Photos by Jacek Barcikowski
Bio
I was born in Rome, Italy, and I currently live in London, UK. I have been studying media and communications, digital media and semiotics in Rome, Copenhagen, Bologna and London. My interests include video game theory and culture, digital media, fakes and 'new media' art.
Academy
I
am a Ph.D. and Visiting Tutor at the Media and Communications
department at Goldsmiths, University of London. My research project
is a cultural analysis of video game consumers and, particularly, of
the emergence of the prosumer in the video game industry. It involves
a study of the concepts of consumer and producer, the history of the
medium of the video game and phenomena such as 'modding', independent
gaming, open engines and game art. While analysing discourses
surrounding the 'Playstation hacking', the Independent Games
Festival, Minecraft, gamification and game development kits, I
propose a new perspective to the linear and hierarchic division
between producers and consumers.
The
idea for this research project comes from a long experience in video
game journalism. I have published several papers on these topics,
worked as a translator, as a guest lecturer in higher education and
presented at international conferences in Europe and the USA. From
2010, I am also studying for the PGCert (Management of Learning and
Teaching in Higher Education).
In
2012 I joined the Gamification Lab at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana
Universität in Lüneburg, Germany. As a Research Fellow I will be
investigating recent developments in the video game industry,
particularly the ethical and political implications of new forms of
consumer engagement.
Since
2011 I am a Lecturer at London South Bank University. I teach about
video game culture (Game Contexts module) and supervise students'
final dissertations at the Game Cultures programme.
Art
I am a member of the artist group IOCOSE. Our mission is to subvert ideologies, processes and practices of identification and production of meanings. We work with camouflage, mimicry, fakes and pranks, mostly based in news, social and mass media. Among our works, we have hijacked an exhibition at Tate Modern, invented a spam campaign for the Italian Democratic Party, designed a religious hi-tech product based on electric shock, crafted an IKEA guillottine, experimented a drug made out of floppy discs, and organized an international contest for the most valueless video on YouTube. We have exhibited, among many, at the Venice Biennale (2011, 2013), Tate Modern (London, UK, 2011), Science Gallery (Dublin, Ireland, 2012) Jeu de Paume (Paris, France, 2011), FACT (Liverpool, UK, 2012), Shift festival (Basel, Switzerland, 2010), The Influencers (Spain, 2010).
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