Man that was terrible, I must have my phaser set to pun. Anyway, Chris Heathcote wants to encode psychogeography in RDF, with a lazyweb idea he calls FOAP: Feel Of A Place.
Full-circle then, from SBJ’s “Cities are great at answering search queries” analogies for the evolution of the web that he suggests in “Emergence”.
So are our cities to be rendered obvious through technology – reduced to digital mappings of the nearest McDonalds pushed to our 3g phones? Yes and no I think is my nonanswer.
Most current visions of ubiquitous computing within the urban real are nothing more than: Cities + Technology + Ease-of-Use. FOAP starts to point to a more complex, advanced mix: Cities + Technology + People + History + Ease-Of-Abuse. This sufficiently advanced technology in the city could be magic.
There are times all of us want to get from A to B, and sometimes we want to get from A to Beowulf: to get lost in the sagas of the city.
I spent a day in the City of London last summer at the height of all the warchalking tizz with artist Heath Bunting, and Kate Rich from Mute where we followed the line of the 2000 year old London Wall. Heath dowsing for water with a twig he cut hastily from a hedge at the start of our walk, and me dowsing for wireless with a TiBook and MacStumbler. Here’s an exchange between the three of us:
“HB: Have you thought of doing a tour? Like the history of cyber or internet or electronic London. Just offer people the stories?
KR: In LA you can do tours of architecture that isnt there any more. Norman Klein. [The History of Forgetting: LosAngeles and the Erasure of Memory http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/buch/3169/1.html & http://ucmedia1.ucxonline.berkeley.edu/sales/artshum02/ahmain1.html#movie38460]
HB: This is Finsbury Circus, the Circle Line goes underneath this. It also runs under a significant portion of the city wall. It was always interesting to me why it did that – like people said, where shall we put the Circle Line? and 2000 years later the wall has affected the route of it. This was a roundabout question to you Matt: have you any recognition that this mapping that youre doing is influenced by more ancient networks or nodes like wells, or meeting places, or routes?
MJ: Not apart from the obvious one: IT is concentrated in the city of London for the same reason as the powerbrokers, that is for very historical reasons. Other than that Ive not really divined a corridor.
HB: Would they be in the same places as the first cellphone base-stations then?
MJ: No. If you think about the network engineers, they are looking for the most coverage for the most profitable groups of customers. The thing about wireless is its bottom up, grassroots up, no-one really plans how it emerges. So you sort of get this ad hoc collection of nodes around where people are activists.HB: So you think that an archaeological dig of wireless networking will reveal no ancestry?
MJ: I think it would be twice removed if there at all.
HB: I remember ten years ago, one of the first mobile phone networks only operated in the tube.
MJ: Rabbit.
HB: Rabbit, yeah. It was a really good idea: you have a phone in the office, a phone at home, in the tube you dont have anything. Now you cant even make a phone call from the tube. I always think its good to look back in history to find your ancestors. It gives you legitimacy or understanding.”
Building on other recent thoughts and efforts, FOAP’s a great idea, that could encode and encourage the understanding of cities, not just their easy negotiation.
Petafloptimism 
Don’t you mean phraser set to pun? 😉
Gawd. I was just thinking about psychogeography and search metaphors when I was down in London, Jones — you saw me with my bloody Iain Sinclair, of course — and the way in which the city organises itself around individual and group belief networks.
The Sinclairish argument, I think, is that sense-of-place is like a latent ether, which is capable of being tapped and shaped by people and buildings. And that’s not so far-fetched, when you think of Wren’s attempt to reshape London, or the flows at rush-hour. And the long-standing pattern of ‘reading’ which was lost (c. the Reformation) when people stopped reading stained glass windows and patterns in stone, and started reading books.
And there’s also the curious weaving of fact and fiction in Sinclair — the blurring of character around the apparent solidity of place — which lends itself well to deep thought. Because when you’re thinking of networks, and cities (the two as flip-sides) then you’re looking for anchors, points of triangulation, one of which can be (but isn’t always) the solidity of your own perspective. Depending upon how solid you feel your perspective might be at that given moment…
I’m glad to see that people are thinking it’s a good idea. I’m going to try and wrestle it into a bit more shape soon.
I’ve been moving for the last week. The things that inspired me to move to here were:
* a friend who lived in the block of buildings
* the SE1 forums
* a few walks round Borough Market and the area
* the bus, tube and walking connections
* the dramatic pull of being a few minutes away from Tate Modern
* a quick scan through Hardens and a few other restaurant guides
So, fact, hearsay, rumour, travel networks, social networks, and the “feel”, all rolled into one.
Wouldn’t it be amazing to find yourself anywhere and be able to tap into that information?
i have been thinking about this for a while too (yes, reading too much sinclair as well).
it started when i was talking with my wife who was doing some photography projects on surevillance and i ended up working with privacy international on the big brother awards.
we are currently planning a database of cameras, as a raw data resource so that artists, researchers or the general public can create their own interfaces to the data. (simon davies of pi has suggested that as of now it would be easier to record the places not under cctv surveillance, though that would become a rapidly contracting database).
the other strand of my thoughts comes from a trip to iran, again with my wife. i so much enjoy tehran, it is a wonderfil city. what was interesting was talking with her family there and hearing about the city in the past, pre-revolution. names have changed now, and building is everywhere, but there are still small echoes of the past city. i wanted to build a system that allowed people to record their positions over time, their family living in the same street for generations, then half the family up and leaving to australia, thus creating a number of vectors. one of distance, the family becoming becoming more distributed, but then in ‘family’ space it is collapsing space, cambridge and sidney become much closer (in my families case, then you can vector in tehran, LA, london etc.)
i will post some more of this on my site soon, we are hoping to start building something to start enabling this for the brighton photo biennial next year, lets work together on this…
(also can anyone say if the rabbit sign is still up near euston street station? if i get the chance i will go over and see soon and take some pics)
Despite the near-ubiquitous international coverage of warchalking, it wasn’t until I found a mark on a building across the street from my flat in Notting Hill Gate that it really struck me as to how it’s penetrating.
Chris’s idea of FOAP is very similar to how I envision the future for urban areas, and is the sort of thing I wrote about for my character “Naomi” in the Semantic Web article a few pages on from your warchalking article.
Feeling Places
“The idea of FOAP is to create descriptions of physical locations …”
Uses for friends-of-friends
In my previous post I talked about FOAF files and longed for some exciting things to do with them. And here they are…
Uses for friends-of-friends
In my previous post I talked about FOAF files and longed for some exciting things to do with them. And here they are…