Autopticon

Patent Centocinquanta

2011-10-29T17:54:00.008+02:00

A book and a new scientific show at the Genoa Science Festival 2011

october 28, Teatro della Tosse, Sala Campana

Patent Centocinquanta

backstage

New Events

2011-07-19T09:22:00.006+02:00

Bicycle Autopsy, Aglié, Teatro Alladium (11.07.08)

Electric Meter Autopsy, Breno, Valcamonica (110405)

Bicycle Autopsy, Torino, Casa del Quartiere San Salvario (11.01.05)

Autospy of an Industrial Sewing Machine

2011-03-16T11:38:00.008+01:00

On March 14 (the Pi Day), in the Main Hall of the ITIS Marzotto (Valdagno, VI) the Autopsy of an Industrial Sewing Machine has been represented. This "Lecture" has been conducted by Vittorio Marchis with the support of the Lecturer Alfredo Giovanni Visconti and helped by the Assistant Demetrio Pretto.

A new Vacuum Cleaner Autopsy

2011-03-03T22:43:00.010+01:00

Today, hosted by the Secondary School "Palazzeschi" in Turin the "Vacuum Cleaner Autopsy" conducted by the "anatomist" Vittorio Marchis involved young boys and girls as assistants in the aventure of dissectioning a domestic machine.

Electric Bulb Autopsy

2011-02-27T19:51:00.008+01:00

Now is available in the Web the autopsy of an electric bulb (the comment is in Italian)

Backstage of the Happy Tech installation

2011-02-04T13:43:00.006+01:00

Some images taken during the Autopsy for a new installation at the Festival "Arte e Scienza in Piazza" and precisely within the "Happy Tech" Exhibition in Palazzo Re Enzo (Bologna - February 3-13, 2011).

A New Autopsy of a Vacuum Cleaner

2010-11-10T22:19:00.008+01:00

A new performance of an Autopsy of a Vacuum Cleaner has been represented in the highschool Cristoforo Colombo in Genova (Italy) on Friday, the 5th November. The context of the Science Festival helped to use technical metaphors in order to speak of science and technology policies in the present times.

Science Things: an Alfabeth

2010-11-10T22:06:00.009+01:00

A play written by Vittorio Marchis, and played together with Federica Cassini.
Represented in Genova (November 4th), within the events of the "Science Festival 2010", Le cose della Scienza, is a theatre representation that uses common things to materialize the alphabet, and with them to compose science words. Played in Italian the letters/things selected are:

ALTOPARLANTE
BASTONE
CHIAVE
DISCO
ELICA
FORBICI
GUANTO
HULA_HOP
IMBUTO
LAMPADINA
MANUBRIO
NASTRO ADESIVO
OROLOGIO
PENTOLA
QUADRO
RUBINETTO
SEDIA
TROTTOLA
UNCINO
VERNICE
ZUCCHERO

At the end all the things are assembled together to build the Science Totem.

Myosotis mechanica M.

2010-06-01T23:48:00.008+02:00

Eradicated from the Stadio delle Alpi in Turin and transplanted to a bed of the Politecnico, I hope that it will grow.

Either the Accordion or a Bicycle...

2010-05-28T23:04:00.009+02:00

Torino, Unione Culturale "Franco Antonicelli", May 19th, 2010

Torino, Fondazione Merz, May 27th, 2010.
(a special thank to MuoviEquilibri,
to Marco Bolle and Gabriele De Carlo)

Also for kids...

2010-05-28T19:17:00.006+02:00

During the OpenDoors Day (Bimbi in Ufficio con Mamma e Papà) at Politecnico di Torino on May 21st, the Autopsy of a Computer is an attractive and magnetic event.

... and moreover: the Autopsy of a Bicycle

2010-05-15T19:54:00.010+02:00

The bicycle is probably one of the most powerful engines that will survive to the industrial revolution. In the Land of In-between, among society fantasy and technology, the bicycle has the power to modify our minds.

Some years ago...

2010-05-02T23:59:00.003+02:00

The Autopsy of a Wash Machine was the start of a new innovative series of theatre-lectures: here the playbill.
Then came the typewriter, the telephone, the clock, the kWh-Meter, the electric bulb, the record player, the telescope,... (see the complete list)

Coming soon...

2010-05-01T12:22:00.002+02:00

The Autopsy of an Accordion is a live-performance inbetween music and technology, with some interesting readings taken from the Italian and International literature (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Giuseppe Berto, Aldo Palazzeschi, Beppe Fenoglio,...)

Some Other Autopsies of a Vacuum Cleaner

2010-04-24T23:02:00.007+02:00

Autopsy of a Vacuum Cleaner

2010-04-24T19:05:00.040+02:00

April 20, 2010: Northampton MA, Smith College, Autopsy of a Vacuum Cleaner, produced and performed by Vittorio Marchis.

In order to enlarge the context around the "corpse" of the vacuum cleaner, some literary texts have been read during the autopsy:

Wringer
I leave the gallery, walk east. I need to go shopping, get some decent food, organize. When I'm by myself I revert to the times when I would forget about eating, stay up all night working, go until I felt an odd sensation I'd identify after some thought as hunger. Then I'd go through the refrigerator like a vacuum cleaner, sucking in whatever there was. Leftovers. This morning there were eggs, but there are no more eggs. There's no more bread, there's no more milk. Why were there eggs and bread and milk in the first place? It must have been a stash of Jon's, he must eat there sometimes. Or could it have been that he got this stuff for me? It's hardly believable. I will buy oranges, yogurt without the jam. I will have a positive attitude, take care of myself, I'll feed myself enzymes, and friendly bacteria. These good thoughts carry me until I'm right downtown.
(Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye)

No other book of Nathaniel Hawthorne is so deep, so dual, and so complete as The Scarlet Letter: this great allegory of the triumph of sin. […] But there are good parables, and wonderful dark glimpses of early Puritan America, in Twice Told Tales. The House of the Seven Gables has 'atmosphere'. The passing of the old order of the proud, bearded, black-browed Father: an order which is slowly ousted from life, and lingeringly haunts the old dark places. But comes a new generation to sweep out even the ghosts, with these new vacuum cleaners. No ghost could stand up against a vacuum cleaner. The new generation is having no ghosts or cobwebs. It is setting up in the photography line, and is just going to make a sound financial thing out of it. For this purpose all old hates and old glooms, that belong to the antique order of Haughty Fathers, all these are swept up in the vacuum cleaner, and the vendetta-born young couple effect a perfect understanding under the black cloth of a camera and prosperity. Vivat Industria! Oh, Nathaniel, you savage ironist! Ugh, how you'd have hated it if you'd had nothing but the prosperous 'dear' young couple to write about! If you'd lived to the day when America was nothing but a Main Street. You can't idealize hard work. Which is why America invents so many machines and contrivances of all sort: so that they need do no physical work.
(D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), Studies in Classic American Literature, Chapter 8 - Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance).

Movie references:
- Who's Minding the Store? a comedy film directed by Frank Tashlin and starring Jerry Lewis. It was released on November 28, 1963 by Paramount Pictures. (a video clip)

- I Want to Break Free, song performed by Queen, written by bassist John Deacon, and featured on album The Works (1984). The music video, directed by David Mallet, was a parody of the northern British soap opera Coronation Street.

- Wall-E meets a vacuum cleaner (a Pixar promo movie)

- The Hoffnung - Vacuum Cleaner (1960), a BBC Comedy Cartoon Animation, by Gerard Hoffnung.

Disclaimer: images and movies (if not referring directly to the event) have been taken from internet sites to which are directly linked.

After a long silence

2010-04-21T20:20:00.000+02:00

After a long silence, stimulated by the friends that invited me at the University of Massachusetts, I converted an obsolete my blog into a new one, where smells and machines combine together under the paradigm of the "autopsy".
Autopsy, from the ancient Greek, means to examine directly and personally an object.
In the world of multimedia it is necessary to re-use our hands (and the five senses).

Northampton MA, Smith College, april 20, 2010: Vacuum Cleaner Autopsy

Machine & Cover

2007-02-13T08:58:00.000+01:00

Within the complex world of machines a particular role is played by books. The cover images are the first presentation of their content, a sort of dress, and in the communication society even more "The dress makes the person; the saddle the horse".
A first reviewof book cover plates shiowing the word "machine", waiting for a conceptual map, is available at the address: http://www.vittoriomarchis.it/machine&Cover_1.html

Machine & Myth

2007-02-13T00:09:00.000+01:00

Several ancient myths are played around machines and other artifacts: the Trojan horse, the golden apple of Atalanta (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atalanta), the Icarus artificial wings, the Sun chariot, the spindle and the loom of the the sexual machine built by Daidalos for Pasiphae who generated the Minotaur (http://www.theoi.com/Titan/Pasiphae.html).

The mythological origin of the water wheel for corn milling is reported by Antipatros of Thessaloniki, a Greek poet of the first century b. C., among the poems of the Palatine Anthology, cited also by Karl Marx in chapter 15 of the first book of Das Kapital.

"Spare the hand that grinds the corn, Oh, miller girls, and softly sleep. Let Chanticleer announce the morn in vain! Deo has commanded the work of the girls to be done by the Nymphs, and now they skip lightly over the wheels, so that the shaken axles revolve with their spokes and pull round the load of the revolving stones. Let us live the life of our fathers, and let us rest from work and enjoy the gifts that the Goddess sends us. "

This myth is a wonderful ante litteram example of women emancipation by technology, the same that will appear when washing machines, in the ’50, changed the domestic life habits. It is remarkable how technology, often considered as a masculine affair, reveals so many feminine presences.
The myth of Atalanta and Ippomenes returns in the alchemical baroque music composed by Michael Maier: Atalanta fugiens (Frankfurt, 1617).

Some electronic examples of the musical variations of Atalanta fugiens have been reported in the hypertext of the exhibition "Un sistema periodico da Amedeo Avogadro a Primo Levi" (Torino, 2001).

http://www2.polito.it/strutture/cemed/sistemaperiodico/s15/e15_1_01.html

Smell ex Machina

2007-02-11T15:33:00.000+01:00

The smell of machines, in a synestesic perspective, has to gain if the visual approach, so typical in our multimedia culture, finds acoustic consonances. Amadeus ex Machina, a work by the composer Lawrence Dillon, "is a whimsical re-imagining of Mozart's 40th symphony from the perspective of a sophisticated - but somewhat disoriented - machine". (http://www.lawrencedillon.com/amadeus.php)
A search on Google about "musica ex machina" produced about 11.000 pages that decrease to 22 if the search is refined to <"musica ex machina" AND "smell">. No pages are produced by the search engine if asked for "smell ex machina".

The futurist poet Marinetti, in a letter from the trenches of Adrianopolis, described to Luigi Russolo "with marvelous free words the orchestra of a great battle" (The Art of Noises, http://www.eclectic.it/russolo/artofnoises.pdf)
There, on the battleground, souds visions and smells are all mixed together:

“every 5 seconds siege cannons gutting space with a chord ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB mutiny of 500 echos smashing scattering it to infinity. In the center of this hateful ZANG-TUMBTUUMB area 50square kilometers leaping bursts lacerations fists rapid fire batteries. Violence ferocity regularity this deep bass scanning the strange shrill frantic crowds of the battle Fury breathless ears eyes nostrils open! load! fire! what a joy to see to hear to smell (vedere udire fiutare tutto tutto...) everything everything taratatata of the machine guns screaming a breathless under the stings slaps traak-traak whips pic-pac-pum-tumb weirdness leaps 200 meters range Far far in back of the orchestra pools muddying huffing goaded oxen wagons pluff-plaff horse action flic flac zing zing shaaack laughing whinnies the tiiinkling jiiingling tramping 3 Bulgarian battalions marching croooc-craaac [slowly] Shumi Maritza or Karvavena ZANG-TUMBTUUUMB toc-toc-toc-toc [fast] crooc-craac [slowly] crys of officers slamming about like brass plates pan here paak there BUUUM ching chaak [very fast] cha-cha-cha-cha-chaak down there up around high up look out your head beautiful! Flashing flashing flashing flashing flashing flashing footlights of the forts down there behind that smoke Shukri Pasha communicates by phone with 27 forts in Turkish in German Allo! Ibrahim! Rudolf! allo! allo! actors parts echos of prompters scenery of smoke forests applause odor of hay mud dung I no longer feel my frozen feet odor of gunsmoke odor of rot Tympani flutes clarinets everywhere low high birds chirping blessed shadows cheep-cheep-cheep green breezes flocks don-dan-don-din-baaah Orchestra madmen pommel the performers they terribly beaten playing Great din not erasing clearing up cutting off slighter noises very small scraps of echos in the theater area 300 square kilometers Rivers Maritza Tungia stretched out Rodolpi Mountains rearing heights loges boxes 2000 shrapnels waving arms exploding very white handkerchiefs full of gold srrrr-TUMB-TUMB 2000 raised grenades tearing out bursts of very black hair ZANG-srrrr-TUMB-ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB the orchestra of the noises of war swelling under a held note of silence in the high sky round golden balloon that observes the firing...”

Reinvent the Nature?

2007-02-10T21:28:00.000+01:00

Why not to read Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181? Look at the Cyborg Manifesto.
The Italian translation of the book has been published by Feltrinelli.

A detailed excerpt can be found at the address: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html

A Forum with Braidotti, Haraway, Scott, and Mitchell has been organized by "Reset":
http://www.caffeeuropa.it/attualita/114femminismo-forum.html

The Sex of the Machines

2007-02-10T19:39:00.000+01:00

With reference to the novel La manufacture des machines by Louis-Philippe Hébert, Canadian writer, see: La fiction illimitée, an article written by Robert Morency and appeared on the Review "Voix et Images", Louis-Philippe Hébert, Volume 4, numéro 3 (avril 1979), sous la direction de Noël Audet, p. 357-371.
In this text some interesting considerations around "le sexe des machines" and "les machines célibataires" appear related to the Louis-Philippe Hébert works.

References:

"VoixEtImages", vol.4, n.3, (avril 1979): http://www.erudit.org/revue/vi/1979/v4/n3/index.html
Robert Morency, La Fiction illimitée: http://www.erudit.org/revue/vi/1979/v4/n3/200166ar.pdf
Ghislain Bourque, La Manufacture de machines de L.-P. Hébert : Une machination du texte dans ses effets: http://www.erudit.org/revue/vi/1979/v4/n3/200169ar.pdf
Textes inédits: Louis-Philippe Hébert, Manuscrits trouvés dans une valise: http://www.erudit.org/revue/vi/1979/v4/n3/200167ar.pdf

Scent of Machine

2007-02-10T12:07:00.000+01:00

Remember the movie Profumo di donna (directed by Dino Risi, 1974; with Vittorio Gassman and Agostina Belli), the archetype of the more known Scent of Woman (directed by Martin Brest, 1992 ; with Al Pacino)
The connection between sexual attraction and olfactory sensation is clear.
But what is the role of smell in technological attraction? Is there a connection that links the gender of machines? Is it possible to speak about of a gender classification of machines? Which is the role of the five senses (and expecially of the sense of smell) in the technological choices?
Memorable is the scene when Arnie Cunningham mets the car Christine (see the movie Christine directed by John Carpenter, 1983, on a novel by Stephen King):

"George LeBay: Her name's Christine.
Arnie Cunningham: I like that.
Dennis Guilder: Come on Arnie, we gotta get goin', huh?
George LeBay: My asshole brother bought her back in September '57. That's when you got your new model year, in September. Brand-new, she was. She had the smell of a brand-new car. That's just about the finest smell in the world, 'cept maybe for pussy. "

In the very poor bibliography and webography of Macine & Gender, even if the olfactory sensations receive always a minor attention, we can find:

Floating Gender, by Eleonora Oreggia http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=639

Piergiorgio Odifreddi, Il sesso delle macchine, in "La Stampa - Tuttoscienze" 700 (10 gennaio 1996), http://www.vialattea.net/odifreddi/altri/macchine.pdf

Tunnel e Sessi, Seminario di ricerca, 2003/04, http://www.t-room.ch/t-it/t2_liste_it.html

Caroline A. Jones, The Sex of the Machine: Mechanomorphic Art, New Women, and Francis Picabia's Neurasthenic Cure in: Picturing Science, ed. by Caroline A. Jones and Peter Gallison, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p.145.

Interesting Technology & Gender links in Swizerland: http://www.t-room.ch/t-it/Gruppe_links_it/links_it.html

A seminar about Machine & Gender will be held in Turin, Italy, Politecnico, Historical and Documentation Center (www.polito.it/cemed) on monday, February 12, 2007.

The Names of Smell

2007-02-05T00:06:00.000+01:00

A Babylonic Mess of Smell: verbs and nouns are mixed all together.

perfumar, reyach, pucia, odor, aroma, fragrância, cheiro, hálito, oler, olfatear, olor, perfume, hedor, hediondez peste, pestazo, kokmak, mirisati, mirìzein, evodhìa, mirodhià, vròma, miros, mirisati, bròma, osmê, thumìama, ozô, osfainomai, yashim, rassh, gandha, dhupa, bau, kagu, perfume, fragrance, fragrancy, scent, redolence, redolency, essence, fruitiness, flavour, savour, sweet, sweetness, smell, nose, aura, breath, whiff, wind, emanation, stinker, pong, reek, tang, whiff, stink, stench stankwiz, Parfum, Duft, Aroma, Geruch, Wohlgeruch Gestank, Ausdünstung, Mief, Fäulnis, riechen, schmeken, lucht, geur, ¢ör, stank, reuk, lukta, lukte, lugte, haistaa, wąchać, čichati, запах, благовоние, благоухание, аромàт, душить, нюхать, pákhnut, пахнуть дурно пахнут, воять, вонь, зловоние, дурной запaх, arôme, fumet, émanation, exhalaison, sentir, senteur, odeur, fragrance, effluve, relent, haleine, fétidité, puanteur, parfum, baume, balme, besme, balsamum.

The Smell of the Machine

2007-02-04T23:31:00.000+01:00

Smell is a new/old sensation
Machine is a new/old device
The Machine of Smell has not yet invented
The Smell of the Machine has to be experienced

MachineSmell

2007-02-04T23:23:00.000+01:00

MachineSmell is a new way of investigating the postcontemporary society:
MachineSmell is aphorismatic
MachineSmell is technological
MachineSmell is multicultural
Machinesmell is artistic
MachineSmell is sensorial
MachineSmell is ...