Peoplequotepeople is another valuable fist against that heavy and tired unhistorical giant called authorship, who is still trying to stop the provocative and revolutionary evolution of the network(ed) culture. The project seemingly takes the shape of a very broad collection of famous quotes, sorted either by name and letter: Paolo Cirio, member of the legendary epidemiC clan, and co-author of GWEI and Amazon Noir, has coded a schizophrenic database, which, in a Luther Blissett style, uses the quotations as a tool to spread some plagiaristic panic around famous names like Albert Einstein, Diogenes, Shakespeare and Adolf Hitler. ‘People quote people’ laughs at thousand years of human knowledge conceived as individualistic process, literally embodied into men, things and places of that sort of culture which gives birth to heroes and identity-based mythology, in order to act conservatively on reality and spread hegemony. This project tries to focus on the hidden role of the collective intelligence, important actor without identity, in creating and spreading knowledge. Now, ambiguous charachters like Buddha, Homer and Shakespeare gain new perspectives, and the fathers of the mediatic guerrilla, like Monty Cantsin, see a new dawn; among them, grows the seed of the free and shareable knowledge which finds in the network its digital materiality and finally release, uncontrolled, the pure data flow, without any istitutional packaging proving any sort of required scientifical certification of validity or officiality. ‘People quote people’ is one of those simple but effective ideas, wandering in the potentialities of the nets until their sudden apparition, starting new paths of meanings, and depicting new scenarios of usage for the open knowledge and technologies.

Tony Canonico