On cities, mapping, psychogeography and the experience of places.

A week after the much dreaded London tube strike, I thought I would post here these odd maps of the undeground, for those seeking ‘alternative’ ways to travel when the tube is shut!

Rude map:

Anagram map:

Music tube:

More maps and anecdotes on http://stuffandshit.co.uk/2009/07/tube-its-maps.html

A new outdoor mobile phone game is to be piloted in London on Saturday July 24th 2010.

Exploding Places takes you on a journey through time and space. You arrive in a fictional Woolwich in South East London, create your own community and place them in the real world Woolwich. Over the space of an hour you and your community travel through 120 years of local and global history. The First World War passes in just a few minutes as you play the game to ensure your survival.

You play on the phone screen and through headphones, as you walk the town’s real streets. You can interact with other players, join together and respond to conflict or difficulties in each other’s communities. The ultimate goal is to build a thriving community that grows and creates a new generation, based on health, wealth, knowledge, participation and your contribution to the game. The game will be broadcast on the BBC Big Screen in central Woolwich giving public audiences the chance to watch the games unfold.

Exploding Places is a real world SIM city or Monopoly, played live on the streets of Woolwich. The game offers participants a playful way to engage with London, engaging with its social, community and
regeneration issues. It will explores how new communities come to live in new areas, what happens to them, how they grow, whether they thrive and settle, whether they move on, etc.

Exploding Places is part of the exciting new area of creative endeavour called locative or pervasive gaming, bringing new and emerging technologies into the public realm. It sits alongside the critically acclaimed work of companies such as Blast Theory whose games have received major international awards and BAFTA nominations.

Be the first to play Exploding Places

To play you must first register a place:
Go online: www.explodingplaces.org
or call 020 8858 2825
or Email anna@streamarts.org.uk

Once registered, come to the launch and play:
When: Saturday 24th July 2010, 11am – 5pm
Where: The Tramshed, 51 – 53 Woolwich New Road, London SE18 6ES
Directions: British Rail / DLR: Woolwich Arsenal, then 2 minute walk to The Tramshed

Exploding Places www.explodingplaces.org

Created by Active Ingredient www.i-am-ai.net in collaboration with Greenwich Heritage Centre, Woolwich Polytechnic and Woolwich residents. Active Ingredients locative game Heartlands won the UK and Ireland Satellite Navigation Competition and the Nokia Ubimedia Mindtrek Award in 2007.

Commissioned by Stream www.streamarts.org.uk, the Greenwich based producer of public and collaborative art.
In 2005 Stream produced the Greenwich Emotion Map using bio-mapping technology with artist Christian Nold.
Funded by Arts Council London and Greenwich Council.
Produced in collaboration with Horizon Digital Economy Research, funded through grant EP/G065802/1 from Research Councils UK.

Entre les villes, celle où je vis, celles où j’ai vécu, celles que je ne connais pas encore, se tisse tout un réseau de connexions et de renversements, d’allusions et de proximités pressenties. Notre interprétation d’une ville est le résultat de tels échos de ressemblance suscitée par un détail ou une configuration, des glissements qui sont autant de départs vers d’autres villes. Il y a les départs objectifs, dus a l’imprégnation de tout un quartier par une population différente et lointaine ou par un bâtiment qui soudain fait rupture, il en est aussi de plus secrets, de moins facilement décelables, et qui n’existent peut-être que pour celui qui en perçoit le frémissement. Il en est encore d’autres qui relèvent du collage, lorsque par exemple, chez soi ou au contraire très loin, l’on se projette par la lecture dans un autre espace.

Jean Christophe Bailly (2001) La Clairière, in La Ville à l’œuvre, Paris: Les Editions de l’Imprimeur (p.73 – 79)

Narita Tarmac

“I suspect that the airport will be the true city of the 21st century. The great airports of the planet are already the suburbs of an invisible world capital, a virtual metropolis whose faubourgs are named Heathrow, Kennedy, Charles de Gaulle, Nagoya, a centriportal city whose population forever circles its notional centre, and will never need to gain access to its dark heart.”

J. G. Ballard

Home is where the hangar is on utne.com

La table de Peutinger, nommée d’après l’humaniste Konrad Peutinger (1465-1547) qui reçu la carte en héritage et la préserva, est la copie d’une carte romaine aujourd’hui disparue, représentant les routes et villes principales de l’empire romain ; elle peut être considérée comme l’ancêtre des cartes routières contemporaines.

Le format horizontal très allongé (6,82 m sur 0,34 m) ne permet pas une représentation réaliste des échelles de distance et de la topographie. La carte doit plutôt être vue comme une représentation schématique d’un réseau de routes, à l’image des plans de métros, permettant de se rendre facilement d’un point à un autre, de se renseigner sur les distances entre étapes. De fait, elle est considérée comme la première représentation cartographique d’un réseau. Elle figure des points remarquables (carrefours, thermes) ainsi quéune représentation simplifiée du relief. Les distances sont inscrites en chiffres romains le long des tracés routiers.

Détail de la carte représentant la région Provence - Bouches-du-Rhône.

Copie intégrale consultable en haute-résolution : B I B L I O T H E C A A U G U S T A N A – Tabula Peutingeriana

Exemples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes’ fashion, ways of making pots or of building archives. Just a genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm of eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, a reads about a good idea, he passes it onto his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up our earlier draft of this chapter: ‘memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.’ When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn’t just a way of talking – the meme for, say, “belief in life after death” is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.

The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins. Oxford University Press (1976), p.192

http://turbulence.org/works/garden

[meme.garden] is an Internet service that blends software art and search tool to visualize participants’ interests in prevalent streams of information, encouraging browsing and interaction between users in real time, through time. Utilizing the WordNet lexical reference system from Princeton University, [meme.garden] introduces concepts of temporality, space, and empathy into a network-oriented search tool. Participants search for words which expand contextually through the use of a lexical database. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into floating synonym “seeds,” each representing one underlying lexical concept. When participants “plant” their interests, each becomes a tree that “grows” over time. Each organism’s leaves are linked to related streaming RSS feeds, and by interacting with their own and other participants’ trees, participants create a contextual timescape in which interests can be seen growing and changing within an environment that endures.

The [meme.garden] software was created by an eclectic team of artists and scientists: Mary Flanagan, Daniel Howe, Chris Egert, Junming Mei, and Kay Chang.

[meme.garden] is a 2005 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support from the PSC-CUNY research fund.