Category: City magic

Skateboarding and The City

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Skateboarding and The City, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

“The triumph of non-labour, however, does not entail an absence of effort but an even more profound redefinition of what ‘production’ might mean, and it is here too that skateboarding strikes at the heart of the business city. At first sight, skateboarders’ labour produces no ‘products’ beyond the moves skaters make, a ‘commodity’ exchangeable only by means of performative action. Furthermore, skateboarders, like students, offer a potential labour force but they deny this by undertaking seemingly meaningless productions, and so appear to waste effort and time. But that ‘principle of economy’ which sees a ‘waste’ of energy as abnormal is itself a reduction of life to mere survival. Skateboarding, in contrast, undertakes a release of energy that either creates or modifies space, espousing play, art and festival.”

– Prof Iain Boarden, Skateboarding and The City

Eliza at the crossroads

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A bit of a confabulation this, but what’s new.

A couple of weeks ago I was luck enough to sit in on one of Adam‘s classes at ITP.

Notes from Adam's class on 'crossroads' at ITP

The subjects that week were ‘crossroads’ as places of special consideration in culture and architecture, and from there to their (near) future place in everyware-augmented cities.

Candy Chang’s “Sidewalk Psychiatry” (via BB) made me think of the recently-late Joseph Weizenbaum‘s Eliza…*

I wonder if as a memorial to Weizenbaum, Eliza’s ambiguous-but-probing questions could be engraved into the sidewalks at the crossroads of a city…

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* see also MindHack’s tribute to Joseph Weizenbaum

A finer grain and fluid time…

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I wish there was a finer grain and fluid time…, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

I’m sat in my house waiting for the delivery guy.
Again.
What I wouldn’t give for a fuzzy read from the delivery van’s GPS/location, piped through a traffic report to give me an estimate of how far away they are.
I’d pay a small premium to be able to leave my house! The city is here for Amazon, Parcelforce and myself to use, ideally.
On which subject, you can go and pre-order Mr. Greenfield’s new book, which will hopefully be designed to fit in a mailbox so you won’t have to wait in for it…

“Do not use while driving”

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gmm

Many have commented on Google’s new version of Google Mobile Maps, and specifically it’s “My Location” feature.

Carlo Longino homes in on the fact that it provides, finally, a somewhat humane and useful basis for a lot of the location-based services use-cases that mobile service providers and product marketers have salivated over for around a decade.

“I know my own zip code, but I don’t know its boundaries, nor do I know any others here in Vegas. So if I’m out looking for something, I’ve got little idea where to start. That’s the big problem with local search – we tend to spend a lot of our time in the same places, and we get to know them. We’re most likely to use search when we’re in an unfamiliar area – but often our unfamiliarity with the area precludes us from even being able to divine a starting point for our search. You don’t necessarily need GPS to get a starting point, as this new feature highlights.”

GMMv2.0 is sufficiently-advanced technology, not because of the concept behind it (location via cell network is pretty known) but the sheer, apparent quality of execution, simplicity and joy injected into the thing. This is something till now missing from most if not all mobile software, especially Symbian software.

Janne once said to me: “no-one codes symbian apps for fun”, and it shows. It’s enough to get the things working for most developers, and as they’re mostly doing it for a salary rather than fun, they walk away before the joy gets injected, or don’t argue when it gets de-scoped.

GMMv2.0 has some of the lovely touches that we’ve seen from the iPhone implementation carried over – like the location pins dropping into place with a little restitutional bounce. Just. So. It seems quicker and more focussed that v1.0, with location search features working to give the bare-bones info right there on the map rather than breaking-frame to a dialog.

The main, huge, thing though is MyLocation.

Chris gave a talk a few years ago at Etech 2004 called “35 ways to find your location”
, which argued against relying on GPS and ‘satnav’ metaphors for location services.

I don’t know if they downloaded his presentation in Mountain View, but GMMv2.0 delivers on Chris’s vision by not only using cellular location fiding, but how it interprets and displays it. By ditching the assumption that all location tasks are about a -> b in a car, and presenting a fuzzy, more-humane interpretation of your location – it gives a wonderful foundation for wayfinding, particularly while walking, which hopefully they’ll build on.

In other possible advantages that “Do not use while driving” gives you is it become a resource you can use indoors, where I’d guess 90% discussions about where to go and what to do actually happen, and where 90% of GPS’s won’t ever work.

Other contenders in the mobile wayfinding world seem to be pursuing interfaces built on the metaphors and assumptions of the car-bound “satnav” world e.g. Nokia Maps. Probably as a side-effect of most of their senior management driving to work in suburban technology parks everyday!

Actually, Nokia Maps (at least the last version I used, I switched to GMM and haven’t returned) does something even more bizarre when it starts up and shows you a view of the entire earth’s globe from orbit! I cannot think of a less user-centred, task-appropriate entry point into an application!

Very silly.

The Google mobile team are to be congratulated not only for technical innovation in GMMv2.0, but also having the user-experience savvy to step beyond established cliche in a hot area and think in a context-sensitive, user-centred way about the problem.

As Carlo says:

“I continue to be slightly amazed at the speed with which Google gets these apps and services out, and the overall quality of them, though I guess it’s a testament to the amount of resources they’re throwing at mobile these days.”

Can’t wait to see what’s next.

Geo-cashing

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A nice thought from Will Davies:

“…once one is reduced back to fivers and coins, the city feels very different all over again. One moves from a post-pay to a pre-pay world, in which anonymity is won at the expense of convenience, something the government is convinced ‘the public’ don’t want (William Heath has queried this repeatedly). It is a pain in the arse in many respects, but you do also get that bizarre, slightly retro feeling of being able to wander off into a crowd and be anyone you want, like the first time you go to the shops on your own to spend your pocket money. The flaneur, for instance, would surely have to use real pounds and pence (alright, francs and centimes) rather than an Oyster card or Visa. There is something rather wonderful about cash, in that if money talks, then nothing else has to.

Privacy arguments too often revolve around Big Brother vs libertarians, with extreme examples being bandied around by both sides. The ethical experience of privacy – or disconnection from the network – is that of a different type of freedom from the one being offered by the network. It’s the freedom to embrace contingency and inconvenience, rather than the freedom to get what you want. I propose a ‘Leave Your Wallet and Mobile Phone at Home Day’, in which once a year, individuals hit the streets with nothing other than twenty quids worth of low-tech, Victorian cash. Then see what happens.”

I’ve done this a couple of times myself, both intentionally and unintentionally. It makes for a different flow of time, and thoughts than you have when instantly connectable to your bank account or your friends.

Further thoughts on the art of disconnecting from Rajat at Rootburn.

Man versus robots and cities

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Very much enjoyed the video for the new Chemical Brothers track "Believe", which portrays a man in the throws of some kind of mental breakdown, tormented by industrial robots – and the city.

Chems1

The robot’s lolloping indefatigability gives them an air of menace that is a mix of the raptor, the T1000 from T2, and the rage-victims of 28 days later.

Chems2

The use of depth-of-field in the shots and colour treatment of the video give it a claustrophobia and feeling of decay I, at least,  associate with the best, most terrifying British sci-fi of the 70s and 80s. Quatermass 4, Triffids, Pertwee in quarries, etc.

UNIT unfortunately doesn’t come to the rescue in this one.

Chems3

The denouement, after a terriffic chase sequence, sees our antihero’s final downfall not at the claw of the robots, but by the city – as reality (and a 70s op-art concrete carpark) falls apart in psychadelic shards.

The best mini-movie I’ve seen in a while.

More on the directors, Dom & Nic,  the process and details of the CGI here.

What’s the frequency, Rembrandt?

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I love the premise of the Waag society’s new mobile learning game "Frequency 1550":

"The Amsterdam UMTS-network is interfering with a different time period:
the Middle Age. The city’s bailiff gets in contact with the 21st
century Amsterdam. He thinks the players are pilgrims coming to 1550
Amsterdam to visit a relic: the Holy Host associated with The Miracle
of Amsterdam. He promises an easy access to citizenship if players can
help him retrieve the holy relic which recently got lost."

Although, surely if people from the future are communicating with you through a crack in spacetime made by their futurephones,  I’m not sure offering them freedom of the city would be your first thought.

  » Frequency 1550 [found via We-make-money-not-art]

A thousand million flowers

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Filthyflowers

^ A panel from the wonderful, uplifting end sequence of The Filth

Paul from induce/deduce posts a playful idea today:

“In the midst of 2 recently announced games involving cultivating vegetables in Japan or your own garden in France, I want to try to put together the recent ideas I’ve had of a massively multiplayer GPS mobile phone green game.

Goal: A community of players working together to compensate the real pollution and eyesores of a city by planting and taking care of virtual flowers and other plants on a virtual data layer superimposed on the city.”

It’s a wonderful concept, and resonates with a lot of the work I’ve been doing over the last few months on social play, and the human fundamental drive to play.

Paul lists some aspirations for his idea:

  • “ability to play on the move, for as little as a few minutes to as long as you want,
  • makes you actively go out of your routine way to discover the city,
  • dynamically links the real world with its virtual overlayed layer in space and time too (some object are only available in certain regions or during certain times of the day, phase of the moon or season.
  • is not a battle.
  • encourages community building.

Sounds fantastic, and I hope he gets it off the ground – heh.

It would be wonderful to look through one’s phone screen at the city and see it as Greg Feely does at the end of Morrison and Weston’s “The Filth”: teeming with digital flora tended by thousands of familiar strangers.

Walking City: 21st Century Mirrorworlds remix

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Walking_remix_1

^ Comparison of YRM/Tom Carden’s  ‘Destinations’ (Detail) with Ron Herron/Archigram’s ‘Walking City’ (reversed out-of-black by me)

Congratulations to Tom Carden on getting a piece selected for the architecture section of The Royal Academy’s prestigious Summer Exhibition this past year. It’s called ‘Destinations’ and is a beautiful simulation of passenger movements through an airport terminal over a day. 

Many things notable about this: that an artifact that is a simulation of flow through architecture is included in a celebration of the aesthetics of architecture, that these complex simulations of ‘people weather’ are not only working tools of large-scale architectural practice, but also now boundary objects that communicate to wider audiences, and that as David Gelertner put in his mid-90’s book MirrorWorlds, that now we have the power to make magic mirrors of what might be, how does that inform our actions – as architects, designers and citizens.

I was fortunate to sit down and have a chat with Tom this week in London, where we talked about simulation, visualisation, cities and agency and if those sorts of fields fascinate you, too, I recommend subscribing to his blog, Random Etc.

The other thing that struck me about Tom’s image was it’s superficial resemblence to Ron Herron’s iconic Walking City – appealing, as it’s an image of that peculiar 21st century transient city: the airport and it’s inhabitants – walking…

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See also: Rodcorp’s "life in the walking city" [via Anne G. to whom I apologise for the non-ironic utopian, technological, democratic discourses I hope she keeps reading 😉 ]

Smokebelch III

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Again for the psychogeographically-inclined, The Spool reports that the latest issue of London-focussed writing and photography mag Smoke, number 3, has been published.

“And I will realise that this clue to her tribe is a big sign of what’s going on, and I will start to see all the tribes that this city is pulling together in its detritus of street signs, high-rise window boxes and discarded elastic bands. And I will start to look at pinstripe men with briefcases and stare at them on trains watching them become high-rank druids with cartoon robes but arcane and serious expressions.”

[Notes on the Exercise of the Derive, Sam Geall]

Some more excerpts here.