Other People's Mail

after reading the link siobhan posted, the this american life episode, "other people's mail", seems apropos. especially act three in which they talk about what happens with undeliverable mail.
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=70

GoogleEarth Life Trail

Here is documentation of the google earth slide show as it should have been

Also I was trying to research what the United States Postal Service does with mail that has no destination and stumbled upon this
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/why-does-the-post-office-deliver-mail-that-has-no-stamp/

Detroit Demolition Project

http://www.landliving.com/articles/0000000995.aspx

Really interesting group of artists working with abandoned buildings marked for demolition in Detroit.

Braille version of Playboy Magazine

Photographer Taryn Simon's image.

The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS), a division of the U.S. Library of Congress, provides a free national library program of Braille and recorded materials for blind and physically handicapped persons. Magazines included in the NLS’s programs are selected on the basis of demonstrated reader interest. This includes the publishing and distribution of a Braille edition of Playboy.

See her website: Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar.

To Remain Suspended without Sinking or Falling

Floater Magazine

Floater magazine suggests an inventory of floatation mechanisms within architecture; Without Stability, Without Foundation / Flip is an ocean research platform that capsizes in order to maintain its stability. Yannick Vassiloulis presents the mechanism of this paradoxical stability / Armin Linke’s images of astronauts and divers project the realities of a utopian body equipped with prosthetics that provide the ability to exist in conditions of No Gravitation / Wave Garden by Yusuke Obuchi and Medusabloo by b. are performative, highly intelligent environments capable of collecting and administrating data / In 1968, Takis invented Oscillation of the Sea; a device that translates the motion of the sea surface into kinetic energy / Dimitris Antonakakis describes the chronicle of an unusual project commissioned to Atelier66; redesigning the cruiser Libra Y the parameters of instability and non foundation demarcate a new territory for the architect / Louisa Adam explores architectural strategies and practices within contemporary cultural concerns, commenting on OMA’s Harbour of Ideas

From BLDGBLOG: "The design of the website itself – with mobile images you can rearrange according to taste – can be quite cool. Better yet, all the articles can be downloaded as PDFs – so you can read them on the go."

Link to Floater Magazine HERE

I want to do this please. Anyone up for helping/coming along for the ride? I'm thinking San Francisco, or possibly Iceland as a destination...

"An oblong city, between two rivers, with streets like deep...

"A spy camera video exploration of Brooklyn's designated bike lanes, a conceptual video which addresses the inefficiency of a car-centric city structure, while presenting a whimsical view of a life in constant transit."

This piece was created by my friend Meghan Ciupka-Whiteford; a Brookln-based public artist dealing with environmental and transportation issues. The video's pedal-fixed perspective results in minimalist view of cycling in the city. While initially disorienting, the video's "oblong" and repetitious structure soon acclimates the viewer to the textural and aural subtleties of bicycling through the Redhook neighborhood of Brooklyn. A rythym of pulsing traffic sounds filtered through an ungulating pattern of view is broken only by variations in artist's speed and tactful coasting techniques. The near micro-level examination of travel demonstrates the artist's travails as she dodges traffic, jumps curbs, and takes refuge along sidewalks. The video provides a stylistically fresh and conceptual relevant take on the sensoral and at time dangerous qualities of cyling in a city.

Welcome Home

Signage on road approaching Burning Man

Giant Swallow Returns!

http://www.complex.com/blogs/2008/05/20/giant-birds-nest-takes-over-office-building/

Dervish, by Lewis DeSoto

Sound & light installation by Lewis Desoto. More information on his work (including the Lost Ship piece, and the Tahualtalpa (Mount Slover- Mountain of the Ravens) piece shown in class this week) at http://sotolux.net

Yestermorrow

http://yestermorrow.org/video.htm

Richard Serra-Nancy Holt Boomerang

http://ubu.com/film/serra_boomerang.html

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Babel reloaded

I thought this piece by Julee Holcombe was a good culmination, I have often found that between the widespread use of English and the ability to irradicate "long distance" via the internet we are at the epoch that the "Tower of Babel" speaks about.

How does international geography shape morality?

Sept. 11 And The Non-Crisis Of Values by Dick Meyer
from NPR's "Against the Grain"
Dick Meyer is the editorial director of Digital Media at NPR.org. His "Against The Grain" column is a mix of sarcastic sociology and comic moral philosophy that occasionally descends into political commentary.

A friend forwarded me this article in NPR about the perceived political crisis of values in a post 9/11 America. I thought it was apt to our class discussions with the timing of the 9/11 anniversary and the presidential elections... and a generally interesting perspective on (moral) wandering amidst our cultural geography.

Meyer illustrates the difference between values of countries around the world via a sociologist, Wayne Baker. "From a broad, global perspective, Baker examines human values on two planes. The first is a range of values from traditional to secular-rationalist. . . The second axis of value runs from survival values to self-expression ones. . . When material needs are well met, self-expression, self-realization, environmentalism, gender equality and creativity become more important. All societies are a mix."

How are we as individuals and as a country wandering this moral international landscape? How is our freedom to create a by-product of our political and cultural values?

You Are Not Here

You Are Not Here (.org) is a platform for urban tourism mash-ups. It invites participants to become meta-tourists on simultaneous excursions through multiple cities.

Passers-by stumble across the curious You Are Not Here signs in the street. TheYANH street-signs provide the telephone number for the Tourist Hotline, a portal for audio-guided tours of one place on the streets of another. Through investigation of these points and with or without the aid of a downloadable map, local pedestrians are transformed into tourists of foreign places.

Current walking tours include Baghdad through the streets of New York City and Gaza City through the streets of Tel-Aviv.

News Telescope

NEWS TELESCOPE

"A fixed public device which allows people to view news from around the world in the form of RSS feed content displayedon screen. The news is chosen and acquired by physically interacting with this device; moving the telescope part of it, so as to train sights - set direction and distance - in order to focus on and pick up news from a particular geographical location."

My friend Edd is working on this public space infoscope at the Goldsmith Media Research Programme. He tells me that they have 5 years of funding lined up to continue developing public use technology in urban space.

See the prototype on his Flickr page...

Bridge to Nowhere

Dark matter 'bridge to nowhere' found in cosmic void
NewScientist.com news service, Rachel Courtland

More than a dozen galaxies seem to be lined up along a bridge of dark matter inside a region of nearly empty space. This 'bridge to nowhere' could shed light on how small galaxies formed in the early universe.

Galaxies in the universe are arranged in a lacy structure that contains many holes, or voids, that are largely bereft of galaxies. But the voids are not completely empty; astronomers expect they are criss-crossed by filaments of dark matter.

Now, astronomers have found a total of 14 galaxies that appear to be part of a dark matter bridge at least 1.5 million light years long.

The string of galaxies spans just 0.5% of a 'mini-void' – a region of space containing mostly dim, dwarf galaxies kept small by their relative isolation from other matter. But the underlying dark matter bridge may be far longer than that.

More information HERE

Greetings Wandering Psychogeographers

This website is a collective effort of the WANDERING: Psychogeographic Explorations in Space and Place class at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Those of you enrolled in the class (and other invited authors) can post to this blog once you respond to the email you will receive from Blogger.com. (We will go over basic blog functions next week for those of you unfamiliar with the technology...it's simple!) Also, please sign up for a del.icio.us bookmark account, and add me to your network. My screen name is Netherzone. (My bookmarks are at http://delicious.com/Netherzone. Check out some of my "All Tags" links on psychogeography, space/place, geography, map, maps, mapping, etc.

The best ever archive of on-line links to research on space and place has been compiled by Bruce Janz here: http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~janzb/place/home.html
Check it out.

Have fun, make art, make music, make magic.
Remember, it's summer 'til December in this class.
Eve (a.k.a. flyingoutofthisworld)