Friday, November 11, 2005

The Futures What the Raven said What will it take to convince a few billion people that destroying wilderness, natural habitats and our fellow creatures is not only harmful to humankind, but also irrational, morally repugnant, and instinctively insane? How can we give people who are completely disconnected from nature a sense of what they're missing, what they've lost, forgotten? I don't believe any of this can come from reading books, watching nature documentaries or trips to parks, farms and summer camps. This connection and knowledge can only come from first-hand experience. The challenge is that there's not much quiet, uncivilized nature left to experience, anywhere in the world. When it's gone, the world that's left, stuffed wall-to-wall with many times more people than it can sustainably support, will be, despite all its people and buildings and cars and inventions and noise, a lonely, barren and empty place.... [how to save the world] The Future 12:48:09 PM    comment []

Making digital space visible LOCATIVE MEDIA AS SOCIALISING AND SPATIALISING PRACTICES: LEARNING FROM ARCHAEOLOGY (DRAFT) ...It has also been much discussed that the urban experience is increasingly mediated through lens and screens, thereby rendering invisible the city's processes of becoming. Representational technologies (the map, the photograph, the GPS trace) capture and expose moments within the city's history. But in the moment of capture the viewer's gaze is projected onto the city as a happened place or totalising system of meanings and relations. This freezing of relations--however temporary--can be limiting when we consider the desire of locative media to effect cultural change. A map without multiple entrances--a map that denies multiple interpretations--is a map that discourages change, that presents the world as a fait accompli or worse, a world without hope. Complementary cultural theories and critiques of everyday life, as well as social studies of science and technology, continue to bring together all of these concerns and offer other ways to explore the promises and potentials of locative media.... "...thereby rendering invisible the city's processes of becoming." 12:25:46 PM    comment []

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