A mobile graffiti? Seen on the red line... Boston-Cambridge, MA.

Thank you Amir Rozenberg from ConnexTo, and Kostas Terzidis for your input during DiMo's final review! The DiMo project website is nearly complete! If you haven't done so, engage with the DiMo blog...

Via networked _performance, Handheld Histories as Hyper-Monuments. Happens in Boston, MA on 130 Newbury Street, April 21-28, 2007, Tues-Sat 10am-6pm.

Uses GPS and mobile technologies to address historic bias in Boston's public monuments. The artwork gathers non-official stories to socially construct hyper-monuments that exist as digital doubles, augmenting specific historic monuments. For example, imagine you are near the Old South Church in Boston, MA, USA. The smartphone sounds church bells to get your attention. It then displays an easily identifiable image of the Old South Church circa 2007, followed by images of the church that take you back in time. Finally you see the location as it was in its natural, wild state. You can send text, image and audio content to the website from the monument location via any internet enabled device. Or use any internet browser to view and add histories to the hyper-monuments.

Comparable to the DiMo project: Dimo blog.

Millegomme creates objects from used tires! I especially like their installations for nomadic children:

We intend to use building materials that can be found on location, in their habitats and neighborhood, or recycle the materials that we assess will be needed for the building. We are preparing an architectural plan which would envisage an ideology of "living dream house", but still confined to materials that are residual and harmless to health. The children should be as involved as possible in the applications once the structure is built and the various workshops will facilitate this. The playground should be a result of many different artistic inputs, that is, we intend to invite outside collaborators to help us with the actual design. We are preparing a preliminary base design, with the help of an architect, but we will leave it open for a remake, considering that local participants would want to give an input to this building .
We were using tires, wood, metal, glass as the basic construction materials, and added color, sound and movement application to the basic form. The playground was not only a static physical entity, but a base for workshops, which is its second function.

There is maybe a thin relation to neo-nomads: finding solutions to spacial appropriation. I am curious however about how mobilities influence the creation of objects or how many objects derive from the waste of our world of mobilities.

Via cascoland. Thank you Jo.

Chase did it again! (She was a Loeb fellow when I was a DDes candidate at Harvard Graduate School of Design... I am a fan!!!) She is a founder of Zipcar. With GoLoco, her new startup, she goes greener, also "to reduce our dependency on fossil fuel" while using social networking! Read the article in Newsweek, Baby, You Can Drive My Car_Via Web by Steven Levy. Excerpts:

Her idea was to let drivers and riders use the Web to turn solitary rides into shared ones, saving fuel and cutting costs. She'd also build a business by taking a cut of the fees that passengers on the site would pay drivers to share the costs. When brainstorming the company, she saw three obstacles to her goal: A fear of strangers. The difficulty of finding rides. And a feeling that the effort really isn't worth it.

That last concern, she asserts, is no longer valid—awakened by the threat of climate crisis, lots of people are now eager to win greenie points.

[...] When you sign up for GoLoco, you submit a picture and share information about yourself from sites like Facebook and Flickr, as well as a list of groups you belong to. You speak into your computer mic to describe your favorite breakfast so that potential ride-sharers can hear your voice. You also indicate what other Olo's you trust enough to ride with, so that others can see if you know people in common. Also, as you use GoLoco, drivers or passengers who accompany you will write reviews of your behavior, eBay style.

This below is the advertising campaign of WWF (China) to help us visualize the volume of harmful CO2 emitted daily by traditional modes of transportation. info via Le Blog du Marketing Alternatif. Isn't car sharing a good alternative?

 

Invited juror for the International Networked Art Competition 2007: Mixed Realities!

The talk for the Upgrade was broadcast on 2nd life, thanks to John Craig Freeman, Associate Professor, Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College :) Thank you everyone for the organization, Jo-Anne Green, co-director of Turbulence for the invitation (via Cati), and Helen Thorington, co-director.

A screen shot...

Enjoy the text and have a look at the website: Paris: Ville Invisible

Paris: Invisible City
Bruno Latour & Emilie Hermant

Translated from the French by Liz Carey-Libbrecht
Corrected February 2006 by Valérie Pihet

We often tend to contrast real and virtual, hard urban reality and electronic utopias. This work tries to show that real cities have a lot in common with Italo Calvino's "invisible cities". As congested, saturated and asphyxiated as it may be, in the invisible city of Paris we may learn to breathe more easily, provided we alter our social theory.

Read more about the philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour.

At the GSD, to watch the documentary movie Bigger than Barbie... The event was organized by the SoCA (Social Change and Activism) group and Loeb fellows. Monkeybiz was selling their craft: "All profits go back into the communities via payment for bead art and the provision of community services." I saw this handicraft above... Cute how the cellphone culture influences our creativity!