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Notes from a Future Past

The notes from a future past are new thoughts generated from the writings of 1989, Design of New Words, a text composed in parallel with the drafting of my thesis at the University La Sapienza of Rome, under the supervision of architect Franco Purini. In those years, the first computers began to appear in the faculty: rare machines, almost objects to avoid, observed with suspicion rather than curiosity. My research, instead, was nourished by public libraries, by photocopies annotated by hand, by pages that returned to the studio to become writings composed on a typewriter. Today those materials take digital form and are published on the web, crossing a temporal leap that carries them from an analog era into a completely new dimension. At that time it was not easy to find information, and even less could one imagine the existence of something we now call artificial intelligence. For this reason, the reading of the text may appear “artificial” to those who do not know the study practices of that period; for others, instead, it will be natural to recognize the intellectual and physical labor that research required in those years. Now all we can do is adapt our habits to this new practice of collective knowledge, capable of expanding our vision of the world just as happened with the arrival of the computer fifty years ago. I continue to write and think with my own brain, remembering that what is around me is part of me, in every way and form.

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