Angel F
Encyclopedia
Angel_F is a fictional child artificial intelligence
that has been used in worldwide art performances focused on the issues of digital liberties, intellectual property
and on the evolution of language and behaviour in information society. The character was created by Salvatore Iaconesi in 2007 as a hack to the Biodoll art performance by Italian artist Franca Formenti.
The project revolves around the story of the technological sensual relationship between the Biodoll, a digital prostitute, and professor Derrick de Kerckhove
, culminating in the birth of the young artificial intelligence. The digital child morphed from a spyware
program capturing internet users' browsing activities in order to gather text to feed an algorithmic language generating system (thus letting the "child" learn how to speak) and became a digital personality used by the artists for both online and real-world performances.
The project was later joined by Oriana Persico who curated communication and part of the theoretical approaches of the action.
The Angel_F project has been featured in books, magazines, national televisions, and has been invited to many worldwide conferences and events, both academic and artistic.
On one occasion, in October 2007, Angel_F attended the Internet Governance Forum
(IGF) in Rio de Janeiro as the only digital being invited to speak: the young artificial intelligence was featured with a video message concerning the struggles for digital liberties, privacy, knowledge sharing and access to networks and technologies.
Franca Formenti, an Italian artist living in Varese, invented the Biodoll character in 2002 which began making its appearances first on the network and later in the physical world by using what were called "clones": young women, prostitutes, pornographic starlets, transsexuals and models interpreting the role of a digital prostitute. The Biodoll was an art performance focused on research emerging from the network of new forms of sexualities, and on the analysis of changes brought on by this transformation to the concepts of private and public spaces, privacy, and the possibility of creating multiple fluid identities through language and digital media. At the time the Biodoll character claimed a role in professor Derrick de Kerckhove's life, narratively seducing him and alluring him into joining in the performance, becoming the Biodoll's favourite lover.
The theme of fertility has always been central to the Biodoll performance: the digital prostitute was a wombless clone but desired giving birth to a son, the Bloki.
In a process starting in 2006 and ending in February 2007, Salvatore Iaconesi (xDxD.vs.xDxD) used his Talker linguistic artificial intelligence to animate the digital child conceived with prof. Derrick de Kerckhove: Angel_F.
Iaconesi and Persico met in November 2006 and immediately started collaborating on the birth of Angel_F.
Angel_F was designed as a synthetic digital being composed through narrative, technological and cognitive psychology
layers. The objective was to create iconic characteristics that resulted in being evocative and able to mimic human life up to a level in which bringing up a symbolic dialogue was possible. On the other side, the artificial identity was to implement and expose the cultural, emotional and relational ways that were typical of networked social ecosystems, among those technologies, systems and infrastructures that entered and shaped people's daily lives.
The young digital being
mimicked the evolution of a human baby: initially conceived inside the website of its digital mother it emulated the birth of a child by using the metaphor of a virus developing inside a website, taking progressively more space in the domain's databases and interfaces. Content was produced through the software by using small browser-based spyware techniques, through which Angel_F could infer
the list of major portals that had been visited by the website's users.
The Biodoll website was invaded by this growing presence and, thus, Angel_F was born.
The Artificial Intelligence (AI) component of Angel_F was derived from another project, Talker, through which internet users could build up the AI's linguistic network by feeding it their text and web clips. Angel_F used this component to generate sentences and phrases, publishing them on the interface and on selected blogs.
The parallel between the growth of the AI and that of a child kept building up and, just as children learn how to speak and act by observing their parents and the people around them, Angel_F used its spyware and AI components to learn, to navigate websites and web portals using web crawler
based techniques, and to interact with other people by using the contents hosted and generated in its database to create surreal dialogues in blogs and websites.
A virtual school was created, called Talker Mind, to narratively continue the AI's growth. Five professors (Massimo Canevacci, Antonio Caronia, Carlo Formenti, Derrick de Kerckhove
and Luigi Pagliarini) fed their texts and academic articles to Angel_F, simulating virtual asynchronous lessons by using a multi-blog structure.
A peer-to-peer
system was also created at the time, named Presence. Its interface resembled the one of 8-bit videogames
and the peer to peer users travelled in a starry space and were able to perform standard Instant Messaging
tasks, such as chat
and file sharing
. The interactions were possible both among humans and digital beings. Angel_F was the first user of the Presence peer to peer system.
Angel_F entered the physical world as a baby-stroller mounted laptop computer that was used to let the digital child join events and conferences held worldwide.
The first public space performance was held in Milan
, when the Biodoll distributed a generative free press publication (called the Bloki FreePreXXX, its text was generated algorithmically and inserted into a prepared graphic layout).
The second performance was held in Rome
, at the Forte Prenestino on June 14, 2007, with a massive playroom created trough computational graphics that people could interact with and that were generated by the AI.
Angel_F performed all over the world, both in artistic contexts and in academic ones. It was also used for the communication strategy of several activist groups on the themes of intellectual property and digital freedoms.
On June 22, 2007 Angel_F presented the closing remarks for an Ipotesi per Assurdo (Absurd Hypotesis) with Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico at the IULM University in Milan, discussing the possibilities for an ecosystemic, sustainable reinvention of corporations.
On July 28, 2007, hundreds of people at LiberaFesta (Free Party) in Rome listened to Angel_F in a speech discussing new politics and hacker ethics.
On October 2007, Angel_F was presented live at the FE/MALE 2 event, as an example of an atypical family during a public debate on new sexualities and social change.
Again in October 2007, Angel_F made a series of public performances Florence
's Festival della Creatività (Festival of Creativity), an institutional event held periodically to showcase Italy's and other countries' best technological projects. During the festival Derrick de Kerckhove publicly recognized the little AI as his digital son.
On October 2008, Angel_F was used at a public event on a European scale called Freedom not Fear discussing privacy and civil liberties.
Lately (July 2009) Angel_F has been seen with its digital father Derrick de Kerckhove to protest against Italy's harsh politics on freedom of speech.
A case of censorship saw Angel_F involved, when it was not allowed to post its contribution to the DFIR (Dialogue Forum for Internet Rights) held in Rome on September 2007 in preparation for Rio de Janeiro's Internet Governance Forum (IGF) edition. The case quickly turned into a collaboration among the involved parties and Angel_F was invited to the global event in Brazil where it was the only present digital being: on that occasion Angel_F contributed a videomessage, in the digital freedoms workshop, which suggested some ideas for action to the United Nations
and to all the parties involved in the global IGF organization.
Angel_F's authors coined the term NeoRealismo Virtuale (Virtual NeoRealism) to identify the practices created and used in the project. Its intent is to describe and represent the contemporary world in its hybrid analog/digital form, with digital technologies progressively interacting and integrating to the physical world, even on the level of personal identity and private/public space definitions.
The Glocal & Outsiders conference held in Prague
at the Academy of Sciences
in 2007 was the first academic presentation of the Angel_F project, together with the Biodoll.
By December 2007 several international associations, and scientific researchers had been involved with Angel_F, eventually producing the system and process used to setup the Talker Mind digital school for the AI with Angel_F's professors.
On March 2008 the Tecnológico de Monterrey university in Mexico City
organized the Computer Art Congress 2 international event, featuring Angel_F's project among with the ones by scientific researchers worldwide.
On July 2008, the project was presented in Austria
at the Planetary Collegium
s Consciousness Reframed 9 conference, together with the NeoRealismo Virtuale.
As of the end of 2009, the project continues, both artistically and academically.
A book is about to be published in November 2009 by Castelvecchi Editore in Italy, titled Angel F. Diario di una intelligenza artificiale (Angel_F, the diaries of an Artificial Intelligence).
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
that has been used in worldwide art performances focused on the issues of digital liberties, intellectual property
Intellectual property
Intellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...
and on the evolution of language and behaviour in information society. The character was created by Salvatore Iaconesi in 2007 as a hack to the Biodoll art performance by Italian artist Franca Formenti.
The project revolves around the story of the technological sensual relationship between the Biodoll, a digital prostitute, and professor Derrick de Kerckhove
Derrick de Kerckhove
Derrick de Kerckhove is the author of The Skin of Culture and Connected Intelligence and Professor in the Department of French at the University of Toronto, Canada...
, culminating in the birth of the young artificial intelligence. The digital child morphed from a spyware
Spyware
Spyware is a type of malware that can be installed on computers, and which collects small pieces of information about users without their knowledge. The presence of spyware is typically hidden from the user, and can be difficult to detect. Typically, spyware is secretly installed on the user's...
program capturing internet users' browsing activities in order to gather text to feed an algorithmic language generating system (thus letting the "child" learn how to speak) and became a digital personality used by the artists for both online and real-world performances.
The project was later joined by Oriana Persico who curated communication and part of the theoretical approaches of the action.
The Angel_F project has been featured in books, magazines, national televisions, and has been invited to many worldwide conferences and events, both academic and artistic.
On one occasion, in October 2007, Angel_F attended the Internet Governance Forum
Internet Governance Forum
The Internet Governance Forum is a multi-stakeholder forum for policy dialogue on issues of Internet governance. It brings together all stakeholders in the internet governance debate, whether they represent governments, the private sector or civil society, including the technical and academic...
(IGF) in Rio de Janeiro as the only digital being invited to speak: the young artificial intelligence was featured with a video message concerning the struggles for digital liberties, privacy, knowledge sharing and access to networks and technologies.
History
Angel_F is an acronym which stads for Autonomous Non Generative E-volitive Life_Form. The project was born in 2007 and resulted from the fusion of two contemporary art performances.Franca Formenti, an Italian artist living in Varese, invented the Biodoll character in 2002 which began making its appearances first on the network and later in the physical world by using what were called "clones": young women, prostitutes, pornographic starlets, transsexuals and models interpreting the role of a digital prostitute. The Biodoll was an art performance focused on research emerging from the network of new forms of sexualities, and on the analysis of changes brought on by this transformation to the concepts of private and public spaces, privacy, and the possibility of creating multiple fluid identities through language and digital media. At the time the Biodoll character claimed a role in professor Derrick de Kerckhove's life, narratively seducing him and alluring him into joining in the performance, becoming the Biodoll's favourite lover.
The theme of fertility has always been central to the Biodoll performance: the digital prostitute was a wombless clone but desired giving birth to a son, the Bloki.
In a process starting in 2006 and ending in February 2007, Salvatore Iaconesi (xDxD.vs.xDxD) used his Talker linguistic artificial intelligence to animate the digital child conceived with prof. Derrick de Kerckhove: Angel_F.
Iaconesi and Persico met in November 2006 and immediately started collaborating on the birth of Angel_F.
Angel_F was designed as a synthetic digital being composed through narrative, technological and cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....
layers. The objective was to create iconic characteristics that resulted in being evocative and able to mimic human life up to a level in which bringing up a symbolic dialogue was possible. On the other side, the artificial identity was to implement and expose the cultural, emotional and relational ways that were typical of networked social ecosystems, among those technologies, systems and infrastructures that entered and shaped people's daily lives.
The young digital being
Artificial life
Artificial life is a field of study and an associated art form which examine systems related to life, its processes, and its evolution through simulations using computer models, robotics, and biochemistry. The discipline was named by Christopher Langton, an American computer scientist, in 1986...
mimicked the evolution of a human baby: initially conceived inside the website of its digital mother it emulated the birth of a child by using the metaphor of a virus developing inside a website, taking progressively more space in the domain's databases and interfaces. Content was produced through the software by using small browser-based spyware techniques, through which Angel_F could infer
Inference
Inference is the act or process of deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true. The conclusion drawn is also called an idiomatic. The laws of valid inference are studied in the field of logic.Human inference Inference is the act or process of deriving logical conclusions...
the list of major portals that had been visited by the website's users.
The Biodoll website was invaded by this growing presence and, thus, Angel_F was born.
The Artificial Intelligence (AI) component of Angel_F was derived from another project, Talker, through which internet users could build up the AI's linguistic network by feeding it their text and web clips. Angel_F used this component to generate sentences and phrases, publishing them on the interface and on selected blogs.
The parallel between the growth of the AI and that of a child kept building up and, just as children learn how to speak and act by observing their parents and the people around them, Angel_F used its spyware and AI components to learn, to navigate websites and web portals using web crawler
Web crawler
A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, Web spiders, Web robots, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutters.This process is called Web...
based techniques, and to interact with other people by using the contents hosted and generated in its database to create surreal dialogues in blogs and websites.
A virtual school was created, called Talker Mind, to narratively continue the AI's growth. Five professors (Massimo Canevacci, Antonio Caronia, Carlo Formenti, Derrick de Kerckhove
Derrick de Kerckhove
Derrick de Kerckhove is the author of The Skin of Culture and Connected Intelligence and Professor in the Department of French at the University of Toronto, Canada...
and Luigi Pagliarini) fed their texts and academic articles to Angel_F, simulating virtual asynchronous lessons by using a multi-blog structure.
A peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...
system was also created at the time, named Presence. Its interface resembled the one of 8-bit videogames
History of video game consoles (third generation)
In the history of computer and video games, the third generation began on July 15, 1983, with the Japanese release of both the Nintendo Family Computer and Sega SG-1000...
and the peer to peer users travelled in a starry space and were able to perform standard Instant Messaging
Instant messaging
Instant Messaging is a form of real-time direct text-based chatting communication in push mode between two or more people using personal computers or other devices, along with shared clients. The user's text is conveyed over a network, such as the Internet...
tasks, such as chat
Online chat
Online chat may refer to any kind of communication over the Internet, that offers an instantaneous transmission of text-based messages from sender to receiver, hence the delay for visual access to the sent message shall not hamper the flow of communications in any of the directions...
and file sharing
File sharing
File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digitally stored information, such as computer programs, multimedia , documents, or electronic books. It may be implemented through a variety of ways...
. The interactions were possible both among humans and digital beings. Angel_F was the first user of the Presence peer to peer system.
Angel_F entered the physical world as a baby-stroller mounted laptop computer that was used to let the digital child join events and conferences held worldwide.
The first public space performance was held in Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
, when the Biodoll distributed a generative free press publication (called the Bloki FreePreXXX, its text was generated algorithmically and inserted into a prepared graphic layout).
The second performance was held in Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
, at the Forte Prenestino on June 14, 2007, with a massive playroom created trough computational graphics that people could interact with and that were generated by the AI.
Angel_F performed all over the world, both in artistic contexts and in academic ones. It was also used for the communication strategy of several activist groups on the themes of intellectual property and digital freedoms.
On June 22, 2007 Angel_F presented the closing remarks for an Ipotesi per Assurdo (Absurd Hypotesis) with Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico at the IULM University in Milan, discussing the possibilities for an ecosystemic, sustainable reinvention of corporations.
On July 28, 2007, hundreds of people at LiberaFesta (Free Party) in Rome listened to Angel_F in a speech discussing new politics and hacker ethics.
On October 2007, Angel_F was presented live at the FE/MALE 2 event, as an example of an atypical family during a public debate on new sexualities and social change.
Again in October 2007, Angel_F made a series of public performances Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....
's Festival della Creatività (Festival of Creativity), an institutional event held periodically to showcase Italy's and other countries' best technological projects. During the festival Derrick de Kerckhove publicly recognized the little AI as his digital son.
On October 2008, Angel_F was used at a public event on a European scale called Freedom not Fear discussing privacy and civil liberties.
Lately (July 2009) Angel_F has been seen with its digital father Derrick de Kerckhove to protest against Italy's harsh politics on freedom of speech.
A case of censorship saw Angel_F involved, when it was not allowed to post its contribution to the DFIR (Dialogue Forum for Internet Rights) held in Rome on September 2007 in preparation for Rio de Janeiro's Internet Governance Forum (IGF) edition. The case quickly turned into a collaboration among the involved parties and Angel_F was invited to the global event in Brazil where it was the only present digital being: on that occasion Angel_F contributed a videomessage, in the digital freedoms workshop, which suggested some ideas for action to the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
and to all the parties involved in the global IGF organization.
Background
Angel_F mixes real technologically advanced systems with a poetic, narrative approach. In the performance real and not-real are constantly intermixed, and the concepts, techniques and characteristics of the whole project have been analyzed multiple times in several international academic events and research projects.Angel_F's authors coined the term NeoRealismo Virtuale (Virtual NeoRealism) to identify the practices created and used in the project. Its intent is to describe and represent the contemporary world in its hybrid analog/digital form, with digital technologies progressively interacting and integrating to the physical world, even on the level of personal identity and private/public space definitions.
The Glocal & Outsiders conference held in Prague
Prague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
at the Academy of Sciences
Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic
The Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic was established in 1992 by the Czech National Council as the Czech successor of the former Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. The Academy is the leading non-university public research institution in the Czech Republic...
in 2007 was the first academic presentation of the Angel_F project, together with the Biodoll.
By December 2007 several international associations, and scientific researchers had been involved with Angel_F, eventually producing the system and process used to setup the Talker Mind digital school for the AI with Angel_F's professors.
On March 2008 the Tecnológico de Monterrey university in Mexico City
Mexico City
Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...
organized the Computer Art Congress 2 international event, featuring Angel_F's project among with the ones by scientific researchers worldwide.
On July 2008, the project was presented in Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
at the Planetary Collegium
Planetary Collegium
The Planetary Collegium is an international platform for research in art, technology and consciousness, with its hub based in the University of Plymouth, with linked centers in Zurich and Milan...
s Consciousness Reframed 9 conference, together with the NeoRealismo Virtuale.
As of the end of 2009, the project continues, both artistically and academically.
A book is about to be published in November 2009 by Castelvecchi Editore in Italy, titled Angel F. Diario di una intelligenza artificiale (Angel_F, the diaries of an Artificial Intelligence).