This morning was nice and sunny. I sat in the park for awhile, basking, relaxing. And then started working my way towards some sights. I passed a statue of Cavour; he rates not only an admiring nude woman but a bronze wreath.
I went into a smallish church, the Church of San Francesco da Paola. I was thinking that churches are, in their own way, a medium, expressing — what? The church as objective correlative for the human head. All the gnarly colorful stuff inside, bejeweled and layered. Dig the incense censer hanging from the ceiling.
Next I happened on the Breara Palace, a big stone building right there on a city street, it's an art school downstairs and a museum upstairs. It was great seeing all the students. There's nothing like the warm sound of human voices bouncing off that lovely, worn stone.
This picture was in the gallery or “pinacoteca” upstairs at Breara Palace, it kind of got to me, the genuine sorrow of the kneeling guy, yes, I know it's rather ripely romantic, almost like a fantasy book cover, but something about the raw emotion made me feel great sympathy for the artist. Federico Faruffini, Sordello e Cunizza, about 1850. “Oh, Cunizza, I love you so.”
Speaking of elegant Italian men, here's Gustavo, a friend of Arianna Dagnino, the woman who was my translator for the panel. I like the skulls on the velvet collar a lot. This is no raggedy-ass hippie, by the way, this a serious businessman who organizes trade fairs. After all, Armani is based in Milano as well as Prada.
We did the panel on “Digital Eternity,” with Arianna — what's the word — proctoring, emceeing, chairing, intervening. Whatever you call it, she did a great job. (I mentioned Arianna's email interview with me about the lifebox and digital immortality a few blog entries back, as regular readers may recall.) Right behind her is Carlo Galimberti, who teaches in Milano, and edited a book on Cyberpsychology. Like you can make a burn victim feel better by putting them into a VR that's a world of ice. He made the point that if you could upload people into computers, you'd want to store a bunch of them together, as humans are social.
On my other side sat Francesco Lentini, an intense programmer who's created a virtual girl called Eloisa. She uses something like an Eliza algorithm to talk to you, also she has a mesh face that moves when she talks, forming expressions. I think he actually keeps adding good snappy answers to Eloise's code, provoking Carlo to ask if he's like Flaubert, who said, “Madame Bovary, c'est moi.”
I talked about my lifebox idea, noting that all kinds of different ideas can come together to make this watered-down form of digital immortality a commercial reality soon. There's a lot about it in my forthcoming book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.
This picture of me, by the way, was taken at the FuturShow fair right before the panel, by a Brazilian photographer Giancarlo Mecarelli who takes everyone's picture in front of these height-adjustable angel wings. I was wearing my sharpest suit to look good for the Italians, the “godfather” suit I got at Saks for Georgia's wedding.