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Walking the web

Can searching the internet be transposed to walking in a city? And vice versa; in what way do subtle navigational choices we make while strawling through a city influence our perception of walking the internet? Automated indexation raises the question if carrying out a walk by yourself is actually worth the trouble.

Sitemaps do not work
Speaking for myself as an artist who likes to walk to collect material, to witness recurring urban phenomana and to get my thoughts organised, the physical act of walking is important, because it delivers a cognitive understanding of an environment which cannot be obtained by any other means. Continue Reading

Superchannel

Superchannel is a project by the Danish artist collective Superflex. The channel is a network of independent channels run by people, local communities, and organisations that use streaming media for communication, discussion and presentation.
“The intention with the Superchannel is to implement the internet-tv-tool in different environmental and social contexts. We specialise in supporting existing cultural, social and political networks who want to use internet-tv as a supplementing media to communicate and create awareness around activities, interests and professions.”
The website collects all broadcasts which have been made so far, ranging from the inexhaustable Tenantspin channel to contemporary-art oriented channels such as Super-Friedrich, The Modern Channel and Europa.
In local sphere, Superchannel puts the tool to create and distribute media in the hands of the individuals to realize their interests related to their channel.

Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood

http://www.mrbellersneighborhood.com
“It is about a specific place – New York – and it is about the many different consciousness that thrive and wilt and rage and reminisce here. We publish reportage, personal essays, urban sketches– any piece of writing that might illuminate a corner of life in the city. By and large everything you read on the site is true. The events of 9/11 were the site’s focus for a while, but this is a site about a place, not a disaster, and we’re open to all kinds of topics

The site combines a magazine with a map. It uses the external, familiar landscape of New York City as a way of organizing the wildly internal, often unfamiliar emotional landscapes of the city dweller.”

Metropolitan representations

This article about the political reality behind murals in Los Angeles was published in 2001 in the architectural magazine Archis. It presents excerpts from a report I wrote during a working period in Los Angeles. How can public art which represents common believes be critical towards ruling ideologies, be of importance to constructing collective identity without compromising to governemental or institutional norms, in what way do prominently outspoken political viewpoints, accesibility, legibility and popular and traditional iconography relate to each other? And in what way do these works represent the people who live amongst them, day in day out?
The text is a bit rusty and dated, but I thought it would be good to include it in this blog, because some of the issues which are touched upon could be revived in thinking about ways of working on public project in Brussels. In stead of relating these questions only to wallpaintings as in this article, it would be interesting to think about the possibility of transposing them to virtual forms of public representations, and try to figure out if the power and straightforwardness of the positioning of political works in urban neighbourhoods could be carried futher in virtual circumstances. Continue Reading

Walking on algorithms

.walk by socialfiction.org
No software but walkware

“No software but walkware. (…) .walk is the name for the pedestrian software that will be used in the construction of a ‘psychogeographical computer’ which will use the city as hardware.
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Walking in a straight line

Nicholas Crane is a writer, geologist and passionate walker.
For the “Walk 21 – Taking walking forward in the 21st Century” conference, organised by CAST – The Centre for Alternative and Sustainable Transport at the Staffordshire University, UK, he delivered a short speech in which he describes a failed attempt to cross the UK by foot walking in a straight line.
“What I wanted to do was draw a random cross-section, a scientific cross-section, and limit my raw material to everything that lay on that straight line. It was rather a tricky operation.” Continue Reading

SMS activism

During the 2004 Republican National Convention held in New York prior to the presidential elections, activists employed large scale SMS text messaging as a means of immediate information. It informed demonstrators about the moves of police forces, and it alerted independent journalists of where cameras were needed to document protests, legal observers of real-time rights violations and activist medic teams of where people were in need of medical attention. Continue Reading