A little while ago I came across a manifesto called Not In Our Name, Marke Hamburg (Sign and Sight has an English translation). In this manifesto a group of 200 artists/squaters criticise their supposed role in the cycle of life of their city, Hamburg. Using artists as tools to ‘spice up’ a city leads to gentrification, they say.

As you probably know, Florida describes how ‘bohemians’ plays an important part in city regeneration. By investing themselves in less popular neighbourhoods they create neighbourhoods that are attractive to the larger creative class. The increase in social capital eventually leads to an increase in property value. Which ironically forces out the artists, as they can no longer pay rent, so they move to another neighbourhood where rent is cheap, and the cycle of economic segregation continues.

When Der Spiegel confronted Florida with the manifesto, he apparently shrugs it off. He says:

“I’ve never talked about marketing in any of my books. And I don’t want to provide any recipes for gentrification.”

While he doesn’t advocate gentrification, it can be argued that he has a stake in this debate. I’d say that gentrification was already part of the cycle of city life, and that by making this proces explicit through his studies, Florida has become a player in this debate. He can’t just say “don’t shoot the messenger”.

So what should we do with this insight?

It’s here, where observation shifts to ideology, that a next step is necessary. Florida’s ideology has created a paradoxical situation where the bohemians are recognised for the value they bring, but this value is only measured economically. This was not the recognition the artists sought. To artists, true recognition would mean adopting their notion of value.

The partial recognition has a weird effect in Hamburg: it seems that the regenerative cycle has been broken. The artists don’t want to move anymore, they want to stay and make a stand. This could be a great opportunity for them, as they have everything they need: a cheap place in the center of town, and, most surprising to them, the listening ear of the local government. This might allow them to stay there indefinately.

Until now Florida’s insight into how the cycle works has led Hamburg strengthen the cycle, trying to optimise its effects. Perhaps instead the cycle should be broken? It will be interesting to keep an eye on Hamburg to see how this stand-off develops.

Director Cassain Harrison explained how he had surprisingly little trouble getting access to these sources after he asked politely. Now, I wonder, how many of those sources can we find online? A little Googling gave almost all of them, to a degree:

- Ships as they sail through the english channel (Live!)

- Taxi’s and deliverytrucks as they drive around (Live!)

- Airplanes as they fly overhead (live!)

- People as they do their thing (live!)

Get them into Google Earth or processing and you’re not far off.

But there’s so much more. If it can move, someone has probably GPS tracked it. A little Googeling will get you far, and there are numerous easy solutions to do your own tracking.

And you don’t have to overlay these tracks on (Google’s) satelite imagery, there are a staggering amount of opensource mapping systems available. Heck, you can run your own maps server if you want, and even make that available to other people’s mapping mashups, or even their GPS devices. Perhaps someone could start one where the earth is a huge ball of brightly coloured candy, I’d love to drive around on that.

Perhaps it’s my bias, but I see so many interesting map-based projects that I have a hard time subscribing to the idea that services such as Google Maps are ‘atrophying’ and narrowing our idea of what maps are. Even though Google Maps is mostly used for mundane wayfinding tasks, I greatly enjoy the incredibly amount of creativity and beauty that has so far come out of this mapping boom, Intentionaly or unintentionaly.

So, Britain from above was great. Gimme more!

Well, that’s not true. Here in Holland these pictures-of-streets services have been in use for some time. But those pay-services were focused on official use, often being used by government agencies and businesses. But now, with Streetview, these imaging services have been given a wider audience, their existence radically exposed. As the 500 million dollar project makes more and more of its European data available, the Dutch version can’t be far off. The Google cars were spotted in Amsterdam and Rotterdam at the end of 2008.

But what do you do with Streetview after you’ve looked at your own house through what is yet another realworld-internet hybrid? You go see what other people’s houses look like. Other people’s lives.

Where most maps strive to come across as reliable and objective in order to spread the word, Streetview has (unwantedly) taken a more theatrical route. The stream of funny tidbits it has photographed seems never ending. It’s not just a reality show either, people actively stage performances around it, from flashing bodyparts to staging self-described art. People are aware of it.

Personally I like it, one way of defending against over-databasation is by overloading the databases themselves with silliness. I want to go further. Carry smokegrenades maybe, or change all the signs into something ridiculous just before the streetview car arrives. Create detours. Maybe we can just hide. That would work well if someone follows them in a car with a speaker system that repeats “smile, you’re on candid camera”. Oddly enough it feels difficult to jam google here, as It’s impossible to predict what myriad of uses will be found for it.

The other way to limit Streetview would be to protest against it. After protests google has promised to make faces unrecognisable. An interesting case is the car itself. In a way it’s the Google cars themselves that are scrutinised the most, as they can most easily be held accountable. A while ago they were stopped by the police, and about two weeks ago a streetview car hit a deer. The whole event could be seen unfolding over a number of photographs.

Funnily enough, when a driver of one of google’s cars was being photographed himself, he asked not to be photographed. I wish the interviewer had replied “don’t worry, I’ll blur your face” only to take the picture anyway.

It’s the main issue surrounding all this: does being public still have that paradoxical anonimity of being lost in the masses? If you’re in the public, can you expect to be photographed and be placed online in a database that links that photo to a location? I know there’s no law against it, but who could have foreseen this? It’s an issue we never had to think about before. It’s an issue I never had to think about before.

And that’s why my street won’t be the same.

A photograph to me is innately personal. Photography is, I feel, a very social human affair. When we’re on holiday when we take pictures of landmarks, we always ask someone to step into the frame, to make it more interesting to the folks back home. And even if there is no person in it, the photograph still says a lot about the person that takes the picture. When we ask “what is this in the picture you took”, we ask because we are fishing for the photographer’s reasoning behind taking the photograph. A photograph, in short, invites us to ask about the context of that photograph. A picture is usually a powerful starting point for a conversation, not an endpoint.

GPS tracks are arguably quite similar. They too are a detailed recording of a situation, so just like pictures they should be able to lure us into talking about it’s context, the ‘why’ behind making the track.

And thus we arrive at Esther Polak’s Nomadic Milk project. I am currently travelling through Nigeria with Esther for three weeks, which puts me in a position where I am allowed a close look at the way in which her art takes shape.

Esther records GPS tracks of nomadic people and shows these to them. She does this with a cool little drawing “robot” that draws lines with sand, so that multiple people can view these tracks at the same time, facilitating conversation. It’s this conversation that she’s after. She believes people have an easier time talking about real life if they have an object-to-talk-around. It’s a little like this journey for me: having the excuse of this project really allows me to see the most incredible side of Nigeria. But because I do so in a work context and not in a tourist context I have a way easier time of accepting this, it gives me an excuse to transcend social boundaries. And so do pictures and, in the case of Esther, GPS tracks.

We’re halfway into this trip now, and, fitting my description above, the experience has been surprisingly smooth so far. Just working with the people, ranging from recording their tracks to videotaping their responses when they see them, has been familiar and intimate (although many boundaries, such as language, obviously remain). So far I have ran on dirt roads, radically traversed a village with a herd of cows, and have ridden with a Lagos truck driver in his mack-truck. The longest journey will start Tuesday when we follow another truck driver from Lagos to Abuja, a milk-delivering trip that will take two days. I wonder what we’ll end up talking about with him.

We’re updating a blog and an sms twitterfeed along the way, so feel free to follow the journey on www.nomadicmilk.net. A first installation will be shown at the Transmediale festival in Berlin on the 28th.

During the last museumnight in Amsterdam the Amsterdam architecture institute Arcam decided to have an evening about the situationists. Apparently the Dutch situationist Constant had (co-)written a pamphlet fifty years earlier about his ideal city. The pamphet, it was revealed, could just as easily be interpreted as a joke instead of as an actual serious statement. Those silly situationists, always up to mischief.

The important thing to me was, however, that Arcam invited me to host an hour in which we talked about locative media art in relation to the situationists. Jeremy Wood was there for instance, to talk about his GPS drawings.

What struck me was that locative media practitioners often refer back to the situationists as some kind of ancestors, as if they’re working in the same vein. The situationist love for traipsing about town is shared by locative artists who similarly enjoy taking computing ‘outside’, into ‘everyday life’. Just like the situationists we must reclaim the street, and this time we’ll use computers to do it!

But that, to me, seems to be where the similarities end. As alive-and-kicking situationist muse Jacqueline de Jong pointed out during the evening, the situationists wanted one thing above all else: to destroy and disrupt our cushy society. They were sick of it, vowing never to work a day in their lives. They probably would have laughed if they had seen that their ideas had been cherry-picked for ripe concepts. The derive, the detournement. All simple concepts that they purposefully packaged in complex and artistc jargon. And we fell for it.

So, we have two options. Either we stop pretending the situationists are our forefathers, or we actually do see them as our forefathers, and start using computing to disrupt instead of streamline society.

And GPS would be so good at that. During the evening at Arcam there was a wonderful debate about TomTom GPS navigators. Do they negate our ability to get lost? Is dealing with being lost a part of “being human” that we are losing?

Well, in front of me I have a little article I tore from the corner of a newspaper. It tells about tourists from Norway whose GPS, trying to get them to the airport, led them into one of the most dangerous neighbourhouds in Rio de Janeiro. The driver promptly got shot in the shoulder, they barely made it out.

A ‘work’ like that would have to be a situationist’s wet dream.

But it seems he has changed his story a little bit, because now he claims his vision was to embed them into our bodies all along. No need for a battery, or turning it off for that matter, because it’s even powered by your own body. It just goes to prove that the ubiquitous computing vision is alive and kicking:

“Just think of what a world it would be if we could measure the characteristics of your body when you get sick and transmit those directly to a doctor or a computer,” he said. “You could get diagnosed and cured instantly and wirelessly.”

Although it may sound like there are quite some technical humps to be taken, the problem, according to Cooper, lies with the people. They are “too conservative”.

This post

Are there any good comparisons to be made with other not-obviously-private information? I recently read that my IP address is personal information because, amongst other things, it can also be used to find out where I am, although not very well. Clicking that last link, I am told my location is The Hague. It’s not, but it’s close.

It reminds me of a tactic used by many companies dealing with private information: When they’re not allowed to store your personal data they store the nearest thing they are allowed to store. If a company may not store my exact address, they may still be allowed to store my zipcode. This blurry information should be enough to give them some juicy demographic statistics, but doesn’t lead back to me directly (and I’m equally powerless about them storing it, but that’s another issue).

Which brings us back to the pizza delivery boys. Isn’t it enough for me to know the distance of the pizza to my house? Why do I need to know the exact route they are taking? Come on Pizza boys, revolt!

Let’s start with the origins. According to John Durham Peters, who wrote the book “speaking into the air: A history of the idea of communication“, the concept of (wireless) communication has a history that is strongly intertwined with that of spiritualism and the supernatural. The word”aether” itself was originally used to denote the invisible substance through minds were connected (page 78). God and angels, ghosts and the dead, all were said to communicate telepathically. It was imagined that the mysterious ways in which God worked weren’t all that mysterious, they were just invisible, kind of how sound waves moved through substances. Many ‘scientific’ experiments were done that explored this field, such as those on the healing powers of magnetism by Franz Mesmer.

This invisible connection to each other and to the supernatural might seem like superstition, but this idea is still very much alive and kicking. Wireless technology, through it’s invisible nature, is ideally suited to play host to these dreams of connection. In many ways the ether is still seen as the Aether.

Let’s look at some examples. Wired magazine published this top 10 of dubious gadgets in which almost all the entries in some way claim improvement through or protection from wireless signals. My favourite has got to be the spray that contains “Magnetic Defense Complex”.

It’s easy to make fun of it. The reality is that, from a sociological point of view, these aspects of wirelessness should be taken very seriously. In China for example, the practise of Feng Shui is ubiquitous. It’s common to get the advice of a Feng-Shui expert on the placement of, well, practically every aspect of a new building.

Interestingly, the idea of Qi that is at the center of Feng Shui seems to have some roots in magnetism, while others connect it to cosmological radiation. Whatever the case may be, it’s another example of the intertwining Peters pointed out. In this great discussion on wireless media, the supernatural shouldn’t be ignored. After all, all this wireless stuff does seem a little magical, when you think about it.

• Walk into the first street on the right.
• Walk into third street on the left.
• Walk into the second street on the left.
• Now look at the other piece of paper and take the street that it tells you to take.

The second bit of paper contained one similar instruction. The fun was that there was another rule: whenever you came across another team, you exchanged your second note with their second note, in effect changing the pattern you were walking through the city. In a way these people moved through the city like the electrons through a computer chip.

So why do I tell you about this artwork? For that I will have to get into something else first, namely an idea called Software Defined Radio (SDR).

The SDR is the holy grail of wireless emitter design. Current wireless systems are literally hardwired to work in a certain small area of the frequency spectrum. A software-defined emitter would be able to work in any frequency spectrum, using any modulation, by just updating the software of the emitter. In essence it would be able to work with any wireless technology, like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, radio, and so on, while using just one piece of hardware. While originally developed for the military, there are now a number of projects (some open source) that aim to make this type of radio work. The only trouble is: it costs a lot of processing power to do this. Thanks to Moore’s law though, this is becoming less and less of a problem.

The fun part of all this is that, in theory, an update to the software will allow old radios to continue working with new systems. This would mean that more and more radios would populate the city, and that all these radios would still be able to work together to create a homogeneous city-wide wireless system. It’s this promise of interoperability that wets the appetite of people like Marc Weiser, the father of the “Ubiquitous Computing” ideal. Like the internet, the hopefuls believe, this could be another military development that creates a whole new platform on which to develop and share services, worlds, lives and business opportunities.

The idea is that SDR creates a reprogrammable environment, a vision echoed poetically in the .Walk project. But any vision should be subject to close scrutiny. Will SDR really bring homogenity or will it rather allow for the creation of a greater diversity? If you gave everyone in the city a piece of paper, perhaps some of them would rather create their own games. Both in the city and online we already find individuals and companies setting up their own sub-networks. Think of Tor, Internet Zero or internet two. The wireless spectrum is, in reality, a highly contested space. So while the idea of a singular system sounds marvelously efficient, new systems, although brought to life with a singular purpose, often end up being used for a whole range of purposes for a whole range of reasons.

And besides, would we really create a better community if we were only all on the same frequency?

My interest lies in the areas of wireless media and public space, so I will blog about those mostly. Starting now!

Portable, battery-powered cellphone jammers are hitting the spotlight. In discussions here [Slashdot.org] and here [New York Times] the use of cellphone jammers is framed as being funny to downright dangerous. They are for sale for about 60 dollars, and you can own them as long as you don’t use them. But who could resist?

“Andrew reached into his shirt pocket and pushed a button on a black device the size of a cigarette pack. It sent out a powerful radio signal that cut off the chatterer’s cellphone transmission — and any others in a 30-foot radius.”

“She kept talking into her phone for about 30 seconds before she realized there was no one listening on the other end,” he said. His reaction when he first discovered he could wield such power? “Oh, holy moly! Deliverance.” (New York Times)

Active jamming is illegal though, and creating this kind of electro-smog can be discovered fairly easily. But what about passive blocking using Faraday cages? Usually citing a fear of radiation, a need for privacy or securing corporate networks, slowly but surely more space is shielded from eagerly traveling wireless signals. Demand is starting to meet production, for instance in the shape of wallpaper or paints that dampen wireless signals.

Practices like these raise a lot of questions about the line between public and private, about sharing public space versus claiming it, which is what both the “mobile phoneurs” and the jammers do. Do new wireless media help proliferate a new digital public sphere within urbanity, or are we just finding anonymous ways to tell each other to shut up? How can we design space, laws and technology to deal with these problems? Questions like these boggle my mind, and for the foreseeable future I will share these boggles with you.