fisharepeopletoo

Written In Water

Amazon Recommends For Cities

There. I've said it.

Someone must be doing that.

Under The Concrete The Decking

On my way across the wobbly bridge to Tate Modern in London this morning I passed Alan Titchmarsh [celebrity TV gardener] doing some filming.

I wanted to snap him with my camera phone but a combination of not wanting to invade his privacy (see previous about real photographers, especially having front) and not wanting to give any satisfaction to a rubbish TV no-mark, stopped me.

So I haven't got any evidence for this, but remember where you heard it first...

After the moment had passed I realised what he must being doing there. Alan, Charlie and the Groundforce Team are going to do the next installation in the turbine hall as a TV garden makeover.

Just think about it. The director of the Tate comes back from his two weeks in Tuscany and finds that Alan and the gang have put in a lawn, a water feature and a barbeque pit. All with the BBC cameras there to record the look on his face.

It'll never, ever happen of course. But wouldn't it just be art?

Brillig

Jabberwocky is ace!*

It uses the way that bluetooth devices can find others nearby to record and visualise Familiar Strangers, the kind of people in our daily routines that we recognise but don’t know. People at the bus stop for example. If we pass the same person in the same place more than once, Jabberwocky records and displays an encounter with a Familiar Stranger.

It doesn’t try and fix us up with a date, or even (though this is a lovely idea in itself) let us hear what they’ve got on their ipod. It just makes us aware that they’re there.

This turns scary monsters – strangers who are going to mug us, kill us, eat us – into a group of people who we share something with, be it a bus journey, a park or a post office queue.

Hence the name Jabberwocky - a children’s rhyme rather than a tabloid headline. It’s still got an edge (children’s stories and folk tales are full of horror), but it’s brought out into the open, graspable. They might be strangers, but they’re our strangers, and they’re probably just as scared of us. Unless they’re a little old lady (with a gun).

Jane Jacobs described city neighbourhoods as, potentially, self-organising systems that emerge from endless local, street level interactions, and Jabberwocky fits in with this perfectly. It makes it a tiny little bit easier to step a tiny little bit further into a public, communal life alongside our private, personal lives. Multiply this by thousands, even millions, of little, local, Familiar Stranger interactions per day, and it might contribute to moving from bad neighbourhoods to good, self-organised ones.

*Using ace to mean good like that is a bit quaint now, but using fantastic, wonderful or amazing was too grown up in this case. Ace sounds best when said with a Yorkshire accent, even posh Yorkshire, like mine.

I Don't Know Much About Art

Voting With Our Feet

The Self-Organising Gallery Guide

Voting With Our Feet uses the walled-in space of an art gallery as a test bed to examine the relationship between the mobile Internet, pervasive computing and self-organising systems.

(possibly) Coming to an art gallery (or museum) near you as soon as I can get:

Money

Technology

Gallery

Pavement Artists

Soapbox

Speaker's Corner at The Media Centre in Huddersfield is working again. A very early - it's been working and not working for the best part of three years now - attempt to examine the relationship between the humming ether and bricks and mortar.

To send a message to the the citizens of a small former mill town in the north of England, "enter the letters 'TXT', leave a space, then enter your message and send to 0776 290 4208" or you can do it over the web from here .

Go on, make us laugh.

Testicles, Spectacles, Watch, Wallet

The two things I always check for when I leave the house are door keys and mobile phone.

If I take my door keys everywhere, what can they learn about me, based on the patterns of where and when they’re used?

And in finest Smash Hits boyband interview style, the ultimate test will be do they know what my favourite colour is?

My key ring has my house and work keys, the key to the padlock on the bag I use for travelling and the front door key for my mum’s house.

(In Disney’s The Magic House, I think the keys might be the baddies, or at least the sidekicks of the baddies. Song - “You aint going nowhere without us”)

So, what do they know, in their metal hearts?

Man or Woman: Only by cheating at the moment.
If they can find out where I live, they can check the electoral register.

In the future, they’ll be able to tell in the same way they’ll know what my favourite colour is (see below).

Where I live: Yes
(I’m thinking about what they can work out from patterns of how they’re used, not that they’re imprinted with houseness. After all, my house keys are no different from my work keys except in the pattern of how I use them.)

They know that I use them at roughly the same time five days out of seven, with approximately a nine hour gap in between. They could be my work keys, but the pattern is less regular than for work keys. These keys, the most often used, with a regular-ish five day pattern, and an with a irregular two day pattern (the weekend) must be the keys to where I live.

Where I work: Yes
A very regular pattern, over five days, with almost no use on two days.

How much I earn: Yes
If they know where I live, and how long I’ve lived there, they can probably put a maximum on my earnings. (Not much, in my case.)

They might also try and estimate it from where I work, but this might be misleading because without a very detailed knowledge of the geography of my workplace they’d think I worked in a wool-spinning mill.

What my job is: Not exactly, but not far off

I use the travel bag key two or three times a year (I don’t actually bother locking it but if I did) for periods of two or three days on weekdays rather than weekends, locking it in Britain and unlocking it abroad, and the reverse a few days later.

This suggests I travel for work rather than holidays, which puts me in the category of jobs that involve foreign travel, which probably means training and qualifications.

Only one other set of keys is used to open the door where I work, so I must have a job that could be done by two people in one small room but involves travelling abroad.

If it’s manufacturing it has to be something handmade – that two people can do - and that either sells, or takes components from, abroad, or alternatively it has to be knowledge based.

So I am the owner of a small craft based manufacturing or knowledge based company that I don’t earn all that much money from.

That’s a pretty good guess.

How old am I? Yes

Based on the fact that I have my own skill or knowledge based company – which must have required a period of training, or at least development of expertise – and that I live in quite a low rent area, my keys probably think that their owner is post education but not very senior in the job, which would put me at 21 – 30.

But what about my leisure hours key pattern usage? I get up quite early at weekends and don’t often use my home keys at three in the morning, which puts me in the 30 and above band.

What social class I am: Yes
Based on job, residence, and occasional visits to another residential area in another northern English town (my mum’s house).

Am I married (or cohabiting): No (they don’t know)

Where I live there are single homeowners, couples, and shared student houses, so too much variety for my keys to make a likely guess, though the fact that I’m over 30 might give them some statistical basis for thinking I am.

Do I have children: Yes (they know I haven’t)

No regular pattern of periods away from work during school holidays.

Am I in love: No (they don’t know)

I’ve visited one foreign country for much longer than any of the others over the last two years, but that could be work.

Favourite colour (and just about everything else): It's only a matter of time

Bank account and payment details are going to be embedded in things like key rings and even mobile phone covers, rather than swipe cards, so stretching the definition of keys a bit, they’ll come to know everything.

Including that I tend to buy clothes in dark blue, which is a comforting and unobtrusive colour.

They’ll also know I’m a man, because for example I’ve read a book about the battle of Stalingrad recently, which will certainly be a 90% bloke book, and also probably puts my age mid-thirties and upwards. Added to the job and housing information which put me in the lower end of that range, and that’s pretty much bang on (36).