Stockholm

holm = island

Stockholm = Island of Stock

Navigating by street names may be tricky but I believe my map has a faithful je ne sais quoi, as the situationists would say.

Being on a train is a microcosm of the private/public blur. Not only is the carriage leaking out business and living room phone calls but it's being instagrammed, emailed and tweeted from - a carriage of documention. I looked down the aisle once to see a guy sat with his smartphone square in my direction. I don't think he was taking photos, but the psychological panopticon effect had already snapped my posture into david bowie's "Heroes" pose (in reality, I hopped on to the next seat. Away from the line of sight and my rock star photo shoot).

Catenary Curves

Perhaps I posted something about catenaries before?? But I've never found a more concise video than this. Do not be freaked out by the maths, allow the hidden descriptions of your environment be explained by one James Grime. Let the chains of understanding (yes, permission to shoot me granted) free you from the cold winter morning.

Timothy Ingold Rant on Haraway

I thought this was superb.
Transcribed for your pleasure

"If i get annoyed with Latour I get positively angry reading Haraway, its got nothing to do with her arguments, it's her style. I find her style pretentious in the extreme and quite unnecessarily so, it's badly written and it's just that kind of stuff that everybody loves because [its] sort of written in this academese and I'm really fed up with bad academic writing parading as something deep." 

"So anyway I really really don't enjoy reading Haraway. The other reason why I don't enjoy it is most of the time when it comes to the dogs and things, companion, animal stuff, she's catching up where people who have been working on animal - human relations have been talking about this for donkeys years and just re-packaging it. So I'm not terribly impressed. I sort of threw her in because she's been talking about this 'being with the animals' and rest of it - but we knew that!"

He concludes, "in terms of the argument I'm on the same page as she is."

Deep link here 

"I think you can find them on the internet"

It's true.

when i'm out walking, I strut my stuff

Testing, testing 1 2

Night tracing foot movement with glow bracelets.

Today's lesson;

The bracelets work as long as they're the strongest light source. This makes it kind of limiting to use in most urban environments with lighting (where people are!).

I have a team of technicians strapping flood lights to our athletes as I type

Glow Bracelets

Controlling the night life fun.

That's one party and one concert, no more!
I'll try to stay under the limit, testing these tonight.

Experiment 43B

don't we all want the same things?

Experiment X01

(I am told this video is blocked in Germany, verdammt!!
To my peoples in germany you are only missing the following;
- footage of pedestrians walking
- some people on bikes
- a car

I use them all to 'wipe' into each other against the soundtrack of 'its different for girls' by joe jackson

In future any videos with copyrighted music will be replaced by karaoke renditions)

barking at the moon

with Gilles Deleuze

Mapping Spatial Boundary Transgressions

Below is a video of Free Runner Phil Doyle scrambling through the roof tops 

The route roughly mapped, reads right to left

Climbing 101, on the surface boundary.

The Minimal Map

The Earth as a Filing Cabinet

"I hired a surveyor, who furnished the Machiguengas with a precise map of their homeland... ...The topographic map that he furnished was, he explained, in certain ways incorrect. It did not correspond to the truth because it did not take into account the curvature of the earth. In such a little piece of land? I asked, losing patience. Of course, he said angrily, and pushed his water glass toward me. Even with a glass of water, you have to be clear about it, what we’re dealing with is not an even surface. You should see the curvature of the earth as you would see it on an ocean or a lake. If you were really able to perceive it exactly as it is—but you are too simple-minded—you would see the earth curve. I will never forget this harsh lesson." 

- Werner Herzog

That account was from Herzog trying to establish land entitlement for the Machiguengas of Peru as part of his deal for filming them (You can read more as he opens a discourse between Reality and Truth). In order to establish land entitlement, he needed;

1. A map delineating the land in question

2. Documents to prove land entitlement

It's catch 22. The Machigeungas only claim to the land was through their grandparents, word of mouth, their own existence. But land doesn't produce documents. We do. 

Set of Fitzcarraldo with Machigeungas

Placing a system of bureaucracy on Earth is bound to be fallible because, like the Projections post I put up earlier, it doesn't correlate at all to what's there. You take the 3 Dimensional thing and treat it like it's 2 Dimensional. After a while you start to believe that's how the world is, a static 2 dimensional thing and when reality pokes it heads up, it makes a mess of your 2 Dimensional map. 

Yet we insist our world fit into this 2 Dimensional map! We insist the world fit the view of a bureaucratic filing cabinet. Observe the island disputes between the UK and Argentina, China and Japan, do you know what they're doing? They're 'back dating claims' to land. Yes, that's right, the very same thing you would do if you applied for unemployment benefits or go through tax payments. Except this isn't money (our own construct), this is land and it's often forgotten there are people living on that land. Bureaucratic things work better in regards to things produced from bureaucratic procedures. It does not work well when you apply it to a living system. Living systems are not bureaucratic procedures; 

- they don't compartmentalise very well

- they use a different language

- they are not balanced (T-Rex isn't here, now we are. Go figure)

- they handle conflict differently

- they don't sit still. This last point retroactively applies to all of the criteria just mentioned, bureaucracy can't deal with the effects of time.  

Land (this earth), things upon it, above and below it is a living 'system'. I use the word system at arms length, perhaps living fabrics, or mesh, or layered ecologies are a few more ways to actively describe it. How we describe the world affects how we see it and I'm all for re-describing it. Something honest that isn't relentlessly squeezing our expectations from it, but can accept it (as much as we are able to) for what is. As Herzog says, to get to The Truth. 

Saying that, if T-Rex came back from the dead with documents claiming ownership of England I would be the first to offer my friends as a meal of approval to his/her leadership.

America Face

My notifications seem to be stuck somewhere in the Americas.

Should this globe start spinning I'll have all kinds of notifications, some say tens* should it manage to swing across europe

(*based on my own research)

Projections

(Map from openstreetmap then scribbled on top)

Automated Coincidence

Today it's a cool 20c. Not suicide weather.

Or should I say, if you did commit suicide there would be no paradigm shift. The trees & flowers would remain the same. Flying insects, with the freedom to take position anywhere in the vast cubic dimensions of space, will still opt for landing in your eye. People will still hide behind their ineptitude for driving with self righteous announcements of stupidity, "use the cycle lane!" (because the throne of stupidity in one part of their brain discussed it with the council of stupidity in the other part of their brain and concluded it to be so. Laws of the real world get in the way of this ageless system). Meanwhile the council in the real world would guarantee the cycle lane rode like someone repeatedly hitting you up the arse with a baseball bat. 

Conversely, there will always be a junction with a cyclist stranded in no man's land, perfectly placed where s/he can't see a traffic light and waiting directly in the path of an oncoming car. Perhaps it's a challenge to the consistent mechanics of the world, "Vehicles can't always follow the same trajectory in a system with defined lanes!" - the rebellious voice of the urban lemming.

God knows why the earth is so finely tuned in this manner. 

It's a consistent mantra that great numbers of people living in the countryside shuffled over to the city in the past 100 years and the easy conclusion is we're all teething together. All impulses, and impulses breed similar impulses. After all, the spontaneous meeting of people in public/open space operates under a fine window of time, so the cordial nod to a passer-by or barking frustrated curse can be reciprocated in the same time it takes to check your watch (because waiting in a public space seems to bring these urgent performances, "I'm waiting so I'll check my watch. That's what people do when they're waiting, I've seen it on a music video". Have you ever waited for someone in the countryside? If its dry, you can lie down - and imagine insects crawling up your shirt). 

God knows why the earth is so finely tuned in this manner. With so many people close together it's not necessarily so that we have to process each other this quickly. In some cultures (which I have just made up) speed is not a currency. 

I will conclude this post with a picture of a pub I used to frequent over a decade ago.  

Still there.

Now you see it, now you...

The Lived Experience

The outdoor place can be a wonderful thing. I enjoy the sense of 'now', a process which wisemen of the east could gift to you through the insight of tales. Tales of mountains, zen masters and a hungover student in the backseat asking, "are we there yet?" over and over again.  

I hold no such insight, for my most frequent reaction to facing a new environment is this

...

Do you see it? 

That was an attempt to convey the 'blank sensation'. 

As I pass through new territory, I'd like to believe that under my gormless facade sits a brain threading together the unfolding arrangement of landscape features, distance and weather into a delicious casserole, one that releases steaming calculus into the air when you cut into it! But it's blank. Therefore, I'm grateful for the supplements found in documentaries, pictures and yes, writing!

The Reflected Experience

However, sometimes reading about places can leave one in the following stations;

1. The information station

2. The haunted territory station

The information station reminds me of a scene from The Trip, a TV show featuring Coogan and Brydon.

(if this link doesn't work, it features Coogan looking over a beautiful landscape yet having a passer by ruin it by regurgitating information of the geological process) 

No one wants to be ear beaten or feel like they're reading through a manual (for the record, I believe manuals can be written and laid out very well! I also believe most of those have been stolen by giants). However, I love finding out how things work!  

The haunted territory station is one where a description of 'now' contains information of what came before it. This is a mind boggling world as one is constantly re-clarifying the links of now and then whilst being juggled around in the author's psyche. Most of what I'm reading is in this latter category. However, it's not only in words that landscapes have turned into ghosts, but in images too. I was hoping to take a photo of this sign, located in essex. 

Yesterday I found it was gone. Now I hold it here as a piece of digital archeology.

Essex is moving up in the world. 

Radio On and the scales of change

"Why do the english always want to live by the sea?"

"It's the last resort"

"huh?"

"They always think it's gonna be better than it is"


Wie gehts holmeslice! Ahem, Radio On follows a trip from London to Bristol. Like a lot of road movies there's a vague ambience to the journey which is interestingly contrasted in a technical and precise delivery. 

A car pulls over so we can get down to some bladder alleviation. In the same shot, the passenger opens the door, 

...exits and takes a leak with the door performing some wonderful groin censorship. Remember, this choreography is just for a guy having a piss - I told you it was technical.


Thoughtfully shot, beautiful photography and a soundtrack we could proudly send to aliens as a declaration of our sensual ingenuity.

But this is not a review or recommendation of the film (though for those curious, I would recommend it on a day when nothing needs to happen. It's also available via a certain daily motion website. You didn't hear it from me, tigerbalm)

Shot in 1979, I couldn't help but compare artifacts. In general, small things can be susceptible to rapid change;

Cassette tapes

Vinyl

Television (if you can stack amps, you can stack tellys)

At the living room scale, we start to slow down. The TV might be the give away but the bauhaus style lamp is still available to purchase at a retail centre near you.

 And bigger scales, what about nature?

Take away the lens and its quite familiar. Slow rates of change to landscape but it is certain change (middle picture is a quarry). Even looking at gardens now you will find fewer variations in styles than compared to houses. Especially in the UK, we're pretty conservative, that's how we roll.

There's an interesting remark in the film about the phrase, "pylons spoil the countryside". I don't hear that anymore, it's been usurped by wind turbines. 

Pylons are just so 1979.

Nighty night pixel readers!

The Supermarket Trolley

The Ancients say it extended from the hand, morphed into a basket and leaped on to some wheels. Each step seemed like autonomy from god yet it was always in god's service. 

That's one way to look at it.

Another view; Sure, the trolley accepts its nature, always to be god's hand but if we map out its shape, its shifting form, there's a progression towards independence.

Another view; By becoming mobile there's an effort to reflect our own mobility, to mimic us. 

Cyborg Trolley (source)

It wants to be us but this is as simple and cheap a solution as we give it. If we lived on water perhaps we'd have an elegant solution, a floating wicker basket to hold Moses along the river reeds. But plastic bottles rafting a wheelie bin would be more likely. 

This is not a story of us and them, technology verus people. In the same way as Science is mistaken as a singular all agreeing collective, the Us (the god earthlings) are built of many groups. Which one of us the trolley serves is clarified at the border line.

"Please note trolley will stop beyond this point"
Trolley disabled at the border line (source)

"...the logic of identity is, always and everywhere, entangled in the logic of hierarchy." - David Graeber, The First 5000 Years of Debt

postcards from the beach

Sometimes when thinking of ideas isn't good enough you might think, "if I was in a different place, I'd think of better ideas".

 
Imagine what incredible ideas I'd come up with if I was at the beach! So I went there, in my mind and came up with this!

which is no different to being at the desk.

Or maybe I chose the wrong location?