Is any of our creative expression really fruit of our labor? Internet and social networks act as the global hive mind many sci-fi writers have been dreaming about, constantly connecting humans and subliminally tickling at least two of our senses. Given the amount of information we’re exposed to nowadays, can we really say that we “create” or “invent” anything by ourselves?

In Isaac Newton’s letter to Robert Hooke (1676) we read [sic]:

“What Des-Cartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, & especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen further it is by standing on the sholders of Giants.”

While some believe Newton’s words meant to be sarcastic towards the rival¹, others noted that, at the time of writing, the two scientists were on good terms, which would indicate those were in fact words of reverence.
Set aside the conflicting views on this particular occurrence, it is worth noting that five centuries earlier John of Salisbury had written [sic]:

Bernard of Chartres used to say that we [the Moderns] are like dwarves perched on the shoulders of giants [the Ancients], and thus we are able to see more and farther than the latter.

making it the first documented appearance of the “dwarf on the shoulders of a giant” analogy.
We might dwell upon Newton giving credit to the ones who preceded him (possibly in a sarcastic fashion) and yet using words he did not forge himself, but this is not what this story is about. This is the story of how I got to “invent” without ever inventing anything.

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When I was a child, I remember often running to my mother screaming “Mom, look what I have invented!”, proudly showing something I had made. She very gently replied that I had “figured out” a way to my achievement, but the invention or discovery was to be attributed to someone else. It was her subtle way of teaching me the right expressions (I started “inventing” when I was about 6), while explaining me that the first person figuring out something was the one who deserved credit. She always told me that one day, maybe, I’d be “inventing” something myself. Today I see this as a lesson in humility.

I remember that, at some point in the mid 80’s, I was having a really hard time figuring out how binary numbers worked. I wanted to learn to code sprites and other things that required binary-encoded data.

As you may guess, there was no Google to ask to and the average 40-something math teacher from the time could not really explain me how 2 would suddenly turn into 10. Add insult to injury, I grew up in a small town in the south of Italy with very few friends in general, and even fewer interested in computers. Most of these just wanted to play video-games.

I won’t deny having a mild interest for the leisure features of the device and can recall spending many hours playing platformers, but I was mostly drawn to the C64 accompanying user manual for the “vast” amount of knowledge it contained about the machine. I was 14.

My main source of “new” knowledge were paper magazines and their pages choke-full of programs listings to type in, hoping no power surge would defy my efforts. Some of these programs were completely useless to me. What was a 12 years old kid supposed to do with an inventory for household insurance policies? If I close my eyes I can see the countless lines of DATA disguising commands for my computer behind a numeric, encoded form. It was tough to understand, but eventually I figured it out… scratching my head over the manual, translated to italian: the only language I knew.

It wasn’t easy to accept that POKE 53280,0 turned the outer side of my screen black, at least not without knowing why. I wish I could have bounced my ideas and shared the limited knowledge of programming with someone else. I would have loved to get better at that stuff with the help of a fellow geek (I ignored the existence of the word at the time).

On the bright side, my best friend had a C64 himself and a few accessories. One of these was a cartridge that allowed pausing the microprocessor to inspect the content of the computer’s RAM. This offered a peek into how those infamous sprites were constructed and allowed me to change their appearance, as well as inject Cheat Codes into the game. Of course I didn’t get the whole thing, but I swear: that knowledge I never really mastered came in handy a couple of decades later.

The other gadget I was able to put my hands on was a Modem. My friend had 2, so he lent me one so I could hook it to the landline my parents paid for. After a few tries we were able to dial each other’s number and communicate through our machines. That was groundbreaking in my mind: we could type onto each other’s screen and even execute programs. At night we would spend hours doing what many years later came to be known to us as “chatting”. Our mothers weren’t too happy about that, but they let us have fun, probably thinking we were better off in our rooms nerding out than out on the streets.

Upon fiddling with my C64’s motherboard to add some “features”, I caused a short-circuit and fried my machine.
I come from a lower-mid class family, and we could not afford to buy another personal computer: that was the end of my computer career, I thought.

I would eventually own an Amiga 600 which I never used to write code. At the time I was more interested in music and loved to play around with ProTracker. I exchanged music with my friends and learned to mix House records. I rarely would be by myself, and my music interests broadened.

My father had just bought a Vespa that was gonna be all mine. With this one our fleet would count three, one of which was used for our delivery service (my sister and I had begun working for the family business in our early teens). I was relentlessly searching for an activity that would feed my young maker’s needs, so I got interested in 2-strokes engines. It was the only type I had access to.
I was confident my dad wouldn’t remember me taking apart (and breaking to no avail) the C64 and TV. For the first month or two I used my vehicle to drive around and gain confidence on the road, as well as meeting other kids who had scooters or mopeds. Many of their vehicles were much faster than mine and way more performing.
What secrets were they hiding?

It turned out to be no secret at all: their engines were hacked. Bigger carburetors, exhaust pipes with specially designed chambers allowing a better flow of exhaust gasses, thus contributing to better fluid dynamics. Wait… I was about 15… what could I possibly know about those things?

I set myself to learn how an engine worked, but this time I was not alone: so many kids were taking apart their scooters, exchanging carburetors, slicing exhaust pipes to see what was inside and sharing information with one another. Had I found the right place for me? I believe I did.

I took my engine apart (not without any casualties), learned to use tools, started grinding down and/or sawing off parts of the cylinder and/or the piston. I moved to learning more about carburetors, special inlet hacks and a slew of other stuff. A few of us often gathered to take apart someone’s engine and hack the hell out of it, often cluelessly, learning by failure. We had to learn fast, as some parts of an engine were not exactly a like a piece of code you can fix and re-compile: once broken, they may never work again. The continuous flow of information led some of us to design and build their own exhaust pipes or inlet systems. These were the people I was inspired by.

I dropped out of university not before having met a handful of incredible people who loved to share knowledge about poetry, writing, graffiti, hip-hop, electronic music and “recreational activities”. During a year in the Navy, my next step after a failed attempt at University, I had the chance to become friend with an engineer who really knew his way around the Windows Terminal. We often voluntarily broke the officer’s computer by moving startup files around, so he would let us off duty to fix whatever there was wrong with that machine from hell. This was useful to keep my interest in computers alive during this year away from my hometown.

When I returned, I got a freelance job in a small design/pre-press studio. My task was typing manuscripts into a computer. The wage was ridiculous, but I was there to learn.

I could have worked from home but I’d be in the studio every time I could, as it gave me the opportunity to work around people who knew Photoshop, Corel Draw, Quark Express and Pagemaker, this last one had just been acquired by Adobe from previous owner Aldus. I liked “Aldus Pagemaker” better, made it feel as if an old guy, said Aldus, would manually compose the layout before printing a page. The studio owners knew how to process files, create assets for offset printing and much more. Most of all, they would share this knowledge with me and let me use their computers and software. I learned a lot from them, but at some point I felt I needed more, possibly different, input: creating on a computer could mean much more, and someone, somewhere, was doing what I wanted to learn, I just didn’t know what it was.

It wasn’t long before I left again, this time in search of fortune and more interests in Milan, almost one thousand kilometers (620 miles) away from what at the time was home.

With no prior knowledge of 3d I embarked in a real adventure and joined a master in 3d modeling and animation with SoftImage, which at the time I believed was pronounced the same as “Soft Image”. I ended up in a class with a bunch of peculiar individuals, each one with a different background, sharing an interest in learning 3d character design and animation. The teachers weren’t less unordinary for a small town boy.

I remember a few months of great interactions and exchanges, which led to extending my skill-set as a computer dude and as a human. I soon drifted away from 3d and got stranded onto a fairly unknown shore: Web and CD-ROM production.

During my second job in the field I hit a wall: there seemed to be people who didn’t really want to share the knowledge I was craving. Suddenly, in the workplace, the atmosphere was different, competitive, secretive.

I resorted to using Internet more and more to exchange information and learn from hundreds of people who cared about documenting their efforts in these incredibly interesting new fields: online/offline interactive experiences, games design and programming, computer vision and much, much more. Most of my contacts were fellow curious humans living somewhere else in the world.

I wanted to know more about programming visuals, and was lucky to have a designer partner who had incredible ideas I could plug my code into. Together we created some beautiful work for ourselves and our clients, ending up winning international prizes and being invited to conferences. I ended up coding for work that was showcased all over the world, although most of the time not bearing my name. I believe at the time code and coders work wasn’t as appealing as the visual nature of interactive pieces.

I had met some great people in Milan, but I was happy to join my partner on a trip to Amsterdam to work on a campaign pitch for an international client, which the agency later won. This brought us to the north of Europe in just a few months, to start a life there, where we both still live and work 12 years later.

I spent a bit over two years working in advertising, but my creative persona lacked interaction with other technologists who could challenge me on other levels. I kept collaborating with other creative coders around the world, and felt like I was closer to them than ever: having left Italy was like being part of the rest of the world.

Over the past ten years I’ve been extending my knowledge to other fields I was curious about, and countless people have helped me to become interested in things I ignored before. I could not count how many small and big projects I’ve worked on, but I’d stake my life on saying that I couldn’t have done any of that work hadn’t I learned from someone else’s experience, and I wouldn’t be living here wasn’t it for someone else in my life.

In 2010 I joined forces with six friends to kick-start a creative collective here in Amsterdam and rented a space where we, and others, could pursue our interests: painting, sculpture, photography, woodwork, graphic and motion design, video, illustration, technology, music and whatnot. We started "Hello, Savants!" to have a place where we could work on commercial projects as well as our own experiments. Sharing a space got me out of the shell, and since then I have dedicated most of my time to projects that allowed me to learn from others and with others. It has been the most rewarding experience of my life so far.

For all of the above, and many other reasons, I’ve always shared information about my work, no matter the level of complexity or general public interest. I have often looked for ways to teach others what I had learned, and donated thousands of my hours to making sure I could devise easy ways to teach myself first, and then others, all I could understand. I used to blog and write tutorials, and this very website is built for the purpose of having a home for my articles about everything I am curious about, in the hope of helping others save some time and effort.

I am a big supporter of Open Source and sometimes I work on projects I cannot disclose, but the most fun I have is when I play with things I’ll later be able to share, in the same spirit that allowed me to become the hacker/maker/designer/technologist I am today.

I believe that, nowadays, discovering something “by oneself” means being found in a water pit at the bottom of a canyon having survived two decades feeding on roots and rats while developing a groundbreaking theory in quantum mechanics and carefully carving it in stone… probably in the hope that someone will find it.

Today nobody begins working on anything without researching papers or using Google, Bing, Wolfram and the likes. We are the Moderns who can see farther and clearer, as we’re not burdened by having to re-discover what we inherited from the Ancients. We have the luxury of fast access to a plethora of information created by others and published in the open. We are nodes of this creative, collective hive mind.

Always thank the people who help you achieve your goals and credit the ones you learn from. Render your deeds and share your results (unless you’re tied to an NDA, of course).

Credits

I deliberately did not use names in this story, as I thought it would have been distracting, so here’s a list of people who were, and/or still are, involved.

As you may assume, I owe a lot to my family, but there’s a long list of people who contributed to who/what I am today:
Claudio Pisciottano, the mechanics, my friends at University of Salerno, Alessandro Morinelli, the late Pasquale Volpe, Giancarlo Leccese, the Softimage Master people (so many), Michela Slomp, Niko Stumpo, Quam > Nurun Italia when I worked there, Charles Forman, Jason Gessner, Simone Legno, Giuseppe Masi, Riccardo Fabbri, Maria Aiello and the Nohup team, Diego Vurro, Ralph Hauwert, Salvatore Iodice, my friends at “Hello, Savants!”, the guys from Mediamatic, Massimo Banzi, Gianluca Martino, the Arduino Community, the openFrameworks Community, Dirk Spandermaan, Rui Carmo, Dani Montesinos, Alice Mela, Dirk Van Oosterbosch, Axel Roest, Antti Kupila, every student I had at my workshops, everyone who gave me feedback on my tutorials, everyone who develops software and hardware and shares it with the world.

I hope this list will never find an end, like my desire to learn new things.

This article would have never been possible without the precious feedback of Angelica and Charles, who made sure I would be writing something better than my first draft.