fisharepeopletoo

Try Before You Buy

Being in places.

Anywhereblogs. Basic, but it makes itself clear.

Big thanks to Dan for doing all the hard work.

Plan 9 from ICA

The Pervasive and Locative Arts Network is having a conference at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London on 1st and 2nd Feb. Jen Southern and I are giving presentations at the end of the second day.

Each time I've been in the ICA over the last two years I've (discreetly and in the name of art) vandalised it with CityPoems stickers.

Seeings as I'm going to be talking about CityPoems, along with the Guardian's SMS competition, Anywhereblogs, GeoNotes and how mobile phones are tools for building places, this could be where I get my comeuppance.

The Case For The Defence

Meditation 1

...I will suppose that some malignant demon, who is at the same time exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his powers to deceive me; I will suppose that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all external things, are no more than the illusions of dreams, which this being has used to set traps for my credulity; I will consider myself as without hands, eyes, flesh, blood, or any of the senses, and that to believe I have these is false...

...But this is a hard undertaking, and a certain indolence leads me back, without knowing it, to my ordinary course of life; just as the prisoner, who, perhaps, was enjoying in his dreams an imaginary liberty, when he begins to suspect that it is just a vision, dreads awakening.

Meditation 2

The Meditation of yesterday has filled my mind with so many doubts, that it is no longer in my power to forget them. Nor do I see, meanwhile, any way in which they can be resolved; and, just as if I had fallen all of a sudden into very deep water, I am so shocked that I cannot either plant my feet firmly on the bottom or sustain myself by swimming on the surface.

René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy 1, 2

Nothing New Under The Thumb

2001 Surrender Control, by Forced Entertainment (paid for by our own dear Media Centre)

2005 This Mobile Will Change Your Life, by Benrikland

The Concrete Mixer Of The 21st Century

"Such "no change" of spatial organization may imply tremendous aggregate savings, as the current spatial structure becomes more effective for its use by urbanites through ubicomp, without investments in physical restructuring."

Wirelessness and urban spaital organization, Aharon Kellerman

Welcome To The Jungle

Unitary Urbanism envisages the urban environment as the terrain of participatory games...

...We are thus able to envisage making use of the climatic conditions in which two major architectural civilizations arose -- in Cambodia and in southwest Mexico -- in order to construct moving cities in the jungle.

The new neighborhoods of such a city could be constructed increasingly toward the west (which would be gradually reclaimed as one goes along), while to the same extent the east would be abandoned to the overgrowth of topical vegetation, thereby creating, on its own, zones of gradual transition between the modern city and wild nature. This city, pursued by the forest, would offer unsurpassable zones of derive that would take shape behind it...

...We are only at the beginning of urban civilization; it is up to us to bring it about ourselves.

Digital Unitary Urbanism maintains an interest in technology as a means of evoking a new kind of urbanism characterized by the ability of individuals and social groups to appropriate and co-create urban space...

...Technological products and systems by no means have to be developed with pre-defined goals or use patterns in mind. DUU encourages ‘bottom-up’ technological manifestations in which individuals rather than institutions define content, use and structure.

Art Mob

A very good, wide ranging list of all things Mob Art.

[Mob as in mobile rather than rampaging text messagers out for blood.]