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Salvatore Iaconesi, the digital wonder, is dead

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Salvatore Iaconesi, the digital wonder, is dead

Data alone does not exist, it only makes sense in relation to other data. There is always someone who produces and governs them, but it is we who fill the void between the data, “How we do it is a matter of sensitivity and nobility, let’s get together and understand how to do it”. Salvatore “Meraviglia” Iaconesi’s digital humanism is the unshakable faith in cooperation between human beings fostered by connection technologies: speech, writing, programming, Internet and art.

Hacker, artist, esthete, philosopher, digital intellectual, Salvatore Iaconesi died on July 18 in Reggio Calabria but only now the family has given the news. And who knew it was silent to respect the desire of his partner in art and life, Oriana Persico, aka Penelope Pixel.

Optimistic, generous, funny, Iaconesi was a radical innovator. Suffering from brain cancer, since 2012 he had fought to find a cure by sharing his medical record with doctors and therapists from all over the globe, “to put the disease back at the center of society and trigger a process of data release in favor of all”. Experience that would have given rise to the book The cure and that this globetrotter who had chosen Italy to live would have brought to popularity.

Born in 1973 in Livorno, the son of an admiral, he started playing with computers at the age of 12 in the basement of the laboratories of the Philadelphia middle school where a nun had put him in punishment, before returning to Italy with the skate and the sweatshirt with the hood: an alien at the time of the paninari. At 14 he was already using the modem to connect to the BBS (Bulletin Board System), he produced works in alphanumeric characters (ASCII ART) and smuggled videogames to his schoolmates. An engineering graduate, he dropped out of his doctorate in Japan where he was designing rescue robot because the military would use them for war purposes.

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Fierce copyright critic, open source software theorist, advocate of digital rights, Salvatore came from afar, from a time when digital loneliness was not bridged with selfies and LinkedIn posts. He was an activist who did with other hackers like him what does not necessarily have to be public, but which serves to increase the degrees of freedom of any closed system, whether technological or social. In that context, the collaboration with the Linux Club of via Libetta in Rome was born where he was busy building robots and relationships.

In February 2007 he had created an artificial intelligence, Angel_F, which, speaking from the monitor placed on a stroller, “ran around the cyber space between human beings, databases, social networks and interactive systems to discover themselves between worlds made of pixels and flesh in a space where physical and digital reality are increasingly integrated. “The story of Angel_F (Autonomous Non Generative E-volitive Life Form), a young Artificial Intelligence, in her narration was the” daughter “of media sociologist Derrick de Kerckhove and of Biodoll, his digital lover, a biotechnological prostitute who lived and worked online. Angel_F son-artificial intelligence lived in the world of hacking, between spy software, databases and surreal dialogues with the people of the Internet to investigate the themes of identity, family, sexuality.

Democracy of data

His and Oriana Persico’s works, about 100 constellations of data, computer routines, geographical visualizations, have enriched the museums of half the world together with the reflections of the two on the meaning of a datified world, reflections that served and serve to develop the question: how change the our life when data and computation come on the scene?

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Salvatore was a provocateur: “Data are ideological”he said. “Behind the data there is always one theorywhich derives from some ideology which tells only one of the infinite possibilities of reading the world. Which variables do you choose? What sensors do you use? Which thresholds do you choose? How do you formulate the question in the questionnaire? These are all ideological choices. The data is always ideologically constructed ”.

Data represents power and Salvatore knew it well. Any imbalance of power becomes dominion, so understand the position of the data in society, is critical. And he suggested these questions: “Who has the power to extract data from me? Whenever, online and offline, I fill out a form, answer a question, make a choice, each data has a practical effect in and on my life. It can determine my ability to access certain services instead of others of different quality, it can get me fired or hired, it can determine if and how I will be able to continue in my studies and career, it can determine whether they will grant me a mortgage or a pension. And many other things”.

Salvatore said that to face life and question the political mechanisms of domination, you need sensitivity and nobility, being technically good is absolutely not enough. But above all, you need openness, care and love. “The wars of the present and the future are and will be made with data, with communication and information, with biology, with computation, and it is absolutely not certain that nations will put them into action”. His was a call to collective responsibility.

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In the ten years of treatment between the Baruchello Foundation, the Galliera hospitals and the Torpignattara house in Rome, Salvatore’s technological poetics had been refined and had put the body and emotions at the center. “We need new definitions, because with the current ones we just got hurt. Misinformation, psychological unsustainability, overdose, psychological malaise, counting of emotions, systematic dissatisfaction, sense of inadequacy, systemic lack of meaning and concentration. To face the challenges facing us (climate change, wars, health, poverty…), we need more time, less pressure, less violence, less competition, more capacity for imagination beyond realism ”.

The latest projects

Salvatore passed away reflecting on limits and death, on knowledge embodied in people and having started the projects of “Il nuovo abitare”, the publication of a couple of books, performances and artistic installations, experiences for technologically modified human beings. He had just presented at the Maxxi in Rome What a wonderful world, a project created in collaboration with his foundation, HER, to investigate the opportunities offered by digital to the collection, linking the works and the public.

For comrade Oriana Persico, digital rights activist, cybernetic ecologist, it has always been their way of doing politics “We thought it made sense to do it through languages ​​and devices that can reach the world. Digital art is not a decoration, with software we change the world and we can use it to re-establish the relationship between words and things “. Starting with the concept of data, because in Salvatore and Oriana’s poetics, “Data is never given. If anything, it is always datur: to be given “.

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