Just back from vacation and deadlines. Some quoteblogging.

First of all, Adam Greenfield’s presentation to 1ILMC:

“If for three thousand years we’ve relied on rumor and reputation, custom and external data stores and never least explicit signage to organize our urban experiences, the advent of latent, user-generated, unedited, location-based content is something that has the potential to change the way humans do cities, change it utterly and in short order.”

It’s titled “Whatever happened to serendipity?” – something to chew on. Just finished reading “Cosmopolis” while on my break: “we need a new model for time” says one of the characters. Causality, confluence and coincidence are things we suspect are becoming fathomable in nature and culture. Just as we are developing our thoughts around them, Adam perhaps suggests we are building ourselves the prosthetics to engage with them.

But then “Here we are, here we are!, here we are.” atop a tower of abstraction.

“this bee, white black and yellow, I bet every single element of it had purpose: every particle, every force, every relative position and potentiality of it, oh and more and wider than I have space here to say, all the way down to the substrate of the universe itself. Not like my desk, built on top of all these layers, in the highly stacked and abstracted world of people — which is, in fact, just like London around me, there at the west end of Fleet Street, a human construction, a deeply nested virtual machine really, that’s all it is — there with our precarious artifact around me, I witnessed a bee, not built on top of reality but part of reality itself.”

Are perhaps the prosthetics Adam describes a circuitous route back down to where Webb found the bee to, well, be? Or more stuff to spiral us higher, further away.

“A rat became the unit of currency”

From Hecklerandcoch:

“Worlds are created by brains. At a simple level, bees, migratory birds, dogs and even limpets, which return to a particular spot after feeding, contain internal maps of their surroundings. Humans, who think abstractly, create more complicated inferential maps going beyond their known surroundings, to include the world, celestial objects, real and hypothetical beings, and the past and future as well as the present.

~ Alex Comfort – Reality & Empathy: Physics, Mind, and Science in the 21st Century
(State University of New York Press, Albany, 1984, page xiii)”

Which leads finally, to Peterme on supporting hypertext pattern dubbed “the cycle”:

“In a hypertext, this is how readers build their experience of context. By definition, you don’t read a hypertext from beginning to end, nor in some broad-to-narrow hierarchical fashion. You piece together an experience through exposure to its elements, and their relationships. Understanding relationships requires cycling through the material, returning to the same point more than once, and seeing how it’s all connected.”

Just like the best cities. Adam’s prosthetics might remake the most modern and inorganic of cities with an overlay of shared information and images. Other related stuff I need to pile in but can’t = My experience of Siena, Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City (again)

I’ll unpack this later in the week if I can, as I unpack my dirty t-shirts and underwear.

—
* apologies to John Donne