Squatting Supermarkets

Describe your idea and concept of your work in relation to the festival outlines:

Squatting Supermarkets is a platform. Mental and technological. It is an attitude suggesting the use of several technologies to create added spaces to reality: for critique, expression, action. The idea was born when different paths merged. Some of them were extremely physical, such as the Superfluo,(Superfluous, but also super-fluorescent), a supermarket in Rome we used to go to because its first floor had been squatted with a joyful action built on music, useless things and queer performances, rediscovering human relations and creative and sustainable forms of economy, while on the other floors amazed people went about their regular shopping. Other paths were extremely immaterial, and featured technologies that had been used to reinterpret the web, search engines, information flows offered by governments a social networks. Other ones were designed to invade bodies and minds with new forms of sensation and communication, creating brand new forms of identity , or bringing back old ones, reimagined in the surreal worlds of virtual realities. It is NeoRealismo Virtuale, (NeRVi,Virtual NeoRealism), the creation of digital immaterial spaces superimposed on bodies and architectures. Places for narratives, performance, conscience and knowledge flows. Two goals. On one side, to systematize practices and technologies, creating an open framework that can be used and evolved to instantiate augmented reality (or, better, Virtual NeoReality) spaces, connecting bodies and information, implementing accessible, relational and natural interaction schemes. On the other side, to act, starting multi-author, diffused, emergent narratives.

What kind of communication approach do you use?

Squatting Supermarkets combines several platforms: iSee, an iPhone application used to create information and communication systems localized on logos and symbols; Ubiquitous Publishing, a set of open technologies that can be used to create location and architecture based contents, accessible directly from the places that we walk through by using mobile phones and devices, together with simple, affordable augmented reality techniques: architettura rel:attiva, DpSdC, and OneAvatar, a series of technological platforms that connect bodies and architectures to the internet and to virtual worlds. Because of the complexity of the project, it has been presented in different ways with different meanings in relation to the context of the various areas and reference points of use. Squatting Supermarkets is based on a trans-disciplinary research approach (applying perspectives from design, economics, art, communication, and information technology). From an artistic point of view it is a performative installation which has taken different forms in each instance it has been presented. For the community of activists / institutions / civil society organizations it is both tool and a practical method of contemporary critical consumption. For producers it is an service and communication infrastructure that enables new business models, the squatting of physical infrastructure and intangible places of consumption.

What are in your opinion concrete benefits to the society because of your communication?

What/Where/When/Why.
We live in a world that is filled with codes, images and symbols that power dresses in signifies, visions, expectations, desires, politics, strategies. Power owns codes, languages and practices, aiming to extend control and to provide people with packaged interpretations, boxed desires, synthetic ethics, and plastic ambitions. Turning from menace to ex-menace, digital technologies and communications are being transformed into further space for codification. Creating new public spaces, limiting private ones, defining access policies by offering services and infrastructures. And, most of all, formalizing acceptable critical practices: from call centers to twitter: “stop speaking to operator 428! From now you can speak directly to our CEO! You have 140 characters for it! Think about it, he even answers….” Critique must move on. Changing languages, places, methodologies, practices. It must go back into space, bodies, objects, inside architectures, along the paths that we walk along in our daily lives. It must disseminate codes and symbols, touching visceral, behavoural and reflexive domains. Fortunately, the world cannot just be reduced into rigid and predefined codes, and there will always be spaces, cracks, interstices between a code and the other. It has been true with architecture, in the buildings of abandoned industries. Psychologically, with the TAZ. Physically, with squats, raves, occupations. And in contents, with subvertising, detournements, surrealism, fakes. Action must take place in between the codes and create signs, words, shapes, flows.

Recontextualizing everything, superimposing meanings, interpretations and spaces to add further ones, out of control. Losing the desire to establish dialogic dynamics with power, and speaking over, beside and below it. Technology offers opportunities to generalize squatting approaches, making them accessible and diffused. To adopt squat as a methodology: identifying un-coded spaces, make them accessible, use them as a communication, action and expression platform. Reality++ We can add elements to reality. And interpret others. Mobile technologies, SPIMES, computer vision techniques allow creating connections between physical and information worlds. These techniques have been used in the past by commercial and military industries, and allow taking information directly onto bodies, objects and architectural spaces. Pattern and image recognition, augmented reality, GPS, sensors, smart tags can be used to tag things and places, creating bridges with the data and communications we want to associate to them. Through ubiquitous applications implemented on mobile phones and devices we can have experience of these connections, we can see them through these devices, creating new sensorialities, new added senses that are not sensible to light, sounds or tastes, but to information, communication, correlation. It is possible to write in space, above it, creating a new context that coexists with the ordinary world. Living outside of any control, due to its immateriality. We can write anywhere, read anywhere. We can reclaim the buildings of power. We can criticize the places of commerce. We can whisper in urban spaces, directly to the ears of the people. We can scream in places that we are not allowed to enter.

What did you personally learn from creating your submitted work?

Open and accessible possibilities are available, but we are still hard put to defining or discovering their grammars, practices and strategies. Networks bring with them a series of strategies and practices that potentially allow for reconsideration of several fundamental issues. Creating information in virtuous and collaborative fashion. Producing and disseminating knowledge. Becoming aware of the progressive de-materialization of commodities and taking advantage of it creating new peer to peer production tools and infrastructures. Invading spaces that were untouchable, thanks to ubiquitous technologies, and opening to pluralized, emergent views. Creating spaces for discussion and collaboration everywhere and anytime. Synthesizing intelligence, competence, knowledge and opportunities using technologies in contemporary ways. Moving away from the languages of corporations and technocracies, and bringing back technologies and protocols to destinations that are more human, corporal, physical. Artificial intelligence is not to be found in the monstrous automatic responders that cinema and some science fiction has constantly shown us, but more in the possibility to synthesize content using networks and the possibility to participate to processes and reasoning. Robots move away from those things that try to replicate human behavior, becoming invisible presences integrated into the environment, thought for an artificially-natural use on bodies and relational domains. Interfaces themselves disappear, replaced by gestures, manipulations, traversals, gazes. Technology disappears and becomes a consolidated part of the world, a kind of Third Landscape in which information, communication, digital emotions and sensations stand side by side with spontaneous vegetation growing along the cracks of the concrete blocks, augmenting space and reality. Augmenting reality. Adding spaces for interpretation, expression, critique, using technologies. We are already doing it: on social networks, on blogs, on mobile phones on SPIMEs.

Why is your work, GOOD communication WORK?

As an installation, Squatting Supermarkets reproduces a simplified version of an interactive supermarket in augmented reality. The focus is on intervening in the experience of shopping by squatting physical spaces of consumption and consumer materials – i.e. shops and logos. The installation is comprised of 3 blocks representing the 3 key players in the shopping world:

- 1st: Brands and manufacturers. Isee, a mobile augmented reality application that allows to interact with the logos of products, turns the logo into a wiki taking advantage of its public nature and acting using its wide recognition as a vehicle to convey information from a variety of sources (After framing a product on the camera, an image processing algorithm identifies the logo allowing the user to access an additional set of information coming from a plurality of sources. Narrative galaxies (open, emergent, multi-author) connected to thematic social networks are layered over products. Logos become open communication infrastructures, distributed social networks, p2p ecosystems);

- 2nd: Products and the stories behind them: revealing the tales of products through the faces of producers and real sites of production. Using webcam software, QRcodes and visual recognition software, an eye-oracle calls entices the observer to watch revealing micro-documentaries on the products;

- 3: Consumers and dialogue: a Web TV is placed directly on the shelf transforming the store into a place for expression.

Squatting Supermarkets is based on four critical elements:
a) interaction,
b) immersive environments,
c) augmented reality,
d) reporting.

The p2p infrastructure of iSee, the technological heart of the project, concretizes in the codified space of the supermarket explained in narrative form, aesthetically pleasing and structuring a new way of publishing relationships and communications. The impact of simple gestures such as choosing an item from the shelf, are immediately rendered visible to the public perception through an immersive, interactive environment reporting sensory-stimulating stories on the products. The consumer’s ecosystem emerges in all its complexity, expressiveness and opens up new possibilities.

Our analysis is based on based on three key factors:

- The importance of issues related to: Ecology, Environment and critical consumption
- The importance of social media in the creation of Brand Reputation
- Dissemination of the latest generation Mobile Device

Environmentalism and eco-sustainability are issues acknowledged as being among the most important global drivers in piloting the shopping choices of large parts of the population. Statistics also demonstrate that progressively large numbers of individuals search for information on social networks before purchasing commodities and services and that the users of last-generation mobile devices are steadily growing by the numbers. In all this, enterprises start feeling the need to confront a globally interconnected communication and relation system, emergent and polyphonic in which the acquisition and the maintenance of a “good reputation” goes through complex social and cultural dynamics that are progressively more chaotic. The “Company” is not the sole center of communication and of the shaping of its corporate identity.

Where and how do you intent do implement your work?

Equilibrium. Squatting Supermarkets focuses on the possibility to reinvent reality. We are all immersed in complex dynamics: simple, daily gestures hide global effects, complex consequences, and we all are the target of planetary strategies that are never clear enough. Turn a light switch on, buy a can of tomatoes, watch TV, drive your car. We constantly are part of global interests producing information that is far from complete. Squatting Supermarkets enters the supermarket with this idea in mind. Shopping, buying, paying, choosing products are common tasks. When we enter supermarkets we instantly become the center of multiple interests: labels, signs, sounds, voices, aisles, shelves all tell messages suggesting our choices and hiding the whole story.

Squatting Supermarkets is an ubiquitous global communication infrastructure, a social network in augmented reality, based on the object of consumption (logos), which is a practice that can be enacted individually or by groups, with an activist mindset or simply that of the consumer: the methodology is based on squatting infrastructure (physical infrastructure and intangible assets).

Augmented Rality (AR) can mean many things. It can mean dinosaurs walking down your favourite street. But it can also mean to augment ordinary reality with new possibilities and opportunities. We wanted to do just that: have a chance to reinvent the present, the real, adding new sensorial spaces, new sensibilities that can be achieved through digital media and contemporary devices. Computer vision, location-based media, wearable and pocketable technologies, gestural and natural interfaces can turn complex tasks into simple ones. Squatting Supermarkets is just that: augment ordinary reality with new possibilities; invade, squat, occupy time and space with expression and different voices; recontextualize, reappropriate, redesign strategies.

Squatting Supermarkets’ intent is to recode the present. The internet of things arrives at the supermarket – at the place of consumption – and fills it with endless economic, social and anthropological implications.

Did your intervention had an effect on other Media. If yes, describe the effect? (Has other media reported on it- how? Were you able to change other media with your work- how?)