fisharepeopletoo

From the Sublime to the School Physics Lesson

I’ve been reading the Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci on the web one-page-a-day, but so far, if I dare say so, it’s been a bit crap.

Regardless of its place in the history of Western Art/Thought/Science, it reminded me of a school physics lesson - “The light from point A shall be seen to illuminate point B”.

And reading it in this way means you don’t even get to see the sketches.

Today though, it really came into its own.

How about this for poetry (page 121):

“Shadow is the diminution alike of light and of darkness, and stands
between darkness and light.

A shadow may be infinitely dark, and also of infinite degrees of
absence of darkness.

The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness
and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is
the means by which bodies display their form.

The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for
shadow.”

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City Chromosomes

The Stadschromosomen project finished in Antwerp on Sunday.

It’s been a fantastic, city-wide, six month long event, put together against the odds and with very little support (until it proved to be great, when of course the local politicians were fighting to share in the acclaim) by Stefan Kolgen and Ann Laenen of C.H.I.P.S, and including brilliant things like them spending a night turning all the city’s buses into Stadschromosomen text points and leading a walk with 200 recent immigrants round the city, asking them to text in their feelings about the landmarks of their new home town.

It all ended with a really nice ceremony as part of the city’s annual literature festival, hosted by a Dutch comedian in a dress. I couldn’t understand a word of what was said, apart from my own short contribution, which was received very kindly considering it was a man in a brown suit reading poems from another city in a foreign language, but the comedian seemed to be gently teasing the politicians, and the audience responded warmly to everyone who spoke, which didn’t take any interpreting to feel.

Viva Ubiquista!

I really enjoyed the Ubicomp in the Urban Frontier workshop, and the whole of Ubicomp, for two reasons.

The first was the breadth and generosity of the work that was presented, both in the Urban Frontier workshop and the conference as a whole.

Even though a lot of the people there were clearly working for The Man (Intel, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard etc) everyone seemed to approach their jobs with a wholehearted sense that what they were trying to do was make the world a better place, and the best way to do that was to apply their (considerable) ingenuity to getting out there and making stuff.

Naïve as I may be, I found that really admirable.

And the second reason is that I didn’t find the theorising too overbearing or annoying.

The Urban Frontier workshop could easily have fallen prey to the dead hand of theory, but it didn’t because it had a good mix of people and because the questions just seemed too big and too timely.

Who knows what the consequences of computers_everywhere are going to be over the next twenty or fifty years? Who knows what opportunities there might be for making the world less mind numbing? And who knows what genies are going to be let out of what bottles?

Faced with those questions the whole day - from Yasmine Abbas's intense attempt to engage with absolutely everything, to the poetry that is Umbrella.net, to Mobile Bristol’s sense of fun (paid for by HP :-), just to name three - seemed worthwhile, even inspiring.

The Bus Stop Poems

Leeds

Antwerp

The Bus Stop Poems ("Poems On The Underground From Anywhere In The World") was a "locative media" project from back in the day, using WAP.

Magic Yoghurt Pot

The woman in the photo is feeding her husband by mobile phone, but it would be more fun if she were feeding the phone.

Maybe in the future phones will be little mind reading imps or magical familiars that go off and fetch us things without us asking.

We’d have to feed them something more than yoghurt though, because they would turn nasty if they weren’t kept happy.

But then they already do drink our blood, because everything that’s in our hearts is in our phones as well.

And Bluetooth phones already have names. That’s not personalising, that’s personality.

The photo comes from a talk about mobile phone culture in Japan, which is here.