20/04/2005
In the wake of some similar initiatives, the first stirrings of an Irish free and open source mapping project has emerged in the form of OpenEir. It would be great to see this become a successful community project.
OpenEir routes are being created using MyGPS on WorldKit MapProxy satellite photos.
Related archive posts: 1, 2. Here’s a satellite photo and Google Map of where I live.
19/04/2005
Back to life after a little server-move induced downtime. Technology, eh?
Speaking of which (what a link!), here’s a project I recently completed that addresses the role of technology as a mediating factor in everyday urban life: Walk/Shuffle.
06/04/2005
The young lieutenant of a small Hungarian detachment in the Alps
sent a reconnaissance unit out onto the icy wasteland.
It began to snow
immediately,
snowed for two days and the unit
did not return.
The lieutenant suffered:
he had dispatched
his own people to death.
But the third day the unit came back.
Where had they been? How had they made their way?
Yes, they said, we considered ourselves
lost and waited for the end. And then one of us
found a map in his pocket. That calmed us down.
We pitched camp, lasted out the snowstorm and then with the map
we discovered our bearings.
And here we are.
The lieutenant borrowed this remarkable map
and had a good look at it. It was not a map of the Alps
but of the Pyrenees
Miroslav Holub, Brief Thoughts on Maps
01/04/2005
The Guardian reports on Glastonbury’s plan to avoid late night noise pollution by issuing 3,000 clubbers with wireless headphones.
“I like the idea of people dancing in total silence,” said Emily Eavis, one of the festival organisers and daughter of the founder Michael Eavis. “Imagine if you were feeling a bit worse for wear and thought, ‘This would be a nice quiet place to sit down.’
See also Flash Mob clubbing.
18/03/2005
The world’s first avant-garde Firefox Extension, after Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s cards:
03/03/2005
We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, –prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again, –if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walking
26/02/2005
This guy downloaded a track from iTunes by Ciccone Youth consisting on one minute of complete silence, then illegally placed it on his website for download - what would John Cage make of all this?
21/02/2005
Dr. Michael Bull talks about the social and cultural impact of the personal stereo in a Wired Magazine interview from last year, raising some questions on the privatization of public space.
One of the interesting things is that with vinyl, the aesthetic was in the cover of the record. You had the sleeve, the artwork, the liner notes. With the rise of digital, the aesthetic has left the object — the record sleeve — and now the aesthetic is in the artifact: the iPod, not the music. The aesthetic has moved from the disc to what you play it on.
It’s kind of a pity that this diverse aesthetic is being lost and there’s a general homogenization of what music listeners appear to be. The Rolling Stones formed when Keith saw Mick’s blues record collection under his arm on a train platform and started talking to him - is the potential for this type of interaction being lost?
Then again, if everyone’s external aesthetic becomes generic, maybe the individual’s relationship with the music they take with them becomes liberated. Do you ever wonder what someone’s listening to when you see them with headphones on? They seem to be completely unapproachable. I think the widespread uptake of iPods in urban spaces is a result of people trying to find a private comfort zone in a very alien and impersonal situation, like the Underground.
So, for example, music allows people to use their eyes when they’re listening in public. I call it nonreciprocal looking. Listening to music lets you look at someone but don’t look at them when they look back. The earplugs tell them you’re otherwise engaged. It’s a great urban strategy for controlling interaction.
See also NYT article The World at Ears’ Length
08/02/2005
Here is a sparkline presenting the wonderful inconsistency I’ve maintained in posting to this site for a year: 