees the face of Jesus...

Swedish anonymous XIX century (Public Domain)

... and here we are to the meaning of this post: we need your help to collect pictures of different subjects in which is possible to see faces. In other words, with this post we want to start a crowdsourcing campaign on this topic to set up a special session of the exhibition in which we plan to show your contributes with a digital installation. To help us you can upload your picture on the exhibition FaceBook page (soon we will open also other channels). Do not forget to give your work the credits (that will be presented with the picture):

TITLE OF THE PICTURE (optional)
YOUR NAME (necessary)
THE LICENSE (necessary)

We suggest you to use a Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC-BY 4.0), but also other form of open license are accepted. Here is the official CC website to choose a license.

As an example, below you can see my personal contribute: the dashboard of my car.

Dashboard (Luca Bezzi, CC-BY 4.0)

We count on your help! Have a nice day and thanks in advance!

Bibliography

(1) Da Vinci, Leonardo (1923). John, R; Don Read, J, eds. "Note-Books Arranged And Rendered Into English". Empire State Book Co.

(2) Alvin G. Burstein, Sandra Loucks (1989). Rorschach's test: scoring and interpretation. New York: Hemisphere Pub. Corp. p. 72. ISBN 978-0-89116-780-8.

“FACCE. I molti volti della storia umana”, an open source exhibition

It's been more than one year since the conclusion of the Taung Project and many things have happened. Today I want to post something related with one of the most important derivations of this project: the exhibition "FACCE. I molti volti della storia umana" (en "Faces. The many aspects of human history"). The event is organized by the Anthropological Museum of the University of Padua, from an idea of Dott. Nicola Carrara, and it is a cooperation between the Museum, the University, Arc-Team and Antrocom NPO (the same actors of the Taung Project). I will not go into details of the exhibition, due to the fact it is still a work in progress being its opening planned for October 2014, but I post the preliminary presentation we did during the European Academic Heritage Day 2013 ("Down the Rabbit hole", backstage of knowledge production).

 As you ague form the title, the main topic of the exhibition is the human face, which, in the words of the French photograper Gisele Freund, is also the "the only part of the body to be exposed naked to the first comer." Actually the thematic sessions planned for the event are six:

1. "Guardiamo in faccia la diversità umana" (en "Let's face human diversity"), which is dedicated to human evolution and will take advantage of the forensic facial reconstructions of the principal actors in the phylogenetic human three, preformed by the Brazilian digital artist +Cícero Moraes.

2. "Una faccia, una razza?" (en "One face, one race?"). This section will show the division of mankind into races proposed by various authors in the 700-800, which will have more deleterious effects in the first decades of the 1900s. Nowadays, thanks especially to human genetic studies, we can say that the division of Homo sapiens into races is just a cultural and social construction, without any sense in biology.

3.  "Una faccia, un destino?" (en "A face, a fate?"), in which the main topic will be physiognomy, analyzed from the artistic aspects of the XVI century till the pseudoscientific approach in the XIX century criminology in connection with phrenology, another famous pseudoscience, well-accepted in the same period.

4. "Con quella faccia un po' così" (quote from the popular Italian song "Genova per Noi" of the singer Paolo Conte), a session in which will be proposed different forensic facial reconstructions of historical personalities connected with the city of Padua.

5. "Ma che faccia fai?" (Italian popular expression). This part of the exhibition will be dedicated to human facial expressions.

6. "Dalla faccia alla maschera: il volto simbolico" (en "From the face to the mask: the symbolic aspect"). The final session will take advantage from the contribute of the Museo Internazionale della Maschera, Amleto e Donato Sartori and will show the symbolic aspect of the face: the mask.

The contribute of Arc-Team to the exhibition, in addition to the forensic facial reconstructions that will be created by our expert (+Cícero Moraes), will cover the touristic fruition of the event through scientific interactive installations mainly based on Computer Vision (from Augmented Reality to Facial Recognition and Motion Capture). In the presentation you can see some of the projected prototype, as well as some sources of inspiration (e.g. the movie "A scanner Darkly") some examples from the software we will use (e.g. Openframeworks). 

As you probably guessed from the title of this post, the main peculiarity of this event will be the fact that it can be considered an "open source exhibition", maybe the first of its kind, due to the fact that all the produced material will be released under the therms of the Creative Commons Attribution, which is a license approved for free cultural works. Moreover open techniques will be used also to collect material for the exhibition itself, with specific crowedsourcing campaigns, while part of the budget will be probably collected wit crowdfunding. I will have time to post more news about these last two topics, by now I just hope that you'll enjoy the presentation below (like always, to navigate just click on the image and use the spacebar to browse the slides).

For a better visualization, click here