What is the impact of a global event like the Architcture Biennale on the City of Venice? Which digital traces do people and organizations leave behind expressing in the city during the Biennale? It is possible to ethically harvest this data? How is it possible to transform it into a shared experience – a “computational commons” available in the new ubiquitous public space? How can cities as a whole – and the city of Venice in particular – have use this data and computation to design cultural programming, policies and participation patterns which can have positive impacts on people’s daily lives?



Human Architecture aims to address these questions through a workshop, a round table and a publication, uniting students, architects, creatives, artists, designers and policy makers in a collective reflection mixing arts, data and research.

The round table.

Human Architecture is an attempt to debate the topic of data, artificial intelligence and public space in the frame of Architcture Biennale, by setting new possible scenarios to coop with the transformation of the life of the city in times of ubiquitous technologies.The city of Venice leads the process from its Pavilion, by hosting the”realtime life of the city” through an installation directly inspired by Biennale’ theme of #FreeSpace.

The whole project is an action of listening to and with the territory, its emerging expressions, in which people can visualize and gain better understanding about the impact of this global event on the city, generating a new open-data source and materializing the data in the public space. The harvested data, and the possibility to ue it with Artificial Intelligence, will be the starting point to an open debate involving city administrators, cultural managers, artists and researchers.

Speakers (in alphabetic order)

• Luca Battistella, Innovation and Smart City councillor for Venice municipality;
• Paolo Cesarini,  Head of Unit of Media Convergence and Social Media (tbc);
• Irene Giglio, coordinator Architect and bioclimatic designeratMario Cucinella Architects;
• Salvatore Iaconesi and  Oriana Persico , Digital Culture theorists, artists and founders of the research center Human Ecosystems Relazioni;
• Fiorenza Lipparini, founding partner and director of research for PlusValue
• Pierluigi Sacco, professor of Cultural Economics at IULM University in Milan, director of FBK-IRVAPP research center in Trento, senior researcher at metaLAB (at) Harvard, and visiting scholar at Harvard University;
• Giovanni Vaia, professor of  Global Sourcing and Business Economics at Ca’ Foscari  University of Venice

Moderator:

• Simone Arcagni, New Media researcher and associate professor at University of Palermo

More information about the Roundtable

The Workshop

Open to students and phds from sciences, humanities, arts and design, to young creatives, professionals, artists and designers, the workshop is a trans-disciplinary and trans-media immersive experience to discover the nature of data as cultural artefacts of the contemporary.

At the heart of the workshop is the new open-data source generated by the Human Architecture installation since the Biennale inauguration, which will be used with AI techniques (Natural languag processing, computer vision, deep learning). Given back in the Venice Pavilion as an artwork, the harvested data become now an observable matter available to create researches, services, citizens projects and new practices in the public space.By analyzing the data, participants will work in groups to imagine collaboratively new concepts for installations, artworks, apps, services and interventions in the public space to transform the new data source into immersive experience designed to make sense and to raise awareness about the Biennale and its coexistence with the city and Venice’s inhabitants.

More information about the Workshop

Fill-in this form to participate to the workshop