Burning Rome is a wealth distribution map of the Italian capital. Most maps of this kind display only average values according to each area of a city. Burning Rome also does that, but the unusual thing about it is that you can actually zoom down to the single household and see the declared income of the individual.

Rome is the city where I grew up in. Since I started exploring it during my adolescence, I’ve been exposed to the socio-economic divisions of the city, the sad ghettoization of some areas and the posh pockets of extreme wealth. This project attempts to visualize what is largely already common knowledge, but while doing so it can shed some light on another important issue.

Arguably what’s most informative of this map is not discovering where the really rich are, but where some of the really poor live. Since the data is based upon income declarations, and since such declaration is often tweaked in order to hide wealth to the fiscal agency (a despicably common practice in the Italian scene), it’s reasonable to expect that the rich will not declare more than what they actually earn, while plenty of people certainly will declare much less than what they have. There will be probably a dozen more ways to explain the plethora of people living -according to the data- on the brink of poverty, yet somehow residing on the most expensive and exclusive areas of the city. Still, a reasonable doubt is raised.

The data used for this project is not updated and comes from a controversial data liberation initiative taken by the Italian IRS back in 2008, when all the fiscal declarations of the country relative to the year 2005 were published online. Even if the declaration of income is a public act and as such freely consultable, the Italian population, against every desirable and professed openness, demanded the dataset to be taken offline in the name of privacy.

Out of almost one million declarations for the city of Rome, 103.615 were sampled, geotagged and mapped with a color according to the income. Every personal information about individuals were discarded during the process.

I’d love to have fiscal data of Rome from every year and visualize the gentrification in progress. A man can dream.

Memeoirs was my third startup and definitely the one I loved the most. It was a webapp that allowed anyone to create a physical book out of online conversations. Email, Facebook or WhatsApp. Have you ever wondered what will happen to your letters and messages after the digital holocaust? We had the solution for you.

Developed with some of my best buddies under the collective name of Fitmemes, Memeoirs was born after an epiphany while staring at my mailbox. Laying in front of me were thousands of letters documenting more than half of my life. Just over a year later Memeoirs went online, where it stayed for 5 amazing years during which it lived all the phases of a typical startup. What follow is the original manifesto of the project.

Memeoirs: your emails in a book. Seriously? Yes, no joke.

We take communication very seriously and we realized the evocative power of our past correspondences. Being able to experience again the emotions connected with what we wrote and what others wrote to us can be a real thrill. Sometimes it’s like staring at the novel of your life.

While being participants of the pervasive real-time frenzy of The Internet, we at Fitmemes are also strong supporters of All Things Physical and of the reassuring stability of printed press. “These words will forever be on this page” reminds us of the value and the mono-tasking dedication we gave in writing a snail mail to our peers.

Created to merge this duality, Memeoirs is as broad and versatile as email can be and it reflects the habits of the author. It has been used to collect love letters, buddies emails, academic exchanges and even meeting minutes.

No matter what kind of email user you are, if you are reading this it’s because you probably give to your writing the attention it deserves. By bringing letters back to paper Memeoirs gives the opportunity to convey the timelessness and profundity of your ideas in a book. Make the best of it.

Update July 2015:
As of today, Youtube allows to see an immersive version of Chemin Vert out of the box. This is the best way to watch the video on a mobile device. Make sure to pick the best resolution (1440p)!

Chemin Vert is an immersive video of a trip on the road at supersonic speed spanning across five continents and four seasons. The title “Chemin Vert” refers to its soundtrack from musician A Ghost Train. The video exists in two forms: an immersive version and a “regular” video you can see on vimeo.

The bone shattering speed simulated is roughly over 1500 km/h (that’s close to 1000 mph, you imperialists). The whole concept is the visualization of one of my childhood fantasies, riding a rocket launched at full speed just above the ground of a long road.

Chemin Vert has been brewing over a few years. Different techniques were employed in the beginning, involving long trips on the road across Europe while shooting time-lapse videos on the go. Back then the scope of the project was substantially different, concentrating more on the augmentation (as in augmented-reality) of landscapes. At a certain point the focus was shifted on the aesthetic qualities of the landscapes and on the immersive factor. In the final version of Chemin Vert the original footage comes from Google Street View, without which this project wouldn’t have been possible. Thanks Google. Thoogle.

The original version of Chemin Vert as immersive, interactive video can be appreciated at its fullest resolution here. The ultimate form of Chemin Vert is still waiting to be built: an installation as a full-dome projection.

This project was developed using Flash, a now-defunct technology. In order to view it, you will need to install a browser plugin called Ruffle.
Firefox plugin | Chrome plugin

Slippery Concepts is semantic-crossword explorer. Start with a word of your choice. Clicking on a letter of that word, a new one is crossed. The relation is twofold: there’s an orthographic connection (the two words now share a letter in common) and a semantic link. The new word can be a synonym, a hyponym or a hypernym of the original one. This is the beginning of a journey that can potentially bring you from any word to any word in a given number of steps.

Henry Adams once said that “no one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous”. Slippery Concepts is a way to experience that first hand, building stairway-crosswords that rise up to new unpredictable meanings or slip down to the very core of language.

Conceived for a touch table installation, Slippery Concepts can be fun from a browser too.

I always loved Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. And Disney’s adaptation too! In this video the key scene of Alice falling down the rabbit hole is processed so that each frame is composed with pieces of that very same scene. In order to appreciate the strange loop of the clip it’s recommendable to watch it on a very large screen.

Beside marrying happily the self-referential nature of Alice in Wonderland, this technique is well applied on this particular scene in which our heroin descends through different levels, each of very marked hues.

A mesostic is like an acrostic with a poetic license: the vertical word intersects lines at any point instead of just at the beginning. Mesosticator is a very simple tool to help building up verses ala John Cage. The task is made particularly easier if either the vertical word or the larger horizontal corpus is already formed.