sensual body

"The sensual body finds itself living amidst an expansive set of technologies. In this ever-evolving computational world we encounter texts of varying forms and functionalities -- visual, sonic, and code-related. Text may also take physical and/or environmental form. The continuum that bridges distributed bodies with the recombinant communicative and associative functionality of technology is charged with the potential of extending humankind's ability to experience, generate, operate on, store, edit, and disseminate meaningful patterns of experience."
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/languagevehicle

single page net map

"What is this? It's a map of the entire Internet. At the moment we're displaying the owner of each IP address (grey boxes), and which IP addresses are listed on the Spamhaus XBL blacklist (red dots), but we should be able to show other things in the future.

A map? Yes, we map all 4,294,967,296 IP addresses onto a huge image and let you zoom into it and pan around. Just like google maps, but more internetty."
http://thewholeinternet.wordtothewise.com

The problem of creating cognitive maps of contemporary landscapes and territories poses significant challenges, but at the same time tech advances move so rapidly that new map interfaces crop up day by day. As more and more of these are available to a general population, the agency of the crowd [with both predictable and unpredictable results] grows exponentially.
EK

ambient music

"Writing in the 1960s, Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander argued that: Under present conditions men are beginning to lose the capacity to discriminate between sound and noise - between the desirable and the irrelevant...The problem of isolating undesirable sounds is technically so hard to solve that acoustics engineers now recommend the simpler expedient of providing artificial background noise in one's own domain as an acoustic cushion or muffler. Making more noise is the only economical way, apparently, of drowning out unwanted noise and of not being overheard. It seems that the illusion of quiet can only be maintained in noise." http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/001/001/articles/11_psuchin/index.php

panoptic fantasy

"The design of social networking and internet dating sites, showing all your friends faces in an array, seduces us with a kind of panoptic fantasy, being able to see many at once.... Just like the panopticon embeds tiny theaters in an array, these social technologies embed so many small panopticons in a matrix of connectivity. Each cell is now its own theater and watchtower."

http://thewinger.com/words/category/tony/

red wind

"Named after Southern California's Santa Ana Canyon and a fixture of local legend and literature, the Santa Ana is a blustery, dry and warm (often hot) wind that blows out of the desert. In Raymond Chandler's story Red Wind, the title being one of the offshore wind's many nicknames, the Santa Anas were introduced as "those hot dry [winds] that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen."

http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/~fovell/ASother/mm5/SantaAna/winds.html

locative media

"What is it about place that runs so deep and holds so tight? Take a minute to think about one of your treasured places. And yes, you should probably close your eyes... Jeremy Hight, one the first locative media theorists, coined the term, "Narrative Archeology," a concept which became a corner stone of locative media. It refers to the process of peeling back layers of a place, and finding the stories underneath." photo:mlab.uiah.fi

los angeles

"No matter what you do in L.A., your behavior is appropriate for the city. Los Angeles has no assumed correct mode of use. You can have fake breasts and drive a Ford Mustang – or you can grow a beard, weigh 300 pounds, and read Christian science fiction novels. Either way, you're fine: that's just how it works. You can watch Cops all day or you can be a porn star or you can be a Caltech physicist. You can listen to Carcass – or you can listen to Pat Robertson. Or both. That's how we dooz it." by Geoff Manaugh
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/greater-los-angeles.html

computer vision

"Messa di Voce, created by this article's author in collaboration with Zachary Lieberman, uses whole-body vision-based interactions similar to Krueger's, but combines them with speech analysis and situates them within a kind of projection-based augmented reality. In this audiovisual performance, the speech, shouts and songs produced by two abstract vocalists are visualized and augmented in real-time by synthetic graphics."

http://www.flong.com/writings/texts/essay_cvad.html

immigration museum

"It’s hard to say who will go to the National Center at the moment, save for bored schoolchildren on compulsory field trips, although the place has the potential to be a constructive troublemaker. Mr. Toubon promises, in time, a program of events to add meat to the bare-bones display, which he says will also change. Clearly the place needs to do more than cheerlead, feign scholarly impartiality and make vague noises about past injustices to have any impact. It needs to try to steer a debate that is reshaping France and the rest of Europe."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/arts/design/17abroad.html

geo tagging photography

"The easiest way of linking photos to locations is to combine the time-stamps from both a digital camera and GPS receiver or other location-aware device. If this data is available (over the same period of time) it’s possible to process a series of images and location tracks to stamp each image with location metadata."
http://www.elasticspace.com/tags/mapping

ghostbustour

"listen! do you smell something?"

"Sites relevant to the original 'Ghostbusters' compose the tour path, with video content relevant to the film, geography and history of New York comprising the tour. Watching film footage on a portable media device, while standing in the site of its creation some 20 years ago, 'media memories' become real memories and mediated experience becomes actualized. ghostbustour is an attempt to re-attach "media memories" with our real experience of space and time." ghostbustour.com

One Voice Movement: One Million Voices to End Conflict

OVER HALF A MILLION PALESTINIAN AND ISRAELI SIGNATORIES DEMAND UNINTERRUPTED NEGOTIATIONS, TWO-STATE SOLUTION
DEADLINE SET BY THE PEOPLE: TWO STATE AGREEMENT BY OCTOBER 18, 2008

"Jericho/Tel Aviv, September 19, 2007 —Today, the OneVoice Movement, a youth-led mainstream nationalist movement with parallel operations in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, announced that it had exceeded its original goal of recruiting half a million Palestinian and Israeli citizens as signatories of a mandate demanding a two-state solution. The OneVoice Mandate calls on Palestinian President Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Olmert to start immediate, uninterrupted negotiations until a comprehensive two-state solution is reached.

As of the latest audit on September 17, 2007, 536,443 Israeli and Palestinian signatories (262,008 Israelis and 274,435 Palestinians) have joined the movement. Having exceeded its goal of recruiting half a million Palestinians and Israelis in roughly equal numbers four months earlier than planned, OneVoice aims to get to One Million citizen signatories by the end of 2007."

http://www.onevoicemovement.org/wps/portal

"OneVoice aims to amplify the voice of the overwhelming but heretofore silent majority of moderates who wish for peace and prosperity, empowering them to demand accountability from elected representatives and ensure that the agenda is not hijacked by forces of militant absolutism."

Urban Adverts + Cycles

This is a fascinating nexus between advertising space, the ways that urban fabrics become increasingly monetizeable [ to their detriment?] and the provision of what many might argue should be a basic urban infrastructure: the bicycle. Here we see the financial tradeoff between the rental of the bikes, the use of the billboard spaces, and the initial investment on the part of the developer/advertiser. Perhaps there would be other ways to create the capital for the creation of such infrastructure.
- Ed Keller
_____
Vive la Vélorution!- Sep 20th 2007 From The Economist print edition

JCDecaux and Clear Channel Outdoor battle over urban bike-schemes
OUTDOOR advertising has become fiercely competitive and highly political. America's Clear Channel Outdoor and France's JCDecaux fought for months in negotiations with the office of the mayor of Paris, and in court, to snap up the contract for panneaux contre vélos—setting up a bicycle-rental scheme in Paris in exchange for exclusive rights to the French capital's 1,628 billboards. Although Clear Channel claims to have won “technically”, the French firm, whose founder, Jean-Claude Decaux, has close ties to the political establishment, emerged as the victor in practice this spring. JCDecaux set up the bike-rental system in record time and launched it on July 15th.

Vélib' (for vélo, or bicycle, and liberté, or freedom) has since taken Paris by storm...
http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9832847

Profile: Manhattan

In the dialogue on profiling the idea taxonomy seems essential. "How the thing works, " what are the mechanisms and materials, where are the hidden yet essential relationships to the lifeline of the profile. How does this organism function? As a sort of latter day assemblage of Delirious New York, Brian McGrath and the folks producing the Manhattan Timeformations project, present a beautiful and comprehensive taxonomy of the Manhattan profile.

Institute for the Future

The Institute for the Future is an independent nonprofit research group. We work with organizations of all kinds to help them make better, more informed decisions about the future. We provide the foresight to create insights that lead to action. We take an explicitly global approach to strategic planning, linking macro trends to local issues in such areas as technology and society, health and health care, and global business trends.
http://www.iftf.org/
http://future.iftf.org/