PsyGeo : psychogeography from Z to A

maggie nesciur: NYC walker

Not done an entry on walking yet – kind of important – so feel this is a fab one to start with. Maggie Nesciur walks 90 miles a week through the hoods thankful she’s still able to walk and breathe after surviving cancer – discovers life is good. This is a complete breath of fresh air – and judging by the comments, I think Maggie’s life is all up from here…

There you are short n nice for a friday afternoon. So perfect. Found via SwissMiss > Protect New York, then a cracking interview that restored my faith in human nature (and nice pics) at the New York Times.

photograph of Ms. Nesciur by Todd Heisler for the NYT

daPi

For every modern-era decade since probably the James Watt-refined Newcomen engine, there’s been a single functional object that’s defined culture for that time.

And these objects have mostly been met with either outright hostility or deep cynicism (as evidenced in the “it’s rubbish” vitriol coming from many comment posts in the online broadsheet tech sections today). So yes, iPad is no different in that some people won’t see the possibilities, instead seeing ways in which it compacts, rather than expands experience; or actually erodes those cultural values it seeks to enhance and liberate. Some see the reverse.

Jobs says Apple are “at the intersection of technology and liberal arts”. This is more true than most give Apple credit for – in terms of intelligence and aesthetics Apple are years if not a decade in front of what are effectively standard washing-machine tech companies like Nokia or Sony, with their creative focus on the proliferation of confusing, wasteful, constantly-changing product lines that essentially change nothing. And it’s not as if Apple are using necessarily better components – it’s the attitude that makes the products so pleasing (here’s a little reminder of what a Blue Meanies world looks like).

So for once, it’s the tech audience who don’t get it. It’s not the limitations of the device – no multitasking, no camera – it’s the fact that it’s the first to fully utilise the most sensitive part of the human body – the fingertips.

iPad might still be Job’s SS Great Britain, but who in 2110 will likely revere the Kindle DX as touchstone for a revolution?

With apologies to Yellow Pages Let your Fingers do the Walking…

oblique strategies card app

I’ve just watched BBC4’s programme on Eno – Hits, Classics and Tracks. As the title suggests it follows Eno’s more mainstream interventions but leaves you in no doubt about the sometimes overwhelming power of the collaborations – Bowie’s Heroes crackles with Berliner energy. Pavarotti doesn’t do too badly either, effortlessly upstaging bono on miss sarajevo…

Eno has always been in my mind since seeing Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan – an ambient filmwork where you had to turn the TV on its side, as it was filmed portrait-wise – I loved that idea. Similary, Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks was an album I couldn’t get enough of. And Bowie’s Lodger – still one of the most distinctive albums, well, of the 20th century I guess.

Now you can get the Oblique Strategy Cards as an App – it’s what the iPhone was made for…

image from creative review

Humanity – must try harder, says God

Having grown up in Easter Ross, a place deep in the lore of the Brahan Seer, the gift of foretelling was a definite fact to me as a child. But when David Icke predicted that in 1991 my neighbouring island of Arran would be destroyed and sunk by an earthquake, in the absence of Charlie Brooker I had to debunk myself. The humanitarian disaster in Haiti (part of Hispaniola, not an island known for earthquakes, but one that knows plenty about colonialism), is an only too-real indicator that nobody – even Sportsreporter Incarnate – can definitively say what will happen.

Now the recriminations – Haitians made a pact with the devil so that he’d help them get rid of the French… the French accuse the Americans of taking advantage of the situation and making a move on the island… Haitian leaders are corrupt and that’s why the buildings are so shoddy… the Aid Agencies, selfishly jostling for position in the aid money-fest… (For a different take on what’s happening in Haiti, visit the Tanzanian/Scottish photographer Pradip Malde who has a strong connection with the island).

This re-run of Who’s Fault Is It Anyway, broadcast whilst the bodies bloat and common looters get murdered in the streets by their own police force, make Icke and his highly confused form of truth about several political situations we all understand only too well, seem quite cuddly. And so those who will make political capital from the disaster should remember there but by the grace of…

Richard Dawkins is at the opposite end of the P T Barnum / Cassandra Scale from Icke. Yet both seem to share common themes (worryingly their web sites also seem to share the same crusading I’m Right, So Buy All My Stuff! look and tone). One of those themes is about either denying something exists (God; Dawkins) or insisting that something does exist (er, lizards; you know who). Delusional? I’ve got an App for that (app now removed from iTunes)

The answer is of course nobody, even the Pope on a good day, is right and nobody can know the width height and breadth of life – only Beeblebrox has survived the Total Perspective Vortex. And just because you live and work in a building designed by, for instance, Zaha Hadid (just to get the world/building analogy right – we wouldn’t want to suggest that God does 50s brutalism), shouldn’t mean she’s there permanently, concierge-style, answering all our dumb questions about what to do about today’s problems and accepting the blame when it all gets a bit too much. That’s Jesus’s job.

OK hats off to all the aid workers in Haiti, and the Haitians who are doing the best they can to survive the disaster.

cloudmade and mapzen

I’ve been using OpenStreetMap for a while now, but Cloudmade and its map editor, Mapzen, are a new offering from OSM. Designed to enhance the mapping experience for more commercial users, it offers a really delightful map editor that allows you to easily create new styles from either the vanilla map or from a range of user-generated styles. Fun!

The one thing lacking in OSM – that all UK users will know about, at least – is the patchy postcode locator. For those not aware of the UK postcode system, it’s based on fairly precise house number data – and that data, although paid for by the taxpayer, is not available to the likes of OSM. The recent good news that some postcode data will be released by the government in the spring, was quickly dampened by the realisation it’s pretty widefield – Googlemaps will still be necessary for a precise street location fix, at least for the time being.

This is the style I’ve been playing with for PsyGeo Edinburgh (still too messy at the mo but sure beats customising OSM data in illustrator). And here’s a good interview (ignore the bantering hosts) with OSM founder Steve Coast.

trams to vacantville

The issues at Leith’s failed luxury land reclamation project at Newhaven’s western harbour – Platinum Point – continue with news that the first stage of council house residents from the blighted brutalist Leith Fort scheme up the road are to be welcomed into brand new flats (i.e., single-breezeblock rabbit hutches) opposite the bankrupt development during early 2010. Naturally PP’s residents association, now cynical due to the shaky-in-reclaimed-sand property developers and their ripoff factors, see this as yet another blow for their negative-equitied designer-hell-on-Forth fog-flats, once a much-cited prestigious stopping point for Edinburgh’s new trams.

The debate should not be with either the mortgaged-to-the-hilt; nor the sometimes, er, rather limited life-expectations locals – it should be with, as usual, the sub-par but well-connected architects, aesthetics-free town planners, overambitious developers and thoughtless toon cooncillors, who always as a cabal fail to equate housing with community. This crash of social groupings will only benefit the crass Asda megastore plonked between them – and of course the cctv manufacturers – and police overtime. lower image: Jamie Reid

the mathematics of place and space

I’ve just finished Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (a standard work that most arts students globally will have had to read). As a primer on the quattrocento, it does make plain a few home truths about the relationship between painter and patron; and of course makes some obvious and less-obvious points about the first stages in the post-mediaeval development of a euro-centric, figurative fine art.

What was most interesting about the book for me though was the exploration of mathematics – in terms of the financing of projects, essential; but also the underlying geometry of the picture frame that was carefully formulated to create the illusion, for the masses, of perspective/depth in the painted scenarios. As with Leonardo, the artist Piero della Francesca (who seems to be getting increasingly namechecked here at PsyGeo Towers) was pretty good at sums. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many musicians and artists have a fundamental understanding of maths – it’s why science and the arts often go together fruitfully.

So the renaissance put in place a practical as well as theoretical understanding of the underlying grid that shapes our daily reality – as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the virtual and the real – the representational and the factual – will become commonplace this decade, as Augmented Reality (hope somebody invents a better name) goes mainstream. For Psychogeographers the rebirth of perspective and overlaid meaning, via a handheld, will open up many new ways of being creative with urban space.

But we focus too much on the visual I think – sound can be a more subtle, more intimate method of creating a thinking and imaginative place. The people at soundwalk deserve attention, if you’re interested in audio (note: the site is a bit sluggish – that’s flash for you).

sousveillance : us watching them

Well it’s a new decade and time’s arrow moves into unknown territories. Looking back on 1999-2009, one thing did strike me as particulary significant – the rise in cctv surveillance.

Sousveillance is the opposite – you use whatever method is at your hand to record them watching us (disturbing UK police abuse in action on innocent people here: “them” really don’t like being reverse-watched…). Of course recording the day and the people you meet is also a fun thing too for recording your drifts and diversions in a stream of consciousness sort of way…

If it wasn’t for the kind of citizen Sousveillance that fitwatch undertakes (at great cost), the death of Ian Tomlinson at the hands of a police officer* at the G20 demos on april 1 2009 would have gone pretty much unnoticied – it was very satisfying seeing each outrageously blatant police PR coverup be countered. So it’s a useful balance to our state-controlled bad-brother environment that most people now have at least a cameraphone – in 1999 quite a lot of us didn’t even have mobiles.

Naturally our elders and betters have now realised the limitations of cctv – the next frontier will be an invisible digital one. I recommend deleting all your social media accounts and never paying for anything with a debit/credit card. In the meantime this collective and these people get straight to the point.

*most officers do a difficult and immensly stressful job well, and nowadays have no autonomy anyway

Constant Nieuwenhuys : situationist architect

For those interested in Unitary Urbanism, the architect/artist Constant Nieuwenhuys is key to understanding what a Situationist cityscape would have looked like. This article by the cult architect Lebbeus Woods, discussing Nieuwenhuys’ neo-marxist city vision, New Babylon, covers a great deal of ground.

New Babylon is a world created by, rather than for, the individual – for me it suggests a masculine angularity and brusqueness, rather than a softer, more hopeful, organic form. I’ve also always been nonplussed about the neo-Babylonian moniker too – not the most auspicious of re-creations, with its connotations of confusion and hubris. Nonetheless, it removes the layer of architect-presidio and gives instead a collective multilayered labyrinth, split into two levels – the mechanics of modern life below and the life of the liberated individual, free to move in space unhindered by traffic, above.

Images from Lebbeus Woods’ post

urban gridded notebook

This is a nice visual take on the wireframe underlying cityspace. Designed by John Briscella and the people at walking things.

||A blank notebook and sketchbook that is gridded with 127 cities from all around the world. Great for urbanists, architects, designers, artists,… everyone who enjoys urban areas. Each city pattern is completely different from the next. Begin to realize the possibilities of cities while taking notes ; redraw parts of a city unconsciously ; or map your travel in a city… The possibilities are open to create anything within the modern city grid.||