McFilter

A brief write-up of one of the two talks from the Share Festival that I made it to, more as a reminder to myself that I attended and to point to some of the related materials. I don't think I can do this session justice as it was all in Italian, and hence my understanding was sketchy.

It was a talk of two halves: the first given by Fabio Franchino and Giorgio Olivero from TODO Design; and then Massimo Banzi talking about Arduino.

Fabio Franchino and Giorgio Olivero

The guys from todo.to.it (nice URL!) were discussing some of the digital art that they've built, and showed some video of it in use.

For the launch of the new Fiat 500 they were commissioned to build a service that allowed the public to text words that they associate with the 500 to a special number. The words were then transformed into a swooping visualisation, popping up in real time as a backdrop to the launch event itself.

They've also been involved in some work for the Torino World Design Capital year (or World Domination Capital as they joked). This was a cool mixture of physical and digital where a microcosm of autonomous digital alien fish were projected onto Porta Palatino, a Roman gateway in central Turin. The windows and edges of the building formed the boundaries of the world that the fish inhabited, and looked cool swimming around on the surface of the ruin. A kind of animated, digital graffiti.

There's another video with more information about how it was created.

Massimo Banzi

This seemed to be mainly a discussion about the evolution of the Arduino prototyping board and the team who have developed it. As I've been following the Arduino's progress for a while now, there wasn't much more to glean than there had been last time I encountered Massimo.

I do like the label on their office doorbell though (that's a photo of it above).

And he pointed us at the Maker Bill of Rights and the Crafter Manifesto - two worthy ideals to which any hardware project should aspire.

The full session was filmed, and you can watch it here.