Surface Patterns

BlinkMedia and Centrifugal Forces, who have just missed out on a BIMA award for their SMS project CityPoems, have announced a new project for early next year - Surface Patterns:

SURFACE PATTERNS is an evolving archive of local history which uses mobile phone technologies and the internet to bring to life and celebrate communities' unique hidden histories. Sympathetic signage will be used to indicate to pedestrians that a site has been tagged. By texting a keyword, registered mobile phone users will be able to access text, sound files and even photographs revealing how the site has transformed over the years. A living archive will evolve as users are invited to give contributions to add to the archive of oral history accounts. Information will be collected on a website featuring an aerial map allowing visitors to see at a glance the physical map of urban development and community memories and watch the growth of the site as it evolves.

Looks really interesting - I remember having a conversation with Rachel Baker about a similar idea when she was doing a residency in Hull. There's a lot of people interested in augmenting and tagging real space with mobile data, but few examples that have built any real momentum. There's real potential for this kind of augmented reality social software, but the trick has always been developing an interface that will make sense in such a rich sensual environment. The simple 'tags' proposed in Surface Patterns make more conceptual and aesthetic sense that GPS or other attempts to fix messages in a virtual space. Why bother triangulating positions on virtual networks when you can just slap a sticker on a wall?

Merz Akademie

The Merz Akademie run a really interesting looking programme of courses in applied arts and electronic media, with a roster of excellent lecturers, including Judith Barry and net.art pioneer Olia Lialina. The reason I've found this out is that my refferer logs have been full of links to posts from the Merz Akademie's internal webmail clients over the last week or so. I don't get a huge amount of traffic here, so any new links that generate a lot of traffic sticks out a mile (eg Cory linking the 'Things of the Past' post on BoingBoing). I assume this traffic means there is a discussion going on that refers to one of the essays on this site. I'd love to participate in this - anyone at the Merz Academie want to email a summary?

I've really resisted making 'meta' posts on this blog, as I want to use it more as a way of collecting stuff I write, rather than writing about the process of writing a blog, but in this case I'm just too damned curious. Apologies - normal service of increasingly obscure, long-winded and pretentious writing about 'digital culture' will resume as soon as possible.

;-)

Image repertoires

Phil provides an excellent excerpt from a mid-19th Century studio photographer talking about how he conned customers into taking other people's pictures as their own:

Once a sailor came in, and as he was in haste, I shoved on to him the picture of a carpenter, who was to call in the afternoon for his portrait. The jacket was dark, but there was a white waistcoat; still I persuaded him that it was his blue Guernsey which had come up very light, and he was so pleased that he gave us 9d. instead of 6d. The fact is, people don’t know their own faces. Half of ‘em have never looked in a glass half a dozen times in their life, and directly they see a pair of eyes and a nose, they fancy they are their own.

It seems incredible think that people once were so unaware of what they looked like in our image-conscious age. How many people these days could be passed off with another's photograph as their own? Most of us probably look in mirrors half a dozen times a day, let alone a lifetime. But even so, we often have misconceptions of what we look like - people rarely like images of themselves, perhaps having a mental image of someone better-looking. Roland Barthes described this as the 'image-repetoire'; the condition of never being able to see yourself as others see you - a dynamic, mobile subject - but instead as a fleeting series of glimpses captured in the lens or mirror:

"But I never looked like that!" - How do you know? What is the "you" you might or might not look like? Where do you find it? - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body?
You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repetoire of its images.

This is from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, a late work produced before his famous Camera Lucida, and equally melancholy and poetic. Its a kind of autobiography, but structured - like A Lover's Discourse - as a series of aphorisms, preceded by a small photo album and the handwritten introduction:

"It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel"