Digital Data and Semantic Simulation—The Survey of the Ruins of the Convent of the Paolotti (12th Century A.D.)

In the presence of architecturally significant ruins, restoring and disseminating the idea of a testimony that has survived the destructive work of time is a cultural and social necessity that the use of advanced methods and tools allows to communicate in a timely and comprehensive manner. The integration of 3D surveying techniques and digital information production and management processes (graphic and alphanumeric, i.e., geometric information) makes it possible to put in place multifaceted and effective strategies. The article aims at describing the process of data acquisition (using applied photogrammetry) of the remains of a medieval cloister located on the outskirts of ancient Oppido Mamertina (RC, Italy). The use of the acquired point cloud, cleaned and optimised, made it possible to extract suitable orthophotos from which to derive the matrix profiles of the vaulted roof system. The information organisation of the model, which can be queried on time despite the generic level of detail, leads us to meditate on the change taking place in the field of documentation for urban environmental design and maintenance

Smart thinking on co-creation and engagement: Searchlight on underground built heritage

This paper aims to explore public participation for activating underground built heritage (UBH). It describes and analyses practices of stakeholders’ engagement in different UBH assets, based on experiences gathered in the scope of the European COST Action ‘Underground4value’. It brings together five inspiring cases from Italy, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, in which digital and mobile technologies were used as tools to improve community experiences in UBH. Thus, the paper discusses ‘smartness’ from the perspective of people and communities around cultural assets, where ‘smartness’ becomes a new connotation and a pathway to advance (local) knowledge and know-how. Therefore, this paper takes on the challenge to define a smart city as an ecosystem for people’s empowerment and participation, and, in particular, to explore social tools for creating new values in heritage placemaking—where sharing knowledge becomes a fundamental principle.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Virtual Tower, 'Virtual' Pit: On Potentiality and the Status of Unrealised Art

An examination of the relationship between virtual art and the politics of possibility, explored through the ideas of Deleuze and Agamben regarding power and materiality, with reference to the works of Valdis Celms, Vladimir Tatlin, Lyubov Popova, Netochka Nezvanova, Lygia Pape and Hito Steyerl

Survey of context provisioning middleware

In the scope of ubiquitous computing, one of the key issues is the awareness of context, which includes diverse aspects of the user's situation including his activities, physical surroundings, location, emotions and social relations, device and network characteristics and their interaction with each other. This contextual knowledge is typically acquired from physical, virtual or logical sensors. To overcome problems of heterogeneity and hide complexity, a significant number of middleware approaches have been proposed for systematic and coherent access to manifold context parameters. These frameworks deal particularly with context representation, context management and reasoning, i.e. deriving abstract knowledge from raw sensor data. This article surveys not only related work in these three categories but also the required evaluation principles. © 2009-2012 IEEE

The future of Cybersecurity in Italy: Strategic focus area

This volume has been created as a continuation of the previous one, with the aim of outlining a set of focus areas and actions that the Italian Nation research community considers essential. The book touches many aspects of cyber security, ranging from the definition of the infrastructure and controls needed to organize cyberdefence to the actions and technologies to be developed to be better protected, from the identification of the main technologies to be defended to the proposal of a set of horizontal actions for training, awareness raising, and risk management

New Media Urbanism: How Brand-driven City Building is Virtualising the Actual of Space

This work is an investigation of the cultural phenomenon of branding in relation to its transformational effects on the contemporary spatial – and urban – reality. Based on a cultural analysis of the brand as capitalist institution, it develops an understanding of the rationale behind the construction of large-scale architectural complexes that relate to corporate brands. The consequences of this process will be discussed regarding two examples of corporate brand-building (“Autostadt Wolfsburg”, “BMW Welt Munich”) and one case of indirectly brand-inspired city development (“Anting New Town”). Theoretically, the work relies on a poststructuralist framework, employing ideas from Deleuze and Sloterdijk. It argues that the brand can be interpreted as a “virtual” in the Deleuzian sense, and that its going-spatial can be read as a way to create new levels of virtual-actual interaction. These interactions will be interpreted as necessary for a brand to survive, but also to generate new levels of risk. This work will analyse how the effects on the urban sphere that are the outcome of corporate spatialisation effectively mean that the city enters into a mode of virtual urbanity. In this process, urban structure will be shown to force the historical into space. A notion of a hybrid history will be developed. It will be shown that brand space consists of different modes of temporality which create different colliding “strands” of history. These colliding histories are arguably part of what will be called “viral urbanism”. This viral mediatisation of space will be shown to result in a regime of “global urbanity”. This regime will be approached by integrating the arguments around virtual and actual into Sloterdijk’s concept of a world of “spheres”. The latter will be used to understand the spatiality of mediatised spaces. It will be argued that brand space can be seen as an instance of new media urbanism

Animating Truth

Animating Truth examines the rise of animated documentary in the 21st century, and addresses how non-photorealistic animation is increasingly used to depict and shape reality