“Metropolitan space is equally irrelevant for the telephone, the telegraph, the radio, and television. What the town planners call ‘the human scale’ in discussing ideal urban spaces is equally unrelated to these electric forms. Our electric extensions of ourselves simply by-pass space and time, and create problems of human involvement and organization for which there is no precedent”
Marshall McLuhan
Global Village Square
Architectural concept: Paolo Di Caterina, architect
Concept: The Global Village Square (GVS) is a public service (free of charge) meant to establish permanent links by videoconferencing between Toronto and other cities of the world. It will allow people to meet across land and sea, but as if they were in a common ground.
Project. The plan is to build a Rotunda in Dundas Square at the South-East corner of Yonge and Dundas, across the street from the North end of the Eaton Centre.
At the centre of the Rotunda, a technical equipment housing area (red) supporting eight large Digital Light Processing (DLP) screens (green) facing eight standing areas (yellow) for people looking at the screen to meet their counterparts across the ocean. Each standing area is positioned at the edge of a soundproof zone where people can talk and hear comfortably without being too much disturbed by the seven other zones (transparent in North East position).
One of the proposed Global Village Square Architectural concept (Paolo Di Caterina, architect)
Each screen displays the designated GVS spot of a different city in various parts of the world. People looking into Toronto from other cities will see different angles of the open-air space surrounding Dundas Square. The connections will depend on time zones and agreements between Toronto and the other cities. There are already four candidates for connections. A two-way trial connection will first be set up between the Deconism Gallery, 330 Dundas Street, in Toronto and the Galleria Umberto in Naples. The first GVS rotunda will be built in Toronto, and the first permanent connection will be with Milan to celebrate the twinning of the two cities in the summer of 2003. Ultimately, the eight spots should be filled in turn by Naples, Milan, Siena, Paris, Warsaw, Sao Paolo and Seoul, and it is hoped eventually also to serve as an element of Canada’s offering to the World Exhibit of Nagoya in 2005. The Toronto GVS will only be the first of these installations and it is expected to inspire other cities to develop their own nodal centres and permanent connections.
The GVS is dedicated to the memory of Marshall McLuhan and Guglielmo Marconi.
The structure would be placed at the South-West corner of Dundas Square across the Eaton Centre (the canopy runs on a bias from the North-West to North-East corner). It should have a 20-25 meter diameter and the external circular wall should either be transparent or have eight doors opening up widely to the scene outside the structure so that people across the planet could see the city and the activity at each point.
Paolo Di Caterina
Connected Intelligence: The Arrival of the Web Society
II International Philosphy Convention in Sila, june 28 2007, Serra Pedace - june 29/30 2007, Silvana Mansio - Francesco Saverio Alessio - Antonio Tursi - Emiliano Morrone - Derrick De Kerkhove - photography: Carmine Talerico - © copyright 2007
In Connected Intelligence, Derrick de Kerckhove speculates on the consequences of massive global networking and what might happen if it reaches a critical mass of "connected intelligence." Will the sum total of people's connected intelligence be vastly more intelligent than any one person's intelligence could hope to be? This startling proposition points directly to the possibility that we are undergoing one of the greatest leaps in the evolution of our species. Connected intelligence may be the next step in the evolution of human intelligence.
Connected Intelligence (Somerville, 1997) introduced his research on new media and cognition.
Olympia
Ionian capital fragment in Olympia - Photography by Francesco Saverio Alessio © copyright, 1998
The sacred precinct, named the Altis, was primarily dedicated to Zeus, although other gods were worshipped there. The games conducted in his name drew visitors from all over the Greek world as one of a group of such "Panhellenic" centres, which helped to build the identity of the ancient Greeks as a nation. Despite the name, it is nowhere near Mount Olympus in northern Greece, where the Twelve Olympians, the major deities of Ancient Greek religion, were believed to live.
"The medium is the message"
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher and scholar - a professor of English Literature, a literary critic and a communications theorist. McLuhan's work is considered as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory.
The title "The Medium Is the Massage" is a teaser—a way of getting attention. There's a wonderful sign hanging in a Toronto junkyard which reads, 'Help Beautify Junkyards. Throw Something Lovely Away Today.' This is a very effective way of getting people to notice a lot of things. And so the title is intended to draw attention to the fact that a medium is not something neutral—it does something to people. It takes hold of them. It rubs them off, it massages them and bumps them around, chiropractically, as it were, and the general roughing up that any new society gets from a medium, especially a new medium, is what is intended in that title."
Marshall McLuhanLinks
This is a section of the site dedicated to the Mediterranean Architecture and that, going from the Mezquita de Cordoba to the Tiberius's Villa Iovis in Capri, from the Adalberto Libera's Villa Malaparte always in Capri until the Francesco Venezia's Gibellina Museum, from the Le Corbusier's Ronchamp Chapel to the Abbazia Florens of Gioacchino da Fiore and Luca Campano through the undergrounds of Naples, the underground architecture of the Greek Roman caverns exposed to the XVII Triennale of Milan, the ages, the cultural migrations, the Urbanism and Etno-Psychiatry, sometimes the losses, sometimes the contaminations, through various values and the religions, the aesthetic valences, with the contribution of personal written and of others Authors, of photography's, designs and other types of iconographic representations, 3d rendering, cad, videos, wants indicate a reflection course on this argument.
