Here lies a thought experiment, in the wild, of imagining a world where specific technologies or situations arise. This isn’t meant as a comprehensive overview, but rather a scratch-pad in the open.
GPS is a low-earth orbit based system consisting of a constellation of satellites, with hyper-accurate atomic clocks, which rely on the radio receiver seeing four or more satellites in order to gain a fix on your location on Earth. It was built and maintained by the US Government, specifically by the Air Force, and can be shut off at anytime. Rival systems such as Russia’s GLONASS or China’s BeiDou Navigation Satellite or European Union Galileo positioning system, and India’s NAVIC are similar systems. We’ll use GPS as a shorthand for any system which gives us specific location on Earth for simplicity.
Imagine a world where GPS is degraded due to any reason, either as a tactical action during war, intentional sabotage, or neglect. What does this world look like?
A semi-weekly note of what has transpired this week. What’s a weeknote? See more for A pre-history of weeknotes.
This is a week is all about Janus – the Roman god of endings and beginnings. A project is about to end, and I’m looking to fill in some whitespace, now that I have some headspace. This week’s links feel quite martial, but I wanted to highlight Michele Spanghero’s work Ad lib (2016):
The sound sculpture Ad lib. (2016) combines a medical machine for automatic pulmonary ventilation with a few organ pipes that play a musical chord to the constant rhythm of the mechanical breath, creating an artificial organ that is metaphorically a mechanical requiem that sounds incessantly.
Now, some time to talk about the many (many) ongoing projects which I tend to slowly get to:
Project Raconteur
I have loved Little Printer since the day it was announced, and shed a tear when the business was shuttered. I’ve been somewhat obsessed with using older technology to tell stories, and receipt printers have held my attention, in addition to split-flap displays, flip dot displays, and changeable letter boards. I think that the common thread is that these are mechanical instruments, that you can touch them, and there there is a certain friction that digital displays lack.
Below is a story generator I found in the Canton Akron Airport. Multiple discovery theory abounds in life.
Project Chattle
Continued deep research on who makes what street furniture is amazingly time consuming. As does being able to take high quality photos of the furniture in-context, without too many distractions. Not a lot of movement this week.
Project Radiance
No movement on my GPS-enabled light. Boo.
Project Moses
Rethinking my Robert Moses-inspired game, this time with machine vision instead of physical cards. Maybe a dead end since I don’t have any knowledge about machine vision. Guess I will have to start. I’m enamored with cards (see Project Raconteur above), but finding a way to combine physical totems with digital work is very compelling to me.
And so the week ends, some things coming and going, some projects just stalling.
Here are links to books I’ve become aware of, but don’t have the time to read. Maybe I’ll get to them, or maybe this is the start of a monthly book recommendation services, or it dies. Let’s see.
At MoMA, through the rest of 2018, is an interesting exhibition entitled Bodys Isek Kingelez: City Dreams. It is a retrospective of artist Bodys Isek Kingelez (1948–2015) who was based in then-Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo):
following its independence from Belgium, Kingelez made sculptures of imagined buildings and cities that reflected dreams for his country, his continent, and the world.
These are amazing models of what could happen, a speculative dream for a new country emerging from great change, all created from everyday and readymade objects. The work is amazing, and you should go. A few times.
My criticism of the work is that the future dreamworld looks dreadful from an urbanist point of view. The future that Bodys Isek Kingelez envisions has come to life in parts of Beijing and in Gurgaon, right outside New Delhi, India. Gurgaon is the manifestation of libertarian space; rife with walled fortress-like compounds which require a car to navigate from one to the other, all cloaked in dust and smog. There is no space for walking or biking; no space for simple pleasures of moving from space to space without the requirement of a car to convey you to that new space.
These are spaces where the body is cut off from each other; spaces where the building form is more important than the person:
Now this criticism might seem unfair, or jumping to conclusions based on art but the work as a whole leaves me with trepidation that the future dream is not truly human-centered, rather the future envisioned is a series of unconnected edifices. Yet this work also, in a way, correctly predicts star architects, run amok libertarian space, and the foregrounding of building not urbanism.
