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<\/p>\nThis morning was nice and sunny. I sat in the park for awhile, basking, relaxing. And then started working my way towards some sights. I passed a statue of Cavour; he rates not only an admiring nude woman but a bronze wreath.<\/p>\n
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I went into a smallish church, the Church of San Francesco da Paola. I was thinking that churches are, in their own way, a medium, expressing — what? The church as objective correlative for the human head. All the gnarly colorful stuff inside, bejeweled and layered. Dig the incense censer hanging from the ceiling.<\/p>\n
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Next I happened on the Breara Palace, a big stone building right there on a city street, it's an art school downstairs and a museum upstairs. It was great seeing all the students. There's nothing like the warm sound of human voices bouncing off that lovely, worn stone.<\/p>\n
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This picture was in the gallery or “pinacoteca” upstairs at Breara Palace, it kind of got to me, the genuine sorrow of the kneeling guy, yes, I know it's rather ripely romantic, almost like a fantasy book cover, but something about the raw emotion made me feel great sympathy for the artist. Federico Faruffini, Sordello e Cunizza<\/i>, about 1850. “Oh, Cunizza, I love you so.”<\/p>\n
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Speaking of elegant Italian men, here's Gustavo, a friend of Arianna Dagnino, the woman who was my translator for the panel. I like the skulls on the velvet collar a lot. This is no raggedy-ass hippie, by the way, this a serious businessman who organizes trade fairs. After all, Armani is based in Milano as well as Prada.<\/p>\n
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We did the panel on “Digital Eternity,” with Arianna — what's the word — proctoring, emceeing, chairing, intervening. Whatever you call it, she did a great job. (I mentioned Arianna's email interview with me about the lifebox and digital immortality a few blog entries back, as regular readers may recall.) Right behind her is Carlo Galimberti, who teaches in Milano, and edited a book on Cyberpsychology<\/i>. Like you can make a burn victim feel better by putting them into a VR that's a world of ice. He made the point that if you could upload people into computers, you'd want to store a bunch of them together, as humans are social.<\/p>\n
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On my other side sat Francesco Lentini, an intense programmer who's created a virtual girl called Eloisa<\/a>. She uses something like an Eliza algorithm to talk to you, also she has a mesh face that moves when she talks, forming expressions. I think he actually keeps adding good snappy answers to Eloise's code, provoking Carlo to ask if he's like Flaubert, who said, “Madame Bovary, c'est moi.<\/i>”<\/p>\n I talked about my lifebox idea, noting that all kinds of different ideas can come together to make this watered-down form of digital immortality a commercial reality soon. There's a lot about it in my forthcoming book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.<\/i><\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/images\/lentini.jpg\")
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