Post-flux/Yale-bound

Wow, that was fun: just a wonderful alignment of audience, topic, venue and panel chemistry. In choosing “schizogeography” as his point of departure, Mark was asking what happens to Situationist practices like the dérive (and, more importantly, the intentions behind them) in cities that have been comprehensively networked, thoroughly mapped, and decisively brought beneath the umbra of Empire. This particular choice of topic was, happily and not at all coincidentally, raw meat for Jan and I, and we tore into it with a certain relish. Or so it seemed from the stage, anyway.

This is the second year in a row that speaking at Conflux has - no other way to put it - left me glowing. It’s an amazing feeling to come off a talk and just know from the faces and the voices around you that you did good. Kudos galore to Christina and the rest of the Glowlab team for knocking it out of the park yet again, and many, many thanks to Mark and Jan for being the perfect co-conspirators. I’m super-bummed to have missed Régine and my main man Kevin Slavin by something less than 24 hours - probably literally crossed paths with them at JFK - but such is life.

Now. Day after tomorrow, I’m doing an Everyware talk over lunch at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project - if you happen to be in New Haven on Wednesday, why not swing by?

More schizogeography

Check it out: I almost forgot to mention that I’ll be appearing on a panel with Janet Abrams and good ol’ Mark Shepard at Conflux something like eighteen hours after I get back to New York - details here. Also, dag, take a look at that credits page - whattaya know, it’s my lovely and talented wife! Clap yr hands, say yeah.

LIFTs, not separates/Kiss kiss, 방 방

(OK, enough stupid puns for post titles.)

So it seems like the LIFT evening here in Seoul was a real success. Certainly, if we can judge by the amount of people who came up to me afterward to express their enthusiasm, as well as the magnitude of that enthusiasm, we need to be doing stuff like this more often. You could actually feel the connections personal, professional and conceptual in the process of being made, and it was a wonderful thing.

Specifics? My talk, I thought, went well enough, although it was clearly compromised by my desire to fit the entire hourlong sweep into the twenty minutes I actually had. I had wanted to suggest that new overlays of ambient information in the metropolitan context, designed with care and sensitivity, may actually bring to life some of the most cherished notions of ’60s and ’70s humanist urban thought, from a Jane Jacobian “eyes on the street” to the spontaneous, ad-hoc use of space we see in Christopher Alexander, Bernard Rudofsky and certain tendencies within Situationism. It was ambitious, perhaps overly so; I stepped off stage feeling as though I had set up the framework of a potentially interesting argument, but then never actually plugged any supporting datapoints into it. So it goes.

Bruce was up next, and he gave a (literally) animated version of his spimey fabject talk. I buy a lot of his argument - that manufactured objects are well along the way toward being instances, shadows in the real world cast by something both digital and immanent, perpetually becoming-actual - but it was quaint to hear him refer to the human actors involved in the specification of such objects as “information architects.” If only any actual information architect had an interest in this sort of thing! My god, give me ten such people and I’d almost wager that the community in question might stand half a chance of remaining relevant.

Jake Song then gave us an interesting overview of how space works in online gaming. Jake started by showing how geography was deformed in early, text-based MUDs - where the landscape seemed to be perpetually in danger of failing to plug back into itself - and drew a line forward through successive generations of ever-more-dimensional MMORPGs. By the time he got to talking about dynamic weathering and self-generating flora, I was put in mind of the Borges story about the map that bears a 1:1 relationship to the world; I’ll even cop to having a stoner-freshman whoah moment as I thought about what all that might imply for the city outside the walls of the conference space.

Wrapping up was architect Yoo Suk Yeon, who left us with some provocative meditations on the present and future state of urban informatics; the most intriguing of the projects she showed concerned the “city of bangs.” That’s 방, meaning “room,” not “bang!” as in “gun,” and it refers to the heterogeneous flowering of single-use spaces that limn the outlines of the Korean city the way nematodes might a human body: PC-bangs for social gaming, noraebangs (”singing room”) for Korean-style karaoke, and so on. If I understood her properly, the project was an attempt to devise a new, networked urbanism on the basis of these nodes of intense activity - I sure would have liked to have seen more of this project in greater depth, and I’m especially curious to see how ideas like these find purchase in her built work.

At any rate, swellness all around. I just want to congratulate the LIFT folks, their colleagues at Bread and Butter, and Daum’s Jaewoong Lee for having had the imagination and foresight to plan this long-overdue event. As ever, it was great to see familiar friendly faces - Heewon (congrats on the book!), Jaz, my brother-in-law Noda and his wife Sanyoung - and even better, so many new ones. I can’t wait to see what we all come up with together for the Big LIFT here in Seoul next June.

106,064

…is, to a first order of approximation, the number of travel miles I’ve logged this year. Absolutely terrifying.

Hi! Seoul

(And yes, sadly, that is the city’s official marketing slogan - possibly the world’s most insipid and least persuasive, especially given what this place actually has on offer. Still and all, it may actually show more verve than Incheon Airport’s curiously flat claim of being “A World Best Air Hub.”)

Touchdown happened around quarter to six yesterday evening, whereupon I spent an hour and some on the limousine bus into the city proper, making link-up first with Nicolas and xtra-special surprise guest Mr. Bleecker, and eventually Laurent and the rest of the LIFT crew, Bruce and Jasmina, and Daum’s Jaewoong Lee.

The latter worthies opted to orgy out on something that looked a whole lot like Black Forest cake, in a would-be pâtisserie in the basement of the deserted LG Arts Center, but Nicolas, Julian and I chose instead to follow our noses straight to some appealingly cinnamony (!) fried chicken and the usual sweating mugs of Cass, somewhere down a forking alley that beckoned from across the way. (Have I mentioned how much I love this city?)

At any rate, it was the best kind of welcome back, or home, or “home”: take your pick. I actually got a decent night’s sleep, despite the errant wake-up call that stirred me from utterly decorticated slumber at 0520, and now I’m up in my room tightening up my presentation for tonight’s event.

I certainly hope to see you there. My talk should be fun, albeit compressed into a dicey 20 minutes - I hope to give a coherent version of the ninety-minute “City Is Here For You To Use” material, with the caveat that Seoulites are quite possibly the planet’s urbanists least in need of admonition to take and hold the space of the street. At any rate, we’ll be talking about ambient informatics in the urban context, read/write urbanism and whether it amounts to anything like genuine participation, the turn from psychogeography to schizogeography, and similar topics.

Please do swing by if you’re in town and so inclined. Beers after.

Random memory #1,421

Summer 1988: I’m in the meter-square dogshit elevator at SPIN, whistling “Tomorrow Belongs To Me.” Glenn O’Brien whips his head around and mutters, “Sieg heil, asshole.”

Economize me

There’s a nice bit in the current Economist on the HCI2020 conference I attended in Seville all the way back in, what, March? It’ll give you a good flavor of the personalities and the ideas in play on that occasion, although I must say it casts me as rather more of a technodeterminist or -utopian than in fact I am, by a long shot. Funny, that.

I mean, “dream world”? Those are so not words that ever came out of my mouth. At least the piece features a picture of the heterosexual cop Tom Cruise plays in Minority Report - that should clarify matters considerably.

In & out burgher

I’m back in NYC for just a little bit over 48 hours before I leave for Seoul on Monday, so it’s the usual drill of laundry, bill-paying and squaring away loose ends for me. Not so much fun, if truth be told: these rapid transitions are draggus maximus. (On the other hand, it will be very, very nice to sleep in my own bed tonight.)

In the meantime, in news that will make sense to precisely six members of this site’s audience, I just want to wish Comrade Alice hearty congratulations and a speedy recovery in having at long last made her own personal Great Leap Forward. Here’s looking at you, kid.