Make: Technology on Your Time Volume 15

HANDS-ON

BY BRUCE STERLING

Generated in Italy

Giorgio Olivero is fresh back from that digital fabrication workshop in Berlin — four months of work done in just ten 14-hour days! Olivero is the tall, bony, curly-haired, gleaming-eyed creative director of TODO (todo.to.it), an up-and-coming Italian media design studio. Phones ring. Glossy magazines pile up. Olivero’s studio is clad in bright, wriggly, digitally designed wallpaper. There’s a huge plastic kiosk unplugged in the back room, the relic of a wealthy client.

Olivero punctuates his conversation by tapping cigarette ashes perilously near his keyboard. “Beyond the screen,” he says, that’s the way Marius Watz framed it, over there in Berlin, at the Transmediale. In tomorrow’s world beyond ...