Tuesday 27 October 2009

Field Journal

Carolyn Butterworth article Gian was talking about, there is some other interesting articles on there too!

http://www.field-journal.org/index.php?page=journal-2
Check this out

http://www.noodlejam.co.uk/room_8/room_8_entwistle.htm

Sunday 25 October 2009

Carolyn Butterworth licking the Barcelona Pavilion

Check her out.. its the girl Gihan was talking about.

Saturday 24 October 2009

110: Mapping ===> http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/player/CPRadio_player.php?podcast=http://www.thisamericanlife.org/xmlfeeds/110.xml&proxyloc=http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/player/customproxy.php

** guys, click on the link and listen the video clip!

Five ways of mapping the world. One story about people who make maps the traditional way—by drawing things we can see. And other stories about people who map the world using smell, sound, touch, and taste. The world redrawn by the five senses.

Prologue.

Ralph Gentles and five other people spend each summer creating a map of every crack, every depression, every protrusion, every pothole in the sidewalks of New York City. We hear why, and we hear all the things their map does not include. Mapmaking means ignoring everything in the world but the one thing being mapped, whether it's cracks in sidewalks or the homes of Hollywood stars. And, according to cartographer Denis Wood, we live in the Age of Maps: more than 99.9 percent of all the maps that have ever existed have been made in the last 100 years.(5 minutes)

Act One. Sight.

Denis Wood talks with host Ira Glass about the maps he's made of his own neighborhood, Boylan Heights in Raleigh, North Carolina. They include a traditional street locator map; a map of all the sewer and power lines under the earth's surface; a map of how light falls on the ground through the leaves of trees; a map of where all the Halloween pumpkins are each year; and a map of all the graffiti in the neighborhood. In short, he's creating maps that are more like novels, trying to describe everyday life.

See some of Denis's maps.Denis Wood is author of The Power of Maps. (8 minutes)

Act Two. Hearing.

TAL contributor Jack Hitt visits Toby Lester, who has mapped all the ambient sounds in his world: the hum of the heater, the fan on the computer. (11 minutes)

Song: "Way over Yonder in the Minor Key," Billy Bragg and Wilco

Act Three. Smell.

A story about a device that charts the world through smell—and only smell. TAL producer Nancy Updike visits Cyrano Sciences in Pasadena, California, where researchers are creating an electronic nose. (9 minutes)

Act Four. Touch.

Deb Monroe reports on how she has been mapping her own body through her sense of touch. (9 minutes)

Act Five. Taste.

Jonathan Gold goes to the places on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles that he visited back in the early 1980s. He tells the story of how he decided to map an entire street using his sense of taste, and how doing this changed his life.

Song: "I Love America," Noel Coward

political

long..go tu this website have something to do with political isu i think..http://www.bbc.co.uk/birmingham/travel/airport-comments-page.shtml

Thursday 22 October 2009

6th event
Exploration of the airport based on a sensory experience.. and our chosen sense to study..
We had a go on the massage chairs.
Event 5
We retraced our steps back to the mono rail link to the airport.
4th Event
Golf and walk by the lake. Artificial lake that is almost pleasant in the middle of this industrialized area.
3rd event
We got into the main exhibition hall. This space is surprisingly big.

Event 2

Second main event.
Lunch. bumping into Marks and Lees group. Then exploring the train station waiting room and platform. This is a perfect "non place"
Hey Guys Sorry its late..
First event.
Meeting up. I remember bumping into lee on the road toward the train station. We were greeted by Atet. My first impression was how my preconception differed to reality.

Wednesday 21 October 2009

We were talking about this earlier today and the idea of how territories govern our life . I think this is pretty relevant.

Architectural structures have a significant existential and mental task. They domesticate space for human occupation by turning anonymous, uniform and limitless space into distinct places of human significance and equally importantly they make endless time tolerable by giving duration its human measure...
Juhani Pallasman.

Architecture helps to replace meaningless reality with a theatrically, or rather architecturally, transformed reality which draws us in and, as we surrender to it, grants us an illusion of meaning.. we cannot live with chaos. Chaos must be transformed into cosmos.
Karsten Harries
hi guys i have read some article and news about why the facebook being blocked ,this actually related to the topic which we discussing.
After the deadly riots in its western region of Xinjiang, China’s central government has taken all the usual steps to block citizens from accessing foreign web services: aside from crippling Internet service in general, the authorities have blocked Twitter, removed unapproved references to the violence from search engines and even bar its citizens from accessing Facebook from most parts of Mainland China. Because those websites are examples of strong media which can actually spread news very fast and threaten a country. so the china blocks some website to protect its own territory. Besides that, like north korea, Isereal and some countries, they actually also blocking some info from getting into their territories. all of these political moblity is control by the governments. but what i was thinkin is that we have the rights to know what is happening out there? don't we?

Toward green mobility: the evolution of transport

Hey guys, i found something interesting here about the physical mobility.

"We envision a transport system producing zero emissions and sparing the surface landscape, while people on average range hundreds of kilometers daily. We believe this prospect of 'green mobility' is consistent in general principles with historical evolution. We lay out these general principles, extracted from widespread observations of human behavior over long periods, and use them to explain past transport and to project the next 50 to 100 years. Our picture emphasizes the slow penetration of new technologies of transport adding speed in the course of substituting for the old ones in terms of time allocation. We discuss serially and in increasing detail railroads, cars, aeroplanes, and magnetically levitated trains (maglevs)." from: http://phe.rockefeller.edu/green_mobility/
====================================

Understanding mobility begins with the biological: humans are territorial animals and instinctively try to maximize territory. The reason is that territory equates with opportunities and resources.

However, there are constraints to range -- essentially, time and money. since ever and in contemporary societies spanning the full range of economic development, people average about 1 hour per day traveling.

Transport matters for the human environment. Its performance characteristics shape settlement patterns. Its infrastructures transform the landscape. It consumes about one-third of all energy in a country such as the United States. And transport emissions strongly influence air quality. Thus, people naturally wonder whether we have a chance for 'green mobility', transport systems embedded in the environment so as to impose minimal disturbance.

Tuesday 20 October 2009

territorialised

hi guys. regarding lee's theory of territorialised. sad to say it sort of happen in our uni. i am not saying it wrong, that a nature of human. i've read few research on why individuals create this 'circle of trust'. Individuals often join a group to meet their interpersonal needs. William Schutz2 has identified three such needs: inclusion, control, and affection.

a)Inclusion is the need to establish identity with others.
b)Control is the need to exercise leadership and prove one's abilities. Groups provide outlets for this need. Some individuals
do
c)not want to be a leader. For them, groups provide the necessary control over aspects of their lives.
d)Affection is the need to develop relationships with people. Groups are an excellent way to make friends and establish
relationships.

as a conclusion to what i've read,

Group Synergy
Group synergy refers to the idea that two heads (or more) are better than one.
You may have also heard the phrase, "The whole is greater than the sum of its
parts," which also refers to group synergy. Put simply, groups are often capable of
producing higher quality work and better decisions that can an individual working
alone.

Support and Commitment
A group may be more willing to take on a large project than would an individual. In
addition to its increased ability to perform work, the group can provide
encouragement and support to its members while working on a big project.

Interpersonal Needs
Individuals often join a group to meet their interpersonal needs. William Schutz has
identified three such needs: inclusion, control, and affection.

* Inclusion is the need to establish identity with others.
* Control is the need to exercise leadership and prove one's abilities. Groups
provide outlets for this need. Some individuals do not want to be a leader.
For them, groups provide the necessary control over aspects of their lives.
* Affection is the need to develop relationships with people. Groups are an
excellent way to make friends and establish relationships.

i dont know if this help with what we talk about yesterday..plz give some feedback...thanks.

my little summary of Meeting1.

1. physical mobility:-
-why did our "home" become statics?
*human's needs/wants?
*why people stay? and why they move?

2. virtual mobility:-
-why human rely on virtual mobility more and more?
-"Territorization"

3. political mobility:-
-physical: Iran, Iraq? the old china? any issues that happened.
-virtual: freedom of speech on internet?
* why? issues? problems? reasons? consequences?

4. Social mobility:-
-what causes?
-what happened?
*changing structures... communism ->capitalism.

guys hope tis is useful to you all. cheers!
hey guys, this is the our coming plan timeline:-

19th Oct (Mon) - Meeting 1: Stage1= revised and improved. (1pm)
20th Oct(Tues) - Researches and Reading for Stage2 (Individually)
21st Oct (Wed) - Meeting 2: Stage2= Discussion about the site analysis info and site visit. (11am)
22nd Oct(Thu) - *
23rd Oct (Fri) - *
24th Oct (Sat) - Meeting 3: Final Discuss about Stage1 for group direction
: Compilation of Stage2 analysis.
25th Oct (Sun) - **
26th Oct (Mon)- Meeting for the presentation preparation
27th Oct (Tues)- Formative Review
30th Oct (Fri) - Submission/ Presentation?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* either 22nd or 23rd will be our site visit date. we'll discuss it during the meeting 2 ok?
** family day? take a small break. (=

Monday 19 October 2009

Shared Space

The more territorialised we become, the fewer options we have, a car will not give way to a pedestrian on a road "this is a road, it is for cars", so if something were to have multiple uses; be less territorialised there are more possibilities (at every scale) it is as simple as that?

Below is a video of a shared space sceme in ashford kent, which does this.

Territories

Hey Guys,
Talking about territories i felt the need to move on slightly and try and make it a little more expicitly relevant to architecture even though with each explaination i feel like it is loosing the essence of what it could mean. it is about people not buildings.

Territories are a product of consciousness. Of our own absurd existance. We become aware that we live in a world, where we have no consequence whatsoever. that we are heading nonchalantly towards death, with no meaning and no purpose.
Now this is either an infinate resource to draw upon or it is a crushing acceptance of death, which in turn calls us to choose between hope or suicide.
Throughout history we have chosen to give ourselves hope by choosing to transcend this life on the premise of eternal life.

We create god in the image of ourselves who in turn creates man. and it is from this point of perceptual saliency (that man is above all other things) that we move forward.

We confine and order space by means of territorialisation to provide meaning for our existence.

architecture can and has become the embodiment of this state of stability, order and permanence as a product of our cultured'perception of the world around us. it becomes the ultimate absurdity.

i'm not saying the world is shit, i am asking just as before we could not accept our absurd existence.... i am asking can we live in a world so limited?

"A SUDDEN SHIFT IN THOUGHT BRINGS BACK INTO THE WORLD A SORT OF FRAGMENTARY IMMANENCE WHICH RESTORES TO THE UNIVERSE ITS DEPTH". (CAMUS)




I'm asking should we question the role of culture in architecture and vice versa? should architecture take a more collaborative approach to culture rather than being a product of it?
Sylv I like your previous blogs on how you are drawing comparisons of our world to the matrix. Is this where we are heading? Its an interesting point. Will there be a time where we don't actually have to leave our home, our pod.. Perhaps we can commune, work, learn all by plugging into a virtual world in the comfort of our own home?? and be static.
Mobility is of goods, people and information. What happens if we didnt move in the physical anymore.. just in the virtual.. Anyway thats just an idea......

I'm reading invisible cities. Its a series of descriptions mostly by marco polo of his travels to different cities.. He depicts fantasy cites to Kublar khan the emperor.
Its plays on his imagination. On our imagination.. and how we imagine a place to be. We can imagine a place that is not confined to physical principles..

In response to what you said about the Pyramids we need to see them in reality to really experience them (in context.)
I'm interested in our preconception or perception of a place. We all have a mental image of what New York is like or Rio. However we know our preconception will differ to the reality of the place... we will not have had the full sensory experience of the place.. We will miss the smell the hustle and bustle the noises the real atmosphere.
We will all have a different perspective of a place. due to infinite factors. Take Birmingham for instance we all have a different mental map or emotional mapping of the place. We pick out urban landscape to create a mental map of a place. This is owed to how we experience our city. Some of us travel by bus, some by car some walk or cycle. Sometime the same routes but we will all have a different image of the city.

Leading on from this I began to think about physical mobility in our society. Yes it can be banal. The regular journey to work or school every day.. the same traffic lights, stuck on the same road. or waiting for a train in the same waiting room. In this place of insignificance. A NON PLACE.
But these NON places are valuable. An airport waiting room, a stretch of motor way. these places give time to our emotions. A place for anticipation to build, For us to develop our preconception of a place. How we choose to move through it.. Is this similar to the different types of territories you mentioned lee? How our own different territories personal to us, influence our experience of a space. We will move differently through different space.

Friday 16 October 2009



this picture is my individual presentation work.

it shows my idea about the future world, if human really totally rely on technology and living in virtual world. the digitized world can give human all the things, because nothing is impossible in that virtual reality.

the virtual reality allow us to achieve those we can't do in the real world. But at the same time, while human living inside the beautiful virtual reality, we will be totally controlled. we have no physical freedom, we have no freedom of thought. machines become strong, and human becomes weak. we got no place to resist, "seems like we have plenty of freedom, but we actually have none."

No matter how much the virtual reality can give us, it is still like a dream that seems so real. If human unable to wake from it, we will never know the difference between the dream world and the real world. Our real world will just like the picture above, devastated.

Thursday 15 October 2009

think...will virtual mobility takes over physical mobility?

we can't deny that we are now living in a world that both physical mobility and virtual mobility are so important to us. i never been to Egypt before, but i know what Giza Pyramid looks like. this is the power of technology. i think that we are heading to virtual mobility, and slowly it's going to take over physical mobility.

will there be one day, virtual mobility fully takes over physical mobility?

Like the "Matrix", we will never even open our eyes to look around since the day we were born. Our life, soul and mind are all injected into a big machine, human officially lives in virtual world. by that time, the government can easily manipulate human's thinking. whatever they think people should not know will never be known.--- political mobility in future.

At that time, the world will accomplish equality of ethnic groups. there will have neither commoner nor royalty, rich nor poor. that will be a major social mobility.. and maybe the last?

I wish that day of virtual world will never come. Even i never been to Egypt before, although i know what Giza Pyramid looks like. still, i wish to go Egypt and look at it, and feel it.



Above is one of Matrix movie scenes, those glowing thingy are actually human, who never open the eyes and unaware that they are living in a totally virtual world. will we become the same, and do we want this?
Group video.... What do you guys think?

teleportation

i have read some article and watch some video about teleportation. i think it might be happen in the future. if this happened i think it can really save our time from travelling... but at the same time we also need to think on the negative way, like what if it fail half way teleporting? something bad might happened...
here's some video to share...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nq6y9P1_yM&feature=fvw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FqLCLooayM&feature=related

Australian teleport breakthrough



By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor


It is a long way from Star Trek, but teleportation - the disembodiment of an object in one location and its reconstruction in another - has been successfully carried out in a physics lab in Australia.
Scientists at the Australian National University (ANU) made a beam of light disappear in one place and reappear in another a short distance away.
The achievement confirms that in theory teleportation is possible, at least for sub-atomic particles; whether it can be done for larger systems, such as atoms, remains to be seen.
The more likely applications will come in telecommunications, enabling much faster transfer of data and the use of encryption that can never be broken.


Will we ever be able to teleport humans?
Teleportation has been one of the hottest topics among physicists working in quantum mechanics - the study of the fundamental structure of matter.
Some 40 labs around the world are currently trying to teleport a laser beam after pioneering work in 1998 at the California Institute of Technology showed it should be possible.
'Spooky interaction'
The Australian researchers have exploited a phenomenon called "quantum entanglement", which links the properties of two photons of light created at the same time. Einstein called it a "spooky interaction".
What it means is that two photons can be created and sent to different places. It is possible to force one photon into a specific quantum mechanical state and, because the two photons are connected in some way, the other photon will instantaneously take up a complementary state.
At first sight, entanglement offers the prospect of sending a signal faster than the speed of light. But a closer look at what is actually possible shows that this will not work because of the limits of what can be known about quantum mechanical systems and how such information is relayed.
But it may offer the prospect of a Star Trek-style transporter.
'Exciting applications'
Using quantum entanglement, ANU physicist Ping Koy Lam has disassembled laser light at one end of an optical communications system and recreated a replica just a metre away.
An encoded signal is embedded in an input stream of photons, which is entangled with another beam.
Elsewhere in the lab, the beam of photons and the associated signal is reconstituted.
"What we have demonstrated here is that we can take billions of photons, destroy them simultaneously, and then recreate them in another place," Dr Lam says.
"The applications of teleportation for computers and communications over the next decade are very exciting," he adds.
Body movement
Quantum teleportation could make encrypted or coded information 100% secure, Dr Lam said, because even if intercepted the message would be unintelligible unless it was intended for a specific recipient.
"It should be possible to construct a perfect cryptography system. When two parties want to communicate with one another, we can enable the secrecy of the communication to be absolutely perfect."
But for a human to be teleported, a machine would have to be built that could pinpoint and analyse the trillions and trillions of atoms that make up the human body.
"I think teleporting of that kind is very, very far away," Dr Lam says. "We don't know how to do that with a single atom yet."
Quantum teleporting is problematic for humans because the original is destroyed in the process of creating the replica.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2049048.stm

virtual friends?

 
this is a video showing one of the first step we(human) made to have a perfect friends. human are incapable of being there for someone every time and anytime. we have needs, problem, job and etc. this robot are programs to make the us loves and importance. but what happen when we start to trust him(machine) we start to take him to consideration of every discussion we going to make. we cant deny that all our decision we make have been influence by our feeling our emotion. in the other hand machine decision been make through a complex equation based on logic and it's program. which been control by the person that design it. in the end we all going to be a product of control equation based on one personality. which make us eventually a robots. 

Wednesday 14 October 2009

Summary

Hey Guys just thought i'd try and condense my posts so that it is clear/clearer what i have been, thinking; about mobility. As stated in my first BLOG i had decided to look at mobility at 1:1 scale but think it is easy to apply the ideas to any scale, again my ideas have been influenced by my reading: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and i can not recommend it highly enough, though it will make you "wired".

The ideas are implicit and cyclical so i found myself turning inside out a few times, and have found clear analogies between the book and this BLOG site, i know i will be returning to it again it has some sort of strange energy.
This is an intensification of a concept of something or other; a territory.



When territories interact it facilitates movement.

For example, the types of territories interacting could be; self concept, popular culture, religion, language, Sensory information, Political climate,and economics....(or at a different scale: buildings) etc this would facilitate some limited or normalised possibilities for movement (it would be common sense) .

Throughout i have been trying to show that there are always alternative routes, and it is important to question why we do or why we are a part of something? and that normalised movement may not always be what we want as individuals. Especially when one of the interacting territories is opposed to peoples needs.

The Ring road is a good example of this.



When territories become subverted e.g. via mobile/communication technologies they undermine the system of interactions which previously controlled movement. The possibilities become endless.


Depending on your own perspective this either undermines the physical realm or reinforces it i'd argue it allows you to interact more with the physical environment, in situations that you would have previously played a passive role in; Listening to your ipod on the bus is a totally different experience to listening to natural/mundane sounds (although this has cultural differences; transcendence/immanence), what is next? subverting the visual field? merging with the internet? Price Charles would be pleased he could have his classical buildings with some old stautes of lions and some expensive crackers in the cupboard of every english man; i wouldn't care, i'd put on my 3-d goggles and piss over it all on my way to uni.

Tuesday 13 October 2009

Control for the common good?


This is a scene from Werner Herzog's encounters on the edge at the world, Werner sum's the scene up with his narration but again it brings me back to Movement and identity.

The penguin's all moving collectively have a proxy identity; informed by a culture, language... semiotics.

Yes it could be called common sense and would be pedantic of me to insist in normal situations that it is anything more, But if we are all occupied by popular culture and common sense then there would be no alternative this is what globalisation is? It is; a VOID it is immobile? and controlling? if it was part of culture that mechanical transport was say... the work of an evil beast... that too would be common sense we wouldn't question it.

Technology



Check this out.... guess who financed it?

Internet


Hey Charlie,

That Video is insane i guess it is stupid to think of the internet as anything other than a part of who we are? it hasn't been imposed upon us, it has come out of us?
Is it alive? Are we nothing but mechanics in this machine (Neurons) What if we gave it a body? Does it need one?


I remembered the opening question in the myth of sisyphus by Albert Camus

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest – whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories – comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer [the questions of suicide].”

Is all that is required for us to accept all of the possibilities this creates; is for there to be a space for us to totally disconnect from time to time?


back to the Womb or Shelter to switch off? I think of this and realise how empowering the virtual world is and why so many people have embraced it so quickly? I agree with the sentiment of your original post: it is the future?
lee

Monday 12 October 2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlBgIO6Mp9A

Which Future?

I was thinking about Charlies post again and about the changing nature of our culture or time, brought about by new technologies.

Linking back to a previous BLOG where i had thought too often we are stuck within a dualistic framework of existance?

Continuously having to categorise without much thought something as good or bad? On what basis?

i don't think it would be useful at the moment to contemplate this much much farther?
But to link it back to the idea of territories and how my previous BLOG may have had a negative tone towards the 'undermining' of cultural values of the built environment and self...

(this is why i believe everyone has such a strong opinion of nationalist politics? from everyone's point of view their own cultural identity is being erroded, i don't care. But i find it facinating the way people react. who makes the nazi's?)

Bbut which is better? to be territorialised? to be firmly rooted in a culture or to be Unterritorialised? to be on the fringes of society deeply unrooted and not of societies values?


Clinton:





The next video has the embedding feature disabled but it is a really powerful scene from the ending of Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qI60RZ0Gr4

Which should we embrace?

Sunday 11 October 2009

Respond to charlie’s “travelling without moving”, yes we really almost can do everything in front of the computer screen now. In Johny Depp’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, people able to teleport things through tv, dissolved – transport – resembled. Do you think it will happened? When the time coming, people will not only embark the “journey” on a virtual level anymoreand then only that time government should really be worry isn’t it?

And then about the “second life”, there’s another movie talking about it which I watched it very long time ago(maybe when I was in primary time?), people in the future can sort of inject their soul into internet and wherever the internet can reach, they can access to. All people digitalise their soul and life into the digital world to persuit everlasting life? But in “Matrix”, the government is the main power to control everything and then the whole world living in the ‘not-really-exist’ world. There got no everlasting long life, but human spend whole life time in dream... 'digital restrict' and 'internet control the masse' mentioned by charlie, are those actually the foreseen that we all heading to it?

to lee, yes i think it would be a great idea if we all can watch together. (=

and so sorry that i was sick these few days so that now only got to read the blog.

Techno-Culture

Hey Charlie,

Your video raises some interesting points and yes agree we should meet as a group to see where we could take it next...

For me it highlights the fact, as you say travelling without moving... we've never been so mobile but makes us become static, how we can tresspass on somebody's territory, virtually; the example comes to mind, is how teenagers now have mobile phones. When i was young if someone wanted me, they would physically have to cross the boundary at the edge of the street, open a gate perhaps and walk a path to knock the door, 9 times out of 10 answered by my parents....

This cultural aspect of our built environment is changing? as a direct result of mobile communication technologies?

I guess the question is how and how fast? How are we changing to keep up? can we?

anyway i have some films we could watch as a group?

Thursday 8 October 2009

Mobility of information...

The mobility of infomation

In response to Loongs blog:-

The American dream was to be prosperous; it was the land of opportunities. I don’t think it was necessarily to become famous. The social mobility of moving though the class system is an interesting approach on social mobility. In this current economic climate I guess many of the higher classes may be affected. However the eventually the poorer will become poorer.

Lee the idea of territories is an exciting idea. It may be something we should all look into?? We should try to differentiate between different territories and how they affect movement relating not only to physical, virtual, social and political.

I have created a video for as an individual response to the task at hand. My initial interest was in how the Internet is affecting our society. I wanted my video to portray a place where we are bombarded with information. It is a place where we can do everything from/in. Experience the world… This is reducing our need to actually be physically mobile.. Now there is no need to go to the shops we have tescos online shopping or even go to the library we have wikkipedia…

It’s a “parallel universe” It’s travelling without moving?!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m17jEWRFDjA

I went on to think about what is the consequence of our growing dependence on the Internet? I went to a great lecture about the future of Digbeth a few days ago. One council representative shared the plan of making Digbeth a “digital district” It seems that our governments priority is connecting people.

Apart from the obvious benefits of the Internet, it does enable a potential invasion of privacy… Governments, the police, the general public even “big brother” are watching you!! The internet allows for the masses to be monitored Before this nihilistic society, religion was used to control the masses.. now is it the internet??

Peacock



This video i thought shows what i am getting at; This is how we exist in the world as individuals, suspended in fictionalisations or territories. what is interesting (i think) is what happens when we begin to remove (de-territorialise) each feather one at a time? where does this leave us with eugenics? after all it is strictly speaking re-territorialisation could we begin to mutate?

social mobility is changing america's dream

Social Mobility is changing America's Dream What happened to the American Dream, how does social mobility affect it? For those who are trying to achieve the American Dream this is a complex question because they have not had the opportunity to be socially mobile in a positive way to achieve the American dream. The American dream is rapidly fading in America and the ideal perception no longer exists with shows like American Idol and America's Got Talent. The traditional definition of the American dream was success, fame and/ or wealth through time and hard work. Today, the American dream is focused on pursuing materialist prosperity. Social mobility is when someone moves across the social class boundaries; this move can be up or down the social scale. When you combine the American dream today is affected by one's social mobility.

Territories

This is an extract from my note book, i've been reading Capitalism and schizophrenia, it sounds stupid but it is life changing stuff. i'm not sleeping.

Territorialisation



The above picture is by Agnes Martin, who described her paintings as being beyond form and void, i got slightly obsessed by them in first year. I think attracted me to them was VOID though, they made me feel somewhat protected by their regularity and repetition (Habit, Habitat). Like i was getting at with territories, territorialised in the chaos of the world, but it gets to a point where this becomes limiting abit like the images superstudio used to produce: THIS IS A VOID




The structure of language (anyone interested i have some links), culture, society, religion and the physical city controls the amount possibilities and type of (statistically i guess is a good way of putting it)of self identity we offer ourselves and to the rest of the world... physical movement... (i remember our first project in the first year and see much more relevence to it now, what clothes we wear, the watch, the shoes, the colours, the music the tv programs; they all props to help fictionalise ourselves) things are not interelated but categorised, easily quantified/ falsified and graded according to the orders needs. its an implicit relationship with a man made machine (there is no alternative...).

De-territorialisation



The above picture is by Brice Marden and as with the other pictures i am using it as a tool to explain my point.
Interrelating territories (Chaos); physical space (parkour, flash mobs, journey as destination) and conceptual space (death of god, virtual realms, mobile communication). Ungrammatical Language (something William Burroughs used to harp on about intend to BLOG on that later), maybe if technology could become conscious we could approach this type of structure... i know it is romantic to think about communicating with plants... but actually why not? this is what this type of structure alludes to? would man made conscious machines only achive human consciousness? (that would be abit pointless?)

Wednesday 7 October 2009

Landslide

Was thinking about mobility and had remembered a book i'd seen about lost buildings and cities etc; i think the main article was about Bam in Iran, which from what i can remember was an adobe city which was wiped out by an earthquake. all the videos on youtube seem to be about an Iranian musician who died in the earthquake (some sweet tunes though, will be investigating), i guess tit's the same as tsunami's and landslides and how our actions (amount of hard landscape for example and landslides)can influence how much or how badly we get effected, i guess it is retarded to say we. and also land movement is not always so destructive? Sand dunes in the desert are constantly moving? and the sea with our floating cruise ships, oil tankers, cargo ships dingys....

Just a thought

Our contribution to the blog is Political, in that we want to be seen as to be doing "what we are supposed to", Social in that we are sharing ideas and shaping whatever conclusions we all come to individually, This is all happenning online Virtually and will affect our grade in the "real" Physical world except it's not real. Unless we start to assign marks to everyone we meet: great handshake, but you smell, 7.

perhaps it's not worth putting up?

Tuesday 6 October 2009

VIDEO pt2

I had intended to post another video based around the idea if Immanence, but it started feeling like slow progress and so decided to post this video of John Cage performing: Water Walk, in this video there is no destination; only experience.



I guess the contrast between the two shows a cultural difference in how people experience everyday life and refer to my favourite john cage quote taken from his essay, Experimental Music:

“This play, however, is an affirmation of life-not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we are living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord”

But can we do this? Without rules? Without habit? Without common sense? (I know every time i approach this my life turns into chaos...) you should see my room after two weeks of letting things act of their own accord. Without habit, preconceptions, language, values etc we have no tools to fictionalise ourselves... we’d be no one and exist nowhere; then where do we begin a journey?

So maybe in creating the world in our image (Churches based on human proportions..) and out of our abstract sensibilities and theories we create a type of space which allows us to exist (in a conscious way)? (i know this is a flippant thing to say, but this is a BLOG)

We cannot have any experience of the objective world except in the light of socially derived periods of duration which constitute the category ‘time’ and ditto for space, cause and the other categories (Alfred Bell, Anthropology of time)

By bringing order out of chaos.

There is a scene in the film Sixth Sense, where; Hayley Joel Osmond, runs into his bedroom (from the ghost girl), and into his improvised tent. Here he begins reciting some type of personal mantra (not sure if it has religious meaning) and surrounded himself with figures stolen from a church, it is as if he is desperately trying to reorder the chaos he had just ran from (the dead girl undermines his sense of the world and the type of space he exists within) he was establishing a territory. Physically (with the tent and symbols) and conceptually (religion).

Territories is where i’m going i think, movement between them, although i still can’t separate things into physical, virtual, social, political? They are all the same?

Thinking about Charlie's post maybe territories are ‘Spaces of anticipation?’

Each in intersecting "mobility" presupposes a "system". These systems make possible movement: they provide "spaces of anticipation" that the journey can be made, that the message will get through, that the parcel will arrive.- john urry mobility

Have any of you seen Videodrome?

Monday 5 October 2009

Traveling without moving


In response to Lees video. I like the contrast between the sound and the visual. It creates an something unusual. The progression from the birdsong to the electronic sounds suggests progression or movement through time?? Development...

The idea about our temporal western society needs to have a destination. I agree with this. I believe whether its a secular society or not we as humans need to have purpose, to get somewhere, or to achieve something.. If we didn't life does become nihilistic and meaningless...

Talking about the anticipation of a journey...

Each in intersecting "mobility" presupposes a "system". These systems make possible movement: they provide "spaces of anticipation" that the journey can be made, that the message will get through, that the parcel will arrive.- john urry mobility

My initial blog was addressing the issue of the internet and how we interact with it now. "We are what we share..." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiP79vYsfbo
In a previous blog I spoke about the internet and how we control it. Governments are scared..The internet is an amazing tool to communicate, to share ideas to start a revolution.. It gives us all the ability to promote our ideologies.
We are all very dependent on it. It is a space that WE can all go to.. However it is strange because it doesn't actually exist...??
How far will our technology go?
I believe the internet is threatening life as we know it.
Will we all eventually be content with sitting in front of a computer screen? or being engaged or connected somehow??
We can do almost everything from the computer screen.... Will we become so content that eventually we will only embark on our "journey" on a virtual level, in this parallel universe?? Has everyone heard of second life

We could live and experience in this virtual world.

You could say we would be traveling without moving?? ?


It's about Social Mobility =Slumdog Millionaire=

Hi ya everyone, It's syl here. I'm posting the Slumdog Millionaire's trailer to you all as i think no matter in or out of the movie, it's a excellent example of social mobility.



(to be continued.)

mobility

hi, here's a video i found it very interesting which can be relate to mobility.




loong

Sunday 4 October 2009

VIDEO

The first video could be taken loads of ways and isn’t intended as a profound statement; rather it is based around a particular thought and as something i could come back to and develop and direct my understanding of where i am going with this....

The idea behind this was the concept of ‘Transcendence’ hence the title and has two sides of it for me... the first is about transcending normal reality. In the case of this video juxtaposing sounds and images to create something new i.e. by placing something virtual into an objective reality. The sound on the video wasn’t recorded on the same day or at the same time as the video so at time of recording the video it didn’t exist; in this sense the sound is virtual.

The next idea was about temporal experience and how from a western perspective things develop over time in anticipation of a destination. Once you get there you wonder what it was that made you begin the journey in the first place. It is the same as most prominent religions in this country today; slightly nihilistic. Rejecting the present in favour of some promised destination (or salvation) at the end of a journey.

lee

Saturday 3 October 2009

Mobility

Hey People,

My contribution to the main BLOG site, has largely revolved around thinking about the experience of being mobile, on a individual level i guess on a 1:1 scale.

looking at ways or circumstance which controls or shapes the way we become mobile in the 21st century.

It began as a critique of the Urban Realm and how options for use and for movement around the city are 'offered' to us by planners and architects and saw several links within what i was thinking at the time and the video that Charlie posted. i speculated that maybe the users should decide how the space is used and that maybe by some type of Group wisdom or collective consciousness; could offer the ideal conditions for each of the cities users or atleast a more democratic version of daily reality.

links related to this cropped up again and again on the blog:

starlings:
Flash mobs:
parkour:
so now i am attempting to understand mobility before it gets to the 'collective' stage and should be posting more soon.... mainly in video format my first video can be found here, now when i started it i told myself it was relevant and hopefully it will make sense as i post more videos.




lee