Our home in Cyberspace

Dear friends and family
Kjære venner og familie
Cari amici e famiglie

All our best wishes to you for Christmas and the New Year, 2008!!
Alle våre beste hilsner a dere for Julen e det Nye Året, 2008!!
Tanti auguri per Natale e l'Anno Nuovo, 2008!!

Patrick & Patrizia

Here's a video/ photo montage we made from a horseback trip we enjoyed while we were in Chile this summer, organised (excellently) by Ritoque Expediciones who are based near Concòn, just north of Valparaiso on the Pacific Coast.

Great experience, beautiful views and nice company, and thanks from us both to one and all who made it possible!

The horizon is always long, low and very present as you cycle along the River Po. Here a view about 25 km from our starting point at Pontelagoscuro, not far north of Ferrara, heading downstream on the Right Hand Po Cycle Path

Right Bank of the Po, heading downstream. The water level of the Po is pretty high at the moment after heavy rains lately

Typical farm bulidings nestling safely behind the right bank of the Po

The other week (April 27th to May 1st), while we were in Turkey for a long weekend visit to Istanbul together with our Bologna friends Irene Ruggero and Carlo Coniglio, we had the interesting and inspiring experience of being able to mingle with the enormous crowds of turkish citizens of all age groups, with a very large component of young people, both male and female, who took part in a vast peaceful demonstration in support of a secular state.

The scene above is from a brief gathering with public appeals and speeches held around the Independence Memorial in Taksim Square, high up on the East bank of the Golden Horn.

The Taksim area itself is well worth a visit in any case in order to enjoy the excellent views of the old city center on the other bank of the Golden Horn with the Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque and the Topkapi Palace, and then to walk down the lively pedestrian precinct which meanders all the way back down to the waterfront again.

The Philosophy of Computer Games:
An Interdisciplinary Conference

January 25th to 27th 2007

University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
Department of Social, Cognitive and Quantitative Sciences
42100 Reggio Emilia
ITALY

Dear Friends, Colleages, Students

This is the second announcement for the international conference "The Philosophy of Computer Games. An Interdisciplinary Conference", to be held at the Department of Social, Cognitive and Quantitative Sciences, Ex-Caserma Zucchi, Viale A. Allegri 9, Reggio Emilia from the 25th to 27th of January 2007

The purpose of the conference is to initiate an investigation into philosophical issues that is relevant to current research on computer games.

More detailed information is available on the conference website.
http://game.unimore.it

We hope to create a lively, informal and first and foremost interdisciplinary atmosphere, and you are cordially invited to attend and take part in the discussions.

A flyer for the event is enclosed with this mail, and we ask you to kindly circulate this, and otherwise publicise the event for those you know who may be interested in attending.

The whole conference has been recorded for web broadcasting and an edited video version is now available at http://tv.unimore.it

Registration may be carried out by sending an e-mail to olav.asheim@ifikk.uio.no.

There is no conference fee.

Welcome to Reggio Emilia!

Patrick Coppock
Locally Responsible in Reggio Emilia for the Organising Committee

Conference Programme

Thursday 25th
COMPUTER GAME ENTITIES

10.00 Registration

11.00 Introduction

11.10 Fictional, Simulated, Real: Towards an Ontology of Game Objects
Professor Espen Aarseth, Center for Computer Games Research, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

12.00 Lunch

13.30 The Reality of Game Objects
Ph.d. candidate John Richard Sageng, University of Oslo, Norway

14.00 Gaming as an Aide to Metaphysical Speculation
Richard Clarkson, University of Durham, UK

14.30 The Temporality of Gaming
Associate professor Hallvard Fossheim, University of Oslo, Norway

15.00 Break

16.00 Is our Actual World Interactive: Some Philosophical Reflections about Videogaming and Life
Ph.d. candidate Dario Compagno, University of Siena, Italy

16.30 The Ludic Parenthesis
Professor Olav Asheim, University of Oslo, Norway


Friday 26th
PLAYER EXPERIENCE


10.00 Videogames, Fiction, and Reality
Visiting Assistant Professor Jonathan Frome, School of Film and Digital Media, University of Central Florida, USA

10.30 On The Phenomenology of Virtual Worlds
Ph.d. candidate Tarjei Mandt Larsen, University of Tromsø, Norway

11.00 The Irreducible Self. Image Studies of First Person Perspective Computer Games
Dr. Stephan Guenzel, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany

11.30 Visual Perception, Motor Action, and the Video Game Experience
Assistant Professor Ole Ertloev Hansen, VR Media Lab, Aalborg Universitet, Denmark

12.00 Lunch

13.30 Goals, Affects, and Empathy in Games
Research Assistant Petri Lankoski, Media Lab, University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland

14.00 Feeling So Real ? a Phenomenological Exploration of the Realities of Emotions in Play
Olli Leino, Researcher, Dr. of Art candidate, Faculty of Art & Design, Dept. of Media, University of Lapland, Finland.

14.30 Ludic Reality: a construct for analysing meaning-mapping and epistemology in play
Dan Pinchbeck, Senior Lecturer, Department of Creative Technologies, University of Portsmouth, UK

15.00 Break

16.00 Virtual Consciousness and the Imaginary: A Phenomenological Sketch
Assistant Professor Nicolas De Warren, Wellesley College, UK

16.30 "Gamescapes": Spatial Orientation Without Physical Objects.
Associate Professor Anita Leirfall, University of Bergen. Norway

17.00 Virtual Realism: Player, Perception and Action in Video Game Play
Hanna K. Sommerseth, Graduate School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, The University of Edinburgh, Scotland

17.30 Playing Dress-Up: Costumes, roleplay and imagination
Ludica: Janine Fron, Independent Artist/Designer, Tracy Fullerton, University of Southern California, Jacquelyn Ford Morie, University of Southern California, Celia Pearce, Georgia Institute of Technology (presenter)


Saturday 27th
THE ETHICS OF COMPUTER GAMES

10.00 Gamers and the Good Life
Adam R. Briggle, The VICI Research Project: The Evaluation of the Cultural Quality of New Media, Department of Philosophy, University of Twente, Netherlands

10.30 Computer Games and Reality: Transworld Identities
Patrick Coppock, Researcher, Department of Social, Cognitive and Quantitative Science, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy

11.00 Virtual Ethics: The Ethics of Virtual Worlds
Edward H. Spence, The VICI Research Project: The Evaluation of the Cultural Quality of New Media, Department of Philosophy, University of Twente, Netherlands

11.30 Targeting the Kids: Computer Games as War Propaganda
Rune Ottosen, Oslo University College, Norway

12.00 Lunch

13.30 Severe Pain or Suffering: Videogames, Morality and Torture
MSc Student Peter Rauch, Comparative Media Studies. M.I.T., USA

14.00 Ethics and Practice in Virtual Worlds
Ren Reynolds

14.30 Instrumentalism and the Ethics of Videogame Play: The Tactical Iraqi Controversy
Writing Director Elizabeth Losh, University of California, USA

15.00-16.00 Closing Session

Sunset, Solnedgang, Tramonto Vada Italy 2006

Dear friends and colleagues, kjære venner og kolleger, cari amici/he e colleghi/e

We wish you a pleasant and peaceful Christmas & New Year holiday, and best wishes for 2007!!
Våre varmeste ønsker for en hyggelig og fredfull julefeiringa, og til lykke med 2007!!
Auguriamo una piacevole e pacifica feste di natale e capod'anno, e tanti auguri per il 2007!

Patrick & Patrizia

We passed this charming summer pasture cabin on our walk up towards the peaks of the Vedrette di Ries Range

Looking towards the top end of the valley and Anterselva di Sopra from near Anterselva di Mezzo. We were there last weekend, and caught the first snows of the winter and some really beautiful (if chilly at times) weather.

A forest path at the Passo del Eremo, close to Marradiand Palazzuolo sul Senio, Toscana, July 20th 2006

[When in Palazzuolo, we stayed at the Locanda Senio - to be recommended ]


The inner Apennines seen from Passo del Eremo.

A wonderful place of silence and beauty, ideal for quiet reflection in a turbulent world....

Les Drus, Chamonix, France

Here we are again, at the start of yet another year.

Time flies, but the clear, cool beauty of the mountains remains - so far at least....

I've finally managed to find som time to put online a Webmedia Space page for us at .Mac (where everything is very easy to administer, and thanks to Apple for that!) where we can share images and other multimedia impressions from our travels, various cultural events we have experienced first hand, conferences etc.

I will also add it to the links menu on this page, and on my work page

The new website of the Italian Association of Semiotic Studies (AISS) is now online!

Sample posting from the home page:

Il XXXII Congresso dell'Associazione Italiana di Studi Semiotici, dedicato a "Il discorso della salute. Testi, pratiche, culture", avrà luogo a Spoleto (Pg), presso il Chiostro San Nicolò, dal 29 ottobre all'1 novembre 2004.

Il Congresso è organizzato in collaborazione con la Fondazione SigmaTau. Ha ottenuto il patrocinio e un contributo della Regione Umbria, della Provincia di Perugia e del Comune di Spoleto, delle Università di Palermo e Perugia, nonché un contributo della Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio e della Credito e Servizi di Spoleto. Hanno altresì contributo all'organizzazione la Società italiana di Antropologia della medicina e la Fondazione Angelo Celli.

Data la forte caratterizzazione interdisciplinare dell'incontro, sono stati invitati, accanto a un folto gruppo di semiologi italiani e non, anche studiosi di altre discipline come l'antropologia, la filosofia, la sociologia, l'etnometodologia, la psichiatria e la psicanalisi, nonché esperti e rappresentanti del mondo dei mass media.

Sono disponibili: il programma, la lista della relazioni e degli abstract, l'elenco delle comunicazioni dei soci con gli abstract, il programma del workshop di sociosemiotica. Sono previste, inoltre, due tavole rotonde, sul sintomo e il discorso e sulle droghe e altre dipendenze.

[Visit the AISS home page >>]

Click here to see my short video montage (now accessible via the AISS website) from the 2003 AISS XXXI Conference "Semiofood. Comunicazione e cultura del cibo", held in Castiglioncello, 3-5 October 2003.

The other week I took a very tough decision: to participate personally in the national protest of public university researchers at present in progress against the draft law proposed by the Italian Minister of Educationa and Researh, Letizia Moratti. In essence the proposal contains legislationary strategies which will change in decisive ways the legal status of university researchers and professors, in an attempt to make the university system - as the minister herself has frequently stated - "more flexible.". The protest now in progress represents a large body of opinion among members of the university community that considers the proposals in the present draft law as potentially harmful to quantity and, more importantly, the quality of scientific research in public universities in Italy in the future.

For more on the proposed draft law see the following review of the situation as of September 30th on The Scientist website: Italy's academics threaten strike.

My contribution to the protest so far has been to promote and present for subsequent adoption by our Faculty Council of a motion, signed by myself and two other researchers at the School of Communication and Economic Science at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, against the content of the draft law.

Got back the week before last on Saturday night (or rather Sunday morning - June 13th at 2 am!!) from St. Petersburg [here is an alternative St. Petersburg website] in Russia, where we spent three very interesting days (with beautiful weather too!) while on our way back to Italy from three pleasant and stimulating days in Imatra, where we took part in an international semiotics seminar entitled "What Is Communication - Epistemological and Empirical Foundations of Transmission Signs". Here are some video-clips from my and other presentations in Imatra.

This was only one of an impressive list of seminars constituting an annual event in Imatra known as The Semiotic Web: The International Summer School For Semiotic And Structural Studies organised by the well-known International Semiotics School, coordinated by Eero Tarasti, who must surely qualify for the title of "Mr Semiotics Himself" in Finland.

As the Imatra website points out, Imatra is a border town which shares a frontier with Russia. The former industrial settlement of Enso (now the Russian town of Svetogorsk) lies just on the other side of the border, which means that Imatra and Svetogorsk are in the unique position of being the only twin towns which gaze at one another over the border between the European Union and Russia, so it was quite obvious that if we were in Imatra, we could not avoid making the trip over the order to St. Petersburg, which is in fact only about five hours by train from Imatra (via and Vyborg)

It was well worth the trip!

However, to end off this note, a few well-chosen words to Russian President Vladimir Putin:

Please, please do something to make your tourist visa application process more simple!!

At the present time it is necessary first to book a hotel for the entire period you intend to visit Russia for (not always easy either). Then you have to ask the hotel or agency you book with to fax you back a letter confirming your booking. You then have to send this letter with your visa application to the Russian embassy in your homeland. When you get the visa back it is only valid for the exact period covered by your hotel bookings.

This all makes the whole travel planning and visa application process for Russia much more rigid and complicated than necessary.

I am quite sure that with a bit of goodwill and some fresh thinking on the part of the Russian immigration and tourism authorities the whole process could be quite easily made more simple and user-friendly.

If you really do want more people to visit beautiful, dynamic and culturally significant cities like St. Petersburg and to develop and maintain a positive impression of Russia as a tourist-friendly place, then paying close attention to these kinds of details will be absolutely vital!

Patrizia and I got back from Phnom Penh last Thursday (February 20th) after a two and a half week visit to Cambodia. It was the first time for both of us and the whole trip proved to be a very interesting and exciting experience. Our journey back home was fairly long (amongst other things 13 hours by air from Singapore to Paris) but that did not at all put a damper on our enthusiasm and enjoyment of the whole thing. The weather in Cambodia was clement and rain-free the whole time and we were able to see quite a bit, both in Phnom Penh and at Angkor Wat (more on this later...). The main stimulus for our visit was provided by a couple of friends and colleagues of Patrizia who are involved in coopertive scientific work in Cambodia: anthropologist Matilde Callari Galli of the School of Educational Science at the University of Bologna who for a number of years has been involved in the development of, amongst many other projects, a Master in Tourism Management at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, and mass media researcher Stefano Magistretti of the Department of Italian Studies at the University of London who is at present spending a year in Phnom Penh to study the effects of the growth of internet based communication in the region on the development of Cambodian society. While there he is based at the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the Royal University. More later....

Friday last I sent a proposal forwarded by myself, Giovanna Cosenza and Patrizia for a workshop on the semiotics of new media. The workshop is conceived as part of the session Theoretical semiotics and epistemology" at the 8th Congress of the International Association of Semiotic Studies, Semio2004: Signs of the world : Interculturality and globalisation

The congress is presented in the following way on the Semio2004 website:

"Signs are conceived and circulate in a world whose recent evolution implies a change in the nature of geopolitical and intercultural relations. The evolution in the means of exchange, in the representations of the world and the strategies devised by political and institutional actors lead semioticians to appraise and update their concepts and analysis tools.."

The general mandate for the section on theoretical semiotics and epistemology is as follows:

?The theoretical origins of semiotics will be subject to contemporary debate on the sign and communication. Do New Information and Communication Technologies (N.I.C.T.) require semiotics to invent special methods or procedures for analysis and interpretation? In this framework great theoretical questions about the objects and the boundaries of semiotics will also be tackled.?

Well worth a visit....

They say:

"SITO.org is a non-profit website. SITO's mission is to promote art, artists and the exploration of new art forms. To that end, we offer a host of free services to artists, including space in our Artchive and experimental fun in our Synergy collaborative art projects. SITO has been operating non-stop since 1993."

A while back I took part in organising a miniseminar on youth mobility, together with Nicola Bigi, highly prized collaborator in my semiotics course at the School of Communication, Economic and Information Science of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia; Stefano Spaggiare, a young italian lone world traveller, due shortly to leave from Carpi for a round world trip of about two years; and Marilena Cataldi, with a new Master in the Economics and Ethics of Tourism (MEET) of the University of Bologna (organised in Rimini), who is working on a microeconomics project to develop responsibile/sustainable forms of tourism in Albania.
The miniseminar, titled suggestively "Viaggiamo o spostiamo: gli sviluppi del turismo dopo che il baco del duemila non ha cancellato il mondo" (here is the visual support for my presentation), was part of a larger event named EUROPA/N'DO' which has as its objective to inform interested young people from university and European volunteer environments about mobility policies and programmes promoted by the European Commission.
We were joined by 30-40 enthusastic participants on Saturday, November 15 at the antique Castello di Rossena, in the beautiful Reggio Emilia Appennines , in countryside clothed in stupendous autumn colours.
EUROP/AN'DO' was organised in its entirety by the Reggio Emilia based cultural association microsophia, founded recently by a group of students and other young people active in european and internatrional volunteer work.
Saturday evening there was also the opening of a small but excellent photograpy exhibition entitled "Di êter pòst", with work by four young photographers from Reggio Emilia: Alessandro Mortari, Federico Salsi, Silvia Sai and Cosimo Bizzarri, represent themes and motives which are both pungent and esthetic from places so different as São Paolo in Brazil, Lisbon in Portugal and Berlìn in Germany.
Sunday morning there was also time for us to follow a very interesting and informative guided tour thanks to our hospitable and well-informed castle custodian.
This whole weekend has been an inspiring and pleasing experience!

Just added the excellent "Comment" function today, courtesy of the "Blog Back" site. which has been non operative for a while, but now back in action. Feel free to try it out and comment on our site!

Thanx a million, BB folks!

This Easter we spent a few restful days in Chamonix where we did some skiing and walking in the mountains. Most of the pistes were closed since Easter was quite late this year, and we are nearing the end of the skiing season in the Alps. But we did manage a day at the Grandes Montets, where the excellent weather allowed us to finally do the superb black piste Point de Vue, which runs from the Aiguille des Grandes Montets (3233 m) and back down to Lognan, all the time with a continuing and changing panorama of the Glacier d'Argentiere on your right hand side. Fantastic!


Mont Blanc summit (4810,40 m) from Aiguille du Midi

Then a couple of days before we went back to Bologna we had the good fortune to have yet another perfect weather day, which allowed us to ski the Vallé Blanche (with a guide) for the second time.



A not uneventful trip, however, since one of our group had some rather serious technical problems right from the start, and after rather a lot of toing and froing, our guide decided to call a rescue helicopter and have him airlifted out. As it turned out this was exactly the right thing to do, since the piste over the glacier at this time of the year is very dangerous indeed, due to the generally low levels of surface snow and the concurrent risk of encountering small and large crevasses.

The photos are all grabbed from a digital video I made during the trip (with a Canon MV550i), so the image quality is only moderate, but they still give quite a good idea of what our trip was like. We were five in all who completed the trip, myself, Patrizia, Sam and Mark from London, and our guide, Nicole.


Click on the image of the Vallé Blanche above to begin the photo series.

With this sign of life and hope we wish family and friends around the world a very pleasant and peaceful Easter weekend and holiday!



Auguriamo con questo segno di vita e speranza una buona e pacifica festa di pasqua a tutti nostri cari amici e parenti intorno in tutto il mondo!

Med dette tegnet av liv og håp vi ønsker våre kjære venner og slekt omkring i hele verden en riktig hyggelig og fredfult påske!

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Some pictures from the peace demonstration in Piazza Maggiore, Bologna, Thursday, March 20th 2003









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