Posts tagged ‘location’
Zombies in Your City
October 21st, 2008For a little costume inspiration, I’d like to offer you the city by city zombie photo finder!
WhereCampPDX :: Oct 19th
October 2nd, 2008
Scavenger Hunt, RIGHT NOW
August 29th, 2008
Heely Turbines – Situationist Action Sports – Dope Ass Rolling Cyborg Shoes
September 2nd, 2007
Christian Croft and Kate Hartman have hacked a pair of Heelys (those sneakers with the hidden wheel in the heel) to generate enough juice to power a little onboard navigation system with unconventional ideas about navigation. As you roll down the street, a little toe mounted digital screen gives directional suggestions, but these suggestions are not trying to help you get to a specific point B, they are directions to help you get lost, to help you wander and explore your own city in a new way, in a way that isn’t influenced by your own habits, nor by urban design, nor by instinct. It’s a pure wandering route generator.
Despite understanding that the project is primarily a technological sketch for sustainable energy harvesting, I am primarily interested (for this venue) to examine the relationship it has to the situationist practice of the dérive because I feel that a purely random, or even algorithmically based path through a city misses the experience of ‘feeling’ one’s way around the psychological topography, which Guy Debord expresses as essential in his Theory of the Dérive:
One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.
In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.
If the onboard digital instructions were less about turn right or go straight, but were more about looking, feeling and following currents like: oncoming traffic, the loudest street, the most or least crowded path, a smiling face, towards the sunrise or sunset, towards the sound of music, into an empty shop, up the steepest stairs, towards the shortest person or away from home, then i would say that this (already very cool) project would actually be participating in the historic conversation on psychogeographic dérive. But in the meantime, shit, I’d sure rock some dope ass rolling cyborg shoes! Wouldn’t you?
tip off via wmmna