This project originates from the combined interplay of several different agents and skills.
My own special skill as an artist is the shaping of personal interactions, the making of "relational" objects, the visualization of the flows and transfers between several sets of languages and techniques.
This speciality of mine was the reason for Atypo to ask me to create an artist's book.
Some time ago, while I was contemplating ideas for an artwork, I became acquainted with a Rome-based hacker space called Unterwelt.
Fascinated as I am by the social implications of the open source and by the easy and free access to the countless advanced technologies and competences that the Unterwelt hacker space and the Unterwelt team generously provide (my special thanks to Federico Baciocchi!), I decided to conceive the book as a product of this encounter.

This artistic project brings together several issues:
1) The artist's book as a work of fine art;
2) My own interest for the contemporary semiotic systems and media;
3) The practice of art as a political tool;
4) The image as a means to understand the contemporary semiotic system (that of the advertising industry included).

This book I am preparing is composed of wide slabs of sculpted paraffin. They are reminiscent of ancient inscribed stones, and at first sight they seem to bear symbols of a past antedating the age of writing. I've rendered them as archaeological findings reminding us that the future has always already past.

By a semiotic point of view the connection between the modern logos and the remote petroglyphs is obvious.
With regard to the media I will operate a translation from the sculpted slabs into 3D-generated ones, thanks to the 3D-printer provided by the Rome-based group Unterwelt.

In addition to the object itself and to the printing process, on the back cover of the book a QR code will link to this same website, in which I explain and discuss the fab labs, their social impact and contribution, and the revolution brought forth by the open source programs and technologies.

The simultaneous presence of various symbols belonging to different eras and suggesting various functions or psychic states (as in entoptic phenomena) enables us to question our normal perception of both the logos and the commercial semiotic system.

By a formal point of view the pages of the book appear as square slides of either objects or grids, interlocking. That is to say, the odd pages bear the bulging symbols, while the even pages bear the bulging grid, and the even pages are conveniently moulded off in order for the bulging grid on the even pages to accommodate the bulging symbols into the odd pages when the book closes.
The symbols will appear within a univocal spatial orientation frame (that is, top and bottom are predefined) and they will show as an equivalent of doodles on a schoolchild's grid paper notebook dilating through space.
A side tracking shot of a set of symbols will appear: prehistorical petroglyphs, hieroglyphs, ideograms, big corporation logos, and many of those international logograms providing information or instructions about washing, assembling or proper usage of objects, devices and spaces.

Tatiana Villani
English translation by Lola Savino (http://lolasavino-katatronix.tumblr.com)