Loosely Assembled » location

Thinking Outside the Bounding Box

fekaylius — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 19:56:44 +0000

In his refreshingly multi-faceted project about the gradual evolution of what we now describe as “the public”, David Cayley dives into one pair of contributing factors that really caught my attention: the institutionalization, canonicalization and therefore social elevation of common vernacular tongues (like French and English) alongside the proliferation of popular cartography. The gist of the argument is that this combination of talking about talking and conceptualizing oneself as a member of a group defined by geography and language helped bring about the idea of self conscious human agency, belonging, and citizenship, providing a new affiliation infrastructure in place of the officially defunct system of monastic and parish based guilds.

I see the shadow of a similar change happening within the current world of Geography related to the contentious neologism “Neogeography” and all the agnostic advances and changes taking place under this monicker of ill repute. In the above mentioned episode there is a story about Joachim De Bellay and his poetry gang’s manifesto on renovating the shabby provincial French language into something capable of expressing grand poetic vision. In this manifesto (Défense et illustration de la langue française) a relatively new term “patrie” (fatherland) is heavily used and advocated but the entrenched defenders of the status quo retaliated with the sentiment, “Those of us with a country (pays) have no need for your fatherland (patrie).” Perhaps the recent deletion of Wikipedia’s page on Neogeography should be taken as a similar expression of defensive self preservation by a status quo uninterested in the elevation and expansion of location based practice? “Those of us with Geography have no need for your Neogeography.”

Part of the idea behind this French linguistic renovation was that a dualistic relationship to the language needed to be in place for it to be more fully understood, analyzed, and exploitable. The language had to be spoken and dissected, internalized and externalized. This could only be achieved if the language was made foreign again, self alienated, reread. I suspect the new organic world of the Neogeographic vernacular will likewise play a role in the rebirth of spatial expression into a form more capable of elegantly handling the increasing complexity of interaction between people, places, things, ideas, and time.

Viva la Neogeography! Shoutouts to @schuyler for getting that page back up, @ajturner and @dianneisnor for their prolific and glamorous use of the term and all the others involved in thinking outside the bounding box!

Hacker Camp in a Missile Silo

fekaylius — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:09:53 +0000

toorcamp

On How to Speak Anonymously in Public: A Hacker’s Guide

Zombies in Your City

fekaylius — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 08:11:23 +0000

For a little costume inspiration, I’d like to offer you the city by city zombie photo finder!

WhereCampPDX :: Oct 19th

fekaylius — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:55:02 +0000

WhereCampPDX

It’s going to rock!

Scavenger Hunt, RIGHT NOW

fekaylius — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 23:08:16 +0000

Get details and play at http://platial.com/laborday

Win a trip to NYC for the Conflux Festival!!!

Heely Turbines – Situationist Action Sports – Dope Ass Rolling Cyborg Shoes

jason — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 06:02:11 +0000

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?

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