Looking forward to partipating in the annual Dialoghi di Pistoia this weekend with some reflections on the state of human/robot interaction in the current era of AI and machine learning
#DialoghiPistoia
#fondazionecaript
#pistoia
Coming up next May 19 in Milan at the Milano LUISS Hub: a conversation about coffee, the history of materials, industrial design, the fascist autarchy campaigns, and many other threads of 20th century cultural history.
@luissuniversitypress
This coming Tuesday, April 28th, in the Dana Palmer seminar room at @harvardcomplit I will be giving a talk entitled "How to Read an Unreadable Book" in which I propose a demonstration/reading of an artist’s book: in this case one of designer-artist-design educator Bruno Munari’s LIBRI ILLEGIBILI. @mu_naria
Munari’s are some of the most famous and inventive artist’s book of the 20th century.
They are books “about” perforations, materials, threads, folds, rips and cuts. Several were made during his stint as a visiting professor at Harvard’s Carpenter Center in 1967, among them the one for New York’s @themuseumofmodernart that I will unfold and decode in my Poggioli talk.
Look forward to some show and tell as well.
A short trip from cover to cover that recapitulates the history of one of the iconic domestic objects of the 20th century: the stovetop coffeemaker.
For more information:
https://luissuniversitypress.it/pubblicazioni/storia-damore-di-alluminio-e-caffeina
and
/2026/03/17/the-romance-of-aluminum-and-caffeine-redux/
On exhibition right now at the LUISS (Rome): Storia d'amore di alluminio e caffeina and a family of Bialetti Moka Express stovetop coffeemakers.
/2026/03/17/the-romance-of-aluminum-and-caffeine-redux/
The PEIRCE INTERPRETS PEIRCE project has now gone live at https://peirce-team.github.io/website/
Charles S. Peirce left a vast archive of manuscripts on semiotics, logic, and the philosophy of science — much of it still underexplored. Advances in OCR/HTR, NLP, and knowledge graphs now make it possible to revisit this archive and surface new insights into Peirce's theory of signs and his universal categories.
The project aims to build a curated, high-fidelity digital corpus of Peirce's manuscripts and analyze linguistic, conceptual, and diagrammatic patterns using AI-driven methods.
@metalabharvard
Copies in hand of @luissuniversitypress Nautilus #20 book: STORIA D'AMORE DI ALLUMINIO E CAFFEINA
with more information available at /2026/03/17/the-romance-of-aluminum-and-caffeine-redux/
Looking forward to participating in Pavia Innovation Week on April 9. My panel will be a conversation entitled "Lo sapevate che anche l’italiano è un algoritmo?" with the linguist Giuseppe Antonelli from the University of Pavia and @massimosideri
Now available from LUISS University Press: a revised, updated, Italian version of my cultural history of coffee consumption with a focus on interwar stovetop coffee makers like the Bialetti Moka Express. The book is accompanied by a new afterword which reflects critically on the economic viability of the "made in Italy" model.
At the core of the book, is an account of how the autarchic cult of national materials promoted by the fascist regime reshaped the design practices of the the 1930s and beyond.
https://luissuniversitypress.it/pubblicazioni/storia-damore-di-alluminio-e-caffeina/
