Datum

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Half an icebow

“Overhead, obscurity unveiled a star. One tremulous arrow of light, projected how many thousands of years ago, now stung my nerves with vision, and my heart with fear. For in such a universe as this what significance could there be in our fortuitous, our frail, our evanescent community?

But now irrationally I was seized with a strange worship, not, surely of the star, that mere furnace which mere distance falsely sanctified, but of something other, which the dire contrast of the star and us signified to the heart. Yet what, what could thus be signified? Intellect, peering beyond the star, discovered no Star Maker, but only darkness; no Love, no Power even, but only Nothing. And yet the heart praised.

Impatiently I shook off this folly, and reverted from the inscrutable to the familiar and the concrete. Thrusting aside worship, and fear also and bitterness, I determined to examine more coldly this remarkable “us,” this surprisingly impressive datum, which to ourselves remained basic to the universe, though in relation to the stars it appeared so slight a thing.”

Star Maker, by Olaf Stapledon

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Shaping Cities?

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cook_sterling

This morning began well, with Zaha Hadid’s guest-editorship of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme spooling some wonderful reminiscences and thoughts from Peter Cook onto the wireless and the web, including this audio slideshow about the work of Archigram.

One of the things floating in the back of my mind at the moment is the reality of the technological reshaping of our engagement with cities contrasted with the 1960s utopias of Archigram.

It’s a mix of mobile phones, practical ubicomp, twittering infrastructures and building-sized blogjects that skirts the framing of The Hill/Greenfield/Shepherd Scenario (that sounds like a ubicomp free-jazz combo!), but is a bit more BLDGBLOGgy too – stranger and more situationist in flavour.

More on this will float out soon I hope.

Then, next, with: more from The SpimePope’s yearly commencement speech:

So the model polity for local urban resilience isn’t Russia. I’m
inclined to think the model there is Italy. Italy has had calamitous
Bush-levels of national incompetence during almost its entire 150-year
national existence.

Before that time, Italy was all city-states — and not even “states,”
mostly just cities. Florence, Milan, Genoa, Venice. Rome. They were
really brilliantly-run, powerful cities. (Well, not Rome — but Rome
was global.) Gorgeous cities full of initiaive and inventive genius.
If you’re a fan of urbanism you’ve surely got to consider the cities
of the Italian Renaissance among the top urban inventions of all time.

And cities do seem in many ways to respond much better to
globalization than nation-states do. When a city’s population
globalizes, when it becomes a global marketplace, if it can keep the
local peace and order, it booms. London, Paris, New York, Toronto,
they’ve never been more polyglot and multiethnic.

In my futurist book TOMORROW NOW I was speculating that there might
be a post-national global new order arising in cities. Cities as
laboratories of the post-Westphalian order.

However… okay, never mind the downside yet. Let’s just predict
that in 2009 we’re gonna see a whole lot of contemporary urbanism going
on. Digital cities. Cities There For You to Use. Software for
cities. Googleable cities. Cities with green power campaigns.
Location-aware cities. Urban co-ops. “Informal housing.”
“Architecture fiction.” The ruins of the unsustainable as the new
frontier.

A President from Chicago who carried the ghettos and barrios by
massive margins. Gotta mean something, I figure.”

I wonder if Cook and Sterling could be convinced to team up and write “Shaping Cities: towards a new spimurbanism”…

Software for cities, and practical citymagic. That’s something I’m resolving to dig into this year, especially for WebStock.

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Bruce Sterling’s state o’ the world 2008/09

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Is beginning on The Well:

“I always knew the “War on Terror” bubble would go. It’s gone. Nobody
misses it. It got no burial. I knes was gonna be replaced by another
development that seemed much more burningly urgent than terror Terror
TERROR, but I had a hard time figuring out what vast, abject fright
that might be.

Now I know. Welcome to 2009!

What I now currently wonder is: what kind of OTHER development makes
us stop maundering about liquidity issues? You know what’s truly weird
about any financial crisis? WE MADE IT UP. Currency, money, finance,
they’re all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning
it’s shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in
place. It’s not merciless enemies would blow themselves up in order to
bleed on our shoes… oh wait. They are. Well, it’s not like the
icecaps are melting.

Oh wait. The icecaps ARE melting. Okay, maybe I’ll start over next
post.”

Happy new year…

Twitter-enhanced Dérive

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#towerbridge, originally uploaded by kellan.

Yesterday I was wandering around London’s Southbank, and whilst idly checking on the movements of friends through the pre-christmas throng, I noticed that @riverthames was headed for a low-tide.
Tower Bridge

I wandered to the steps near @towerbridge and took some photos – including a long photo of the waves of the river lapping against the rocks at my feet, and went for coffee at the Design Museum.


I read the paper, and checked twitter again. @towerbridge said that it was going to be opening shortly. I bolted out and caught the occasion on camera.
Tower Bridge

The city is here for me to use, and it tells me so.

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The Bourne Infrastructure

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BondBourne, originally uploaded by rodcorp.

In the art bar at the RCA last night with Noam, we started discussing my recent obsession with the dematerialisation of super-villainy.

I haven’t seen the latest Bond movie, but Noam had – and he started talking about how there’s no travel in the new Bond. Or more correctly, there’s lots of travel, but no destinations.

Bond and his various nemeses live in the inter-zone, a bland Super-Cannes. As opposed to the Connery/Moore, hell – even Brosnan films, where you had long establishing shots of exotic destinations, you just feel like you are in the international late-capitalist nonplace.

We started talking about the Bourne movies, and how, particularly the first and the last are set in Schengen – a connected, border-less Mitteleurope that can be hacked and accessed and traversed – not without effort, but with determination, stolen vehicles and the right train timetables.

Again, the triumph of dematerialisation – but with a twist.

Rather than Bond’s private infrastructure expensive cars and toys, Bourne uses public infrastructure as a superpower.

A battered watch and an accurate U-Bahn time-table are all he needs for a perfectly-timed, death-defying evasion of the authorities.

As Rod has already pointed out:

“Jason Bourne is the man-as-weapon, never troubled by indecision or doubt, immediately responsive, unbalancing his enemies’ battlefield underneath them. He moves forward constantly, like a shark, and lives in a fast forward that’s the exact opposite of bullet-time – blurred fragments experienced at extraordinary speed – and his reactions are all reflex-fast”

But in addition, Bourne wraps cities, autobahns, ferries and train terminuses around him as the ultimate body-armour, in ways that Old Etonians could never even dream of.

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Howies Instorematic update: November

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Time for an update. The siege mentality has set in, and incremental progress is being made towards The Glorious Completion.

Today we made the tracks much more structurally-sound and less likely to deviate from setting. The new design is very adjustable and tunable, so that the postcards will sail down majestically everytime (we hope)