A very interesting 52 minutes 1972 BBC documentary (directed by Julian Cooper) staring Reyner Banham (1922-1988), architecture theorist, member of the Independent Group, who also had contacts with Archigram.

We learn in Encyclopedia Britannica...

[...] The automobile so dominates life in this uniquely mobile community [Los Angeles] that Reyner Banham, an English observer who took his cue from scholars who study Italian in order to read Dante, is said to have learned to drive a car so he could “read Los Angeles in the original.”

Reyner Banham is according to Nigel Whiteley the Historian of the Immediate Future!

To read as well: The kinetic icon: Reyner Banham on Los Angeles as mobile metropolis.

NID 001

Gender · Female

Online Designation(s) · Cati Vaucelle

Function · Researcher + inventor, technology and design.

Vaucelle studied economics, mathematics, fine arts, photography, multimedia, computational linguistics, psychology, computer sciences, technology, and product design! She currently is a PhD student and a research assistant at the MIT Media Laboratory, in Hiroshi Ishi’s Tangible Media group.

Vaucelle plays simulation, strategy and role playing games.

Her 63 warrior-engineer WoW character, 2007

Kit · A MacBookPro laptop with internet access, a camera and an iPod. Vaucelle DOESN’T own/use/carry a cell phone! She is exclusively on Trillian and Skype.

Vaucelle wants to design her own gear: a folded laptop with a projector integrated so that she can retro-project from it on a folded white mat or onto any surface. She would like the keyboard and the track-pad to be detachable. She envisions a laptop lighter than a cell phone.

In the city, she travels ultra light (3 keys, a Subway card, a credit card, a student ID card, and few bucks) but she is also an incredible collector: from MP3 to CD and records, comic books, movies, toys… For Vaucelle, objects have a history, hence a deep significance: “I collect and revisit toys that are charged with a period.”

Cati Vaucelle, A toy found in a demolished hotel in Paris, 1998. “If only objects could talk!” she says.

Mission · She explores, designs and implements mutable interfaces to uncover the coexistence of the digital with the physical. This work differs from current considerations of digital and tangible representation. In her work, she allows the digital and the physical to exist independently from each other, and to co-exist in a way that informs one another. This has implications for fields as diverse as architecture, fashion and health care treatment, three areas in which she is currently developing applications.

In terms of projects with a straightforward link to mobilities, Vaucelle created Moving Pictures, a project that involves the use of small, light, ergonomic and transportable cameras. Children could record visual and sound memories using coins to later mix them together, and explore their own narratives.

Children and Moving Pictures, Dublin workshop, 2004. A child recording an instant of everyday life.

As another example, her seamless sensory interventions for the treatment of mental and neurological disorders. Vaucelle researches haptics as the key to bringing treatment into the social sphere through wearable devices, and providing new ways to mediate between the patient and the therapist both in and outside of therapy.

Mobility · Vaucelle implements software and hardware when developing new technology, in addition to conducting research on currently available technologies. In either case, she traverses scientific fields. She is mobile physically and mentally and extremely mobile digitally: she loves to try out/hack/extend the newest digital tool.

Cati vaucelle, Hurt Me, concept model, 2006. In Hurt Me she combined her background in psychology to her explorations in haptics.

In transit, she loves to remove her shoes. It feels good. She hates having to remove the computer from her bag. Vaucelle wishes that by closing her eyes she would instantly turn on the computing capabilities of her computer and drive her computer. She also thinks that being regularly disconnected from a computer for a minimum of a week is refreshing! It is important to realize that we come from natural elements, and feeling the strength of nature is grounding...

On the road from San Francisco to San Diego, CA, 2003

Vaucelle lived in France, USA, and Ireland. She spent long periods of time in Sweden, Brazil, and Canada. She visited many other countries, and among them, Senegal!


Cati in her Parisian suburbs, 2000

Mobile philosophy · According to Vaucelle, teleportation should be the next mode of transportation! Not that she doesn’t love to take the train and ride her bicycle. To be mobile is to have access to any requested services at any given time. Yet, being digitally mobile does not necessarily imply loosing the physical interactions with persons and objects. The digital mobility enables her to freely navigate between being a machine and a physical human being.

Connect: cati [at] media [dot] mit [dot] edu · http://architectradure.blogspot.com/


“Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.”

DiMo workshop last Thursday, 8am - 10am

Bill Thompson, an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet wrote Monday 19 March, 2007 an article entitled: In search of the neo-nomad. He writes:

As one of the millions of people who work wherever they happen to find themselves, relying on a laptop and a wireless connection for all their computing needs, I certainly live a nomadic lifestyle, pitching my virtual camp wherever I happen to find myself.

And I'd rather be a neo-nomad than a laptop warrior, a term which was clearly designed to make corporate executives feel that the evenings spent in dull business hotels in Utrecht preparing the monthly sales figures had some heroic aspect.

Nomads certainly have lots of places to settle for an hour or two of work.

And later (I am flattered):

The term neo-nomad has actually been around for a while. Researcher Yasmine Abbas calls her blog neo-nomad, and she has been writing about what she calls "digitally geared people on the move" since 2005.

Abbas is especially interested in how people who work on the move retain a sense of belonging to places and organisations, and at the way new technologies open up new ways of belonging to groups and even companies.

My good friend Simon runs an online recruitment company and it has operated as a hybrid business since it started.

There is a real office, and meetings take place there, but in general the team work remotely from wherever they happen to find themselves, whether that's in Brighton, Suffolk or Australia.

Here below is an observation that I would like to discuss for that it is often a question that comes up when I make a presentation:

Neo-nomads and digital bedouins sound very exciting, but we mustn't forget that this will only ever be a viable way of working for a small, skilled and privileged minority of people.

Will be back soon...

The Digital + Mobilities class has opted for DiMo as the general title of the Freedom Trail inquiries :) Here is project DiMo's blog!

Upgrade! Boston... Cati (architectradure) presents her work... remember she said:

Jo-Anne Green, Co-Director of Turbulence invited me to give a talk. So April 12th at Art Interactive I will present some of my work. There is a rumor that Dr Yasmine Abbas might also be available to share her latest findings on the neo-nomads.

Et moi avec... (Merci Cati!!!)

Be there!

Great findings on PingMag! I really like the ethnographic quality of the articles which balance well visuals and texts. The everyday as a source of inspiration...:

PingMag is an online design magazine based in Tokyo. Defining the term design as broadly as we can, PingMag writes about ideas and inspiration coming from both world class designers, and from the little store on the corner.

My favorites:

Field work? Here is an interesting example: (screen shot from website)

In his interview, Stefan Rötzel elaborates on bridging physical and digital environments. He says:

But to point out a more simple example for a new problem in everyday life, let’s look at online shopping. For the global electronic commerce all goods require a digital representation. When people browse a web shop, they perceive this digital representation of an artefact, for example an image of a lamp. The new problem is now that the image does not communicate the true, real dimensions. (Would that lamp fit on my table? Is it too big or too small?) Online-shopping often ends with a surprise: the artefact is either better or worse than expected.

That is actually a similar problem designers and engineers face when working with CAD. CAD workers need a forced sense for spatial perception. They can scale and rotate the digital object, but often lose the feeling for the true measures of the object. There is a need for perceiving a CAD-object in relation to the real room.

I introduced a concept for displaying a digital object in the context of the real surrounding. It works by overlaying the digital representation in context to the real surrounding. This could be translucent display someday, or it could be a mobile phone with a photo-camera as well.

3. Accessibility for blind people

That is because of our culture, visual at the extreme... I had mentioned that conundrum when elaborating on 2D codes and tagging.

I am currently working on a graphic representation of mobilities, physical, digital, and mental. This graphic shows how, when place changes, the social network multiplies, shrinks, evolves, so is the feeling of belonging. Sometimes belonging stays strongly linked to the place of departure (grows even, if we "long in belonging")... It also explains the notion of displacement, physical and mental, and how digital networks participate to it.